Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Systems Help with bass heavy sound

Hi all,

In times of boredom as we must currently, I would like to see if I can improve the sound of my room.

- The Room 14 x 17ft.
- Speakers 5200.2 30cm from rear wall, 75cm from side walls, 6ft apart from centres.
- Sitting position is sofa at the back of the room, no choice unfortunately.
- It is a suspended floor (modern house), which has always been difficult to know if some isolation is needed.

The sound is quite bass heavy, I realise my sitting position doesn't help this but I have no choice. Should I install some bass traps, put the speakers on concrete plinths, move the speakers???

Mostly I stream my music from my NAS using Roon.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks

Getting them off the floor will certainly make a difference, concrete slabs are an ideal start point as not expensive.

Have you used or got DSP control options to try too like boundary and bass tilt etc?

If you have the tools you can also try to get a picture of how bass heavy the room is by using REW.

As a trial and if you can be bothered, plonk the speakers on some sturdy chairs or similar, aim to get the bass drivers away from the floor.
Try some music and compare.

I had some stand mount active ATc 50s in a a similar room environment once and getting bespoke stands of around 60 cms in height, about twice the normal height, made a tremendous difference in controlling the bass. They are really designed to have their mid units at ear height, which this also achieved so it was a good solution.

Check out GIKs site and you can get good advice over email. They will likely suggest bass traps, first reflection points, treating the back wall etc. Gives you some food for thought and compared to new (Meridian type) hi fi is cheap in my view. I am trying some at the moment. There is a 30 day return option.

And I should add you can use the DSP in Roon to tame the bass - really easy to play with - and if you don’t like it it is easy to turn off!

Hi

As a few easy (and free!) starting points:


1. Apply the "corner" boundary setting to the DSPs

2. Toe in so that the tweeters' "line of sight" crosses at, or just in front of, your listening position

3. Move the speakers out from the rear wall in increments of a few inches at a time if feasible


Is your room lively, neutral, damped at present? Standing in the middle of the room and clapping hands can give some clue as you'll hear how much or how little echo is there. If there's any scope for moving furniture around (large cushions, padded foot stools etc) that can make a difference too. Clearly subject to WAF!

Cheers
George

Before you do anything physically exhausting or start spending lots of money try setting the speakers to wall and if that doesn't help corner. I had huge bass problems with DSP5200s and setting them to wall fixed them right up. If I remember correctly the recommendation is something like within 50cm of a boundary to change them from free so certainly the back wall isn't helping. I think if you power them on whilst pressing 0 on the remote you should get into the settings where you can change the speaker position.

Anthony.

Agree - as others have said, try the adjusting the boundary settings. It won't cost you anything and can potentially really help to attenuate the bass.
As an example, I find the 5500s to have a really heavy bass presence, but applying the corner setting really helped to tame the bass.

Excess bass boom in my room was cured by setting to corner position and since I have added 2dB of bass and it sounds perfect for my room.

Great thanks guys, I’ve tried both settings and so far i prefer the wall setting as it keep a bit more bass than the corner setting, plenty of listening to do to get used to it.
Does anyone know the actual settings it changes in each setting would be interesting to know

Exactly my set up Chris. Could be the optimum for 5200SE, nearly live sound from the studio. Treble set to 0 no adjustment required.

Hector

Hi

The freq response curve for boundary (wall), sub 1 and sub 2 are shown in a graph as the final appendix in the DSP5000 (v1) manual in Duncan's Info site above. Shame that the Corner trace isn't shown though, would like to have seen that myself.

Cheers

George

I too have a suspended floor and it’s a pain. My room Size and sitting position are not very different from yours, but my speakers are about 50cms away from the far wall and just over 7 feet apart.

Unlike others here, I dislike using other than the ‘Free’ setting, but my options are probably not as limited as yours. In my experience, getting the speakers isolated from the floor makes a huge difference. You may want to trial Isoacoustics Gaia feet (or their Orea supports if you also use a concrete slab). I use Oreas (albeit on a sprung platform) and they tidy up the bass considerably, as well providing other sq improvements across the frequency range. Mind you I still need to reduce the bass setting a tad.

Hope you get something sorted.

Best wishes.

In my setting (solid floor, double thickness plasterboard, 10" from the wall) I found that using the wall setting, whilst doing a good job of removing the lowest bass, seemed to have an adverse effect on the rest of the sound. For example, studio voices on R4 felt a bit chesty. For me, a -1.5dB bass adjustment with the free setting seemed to do a better job of keeping the bass under control without sacrificing "air".

Hope it helps. It's frustrating that management of <100Hz overwhelms the presentation of the other ~20,000Hz!