Acoustic setup for 8 inches amplified monitor speakers

Hi guys, I just bought a pair of supposedly kick-ass Adam A8X amplified studio monitors for my relatively large living-room. As I find their sound very disappointing with songs that I usually love, I allow myself to consult the community. What would be your hints for a step-by-step acoustic improvement, provided that the possible adjustments are: - The 3 "screws" at the back of each speaker (high shelf, low shelf, tweeter level) - The distance/position of the speakers in relation to the room walls and corners - The equalizer on the computer - Any physical acoustic modules I could add - Any software you may think of - Anything else I may have forgotten As you can see on the pictures, the speakers are placed in a slightly narrower part of the room (3.5 meters wide at this point, 12 ft) and the rest of the room is about 5 m x 10 m (17 ft x 33 ft) Thanks a million in advance Ant

Hi Ant. Please read the forum rules for posting (click here). You seem to be missing a couple of things! :)

I just bought a pair of supposedly kick-ass Adam A8X amplified studio monitors for my relatively large living-room. As I find their sound very disappointing with songs that I usually love, I allow myself to consult the community.

Those are excellent speakers, among the best you can get for home studios. So the fact that they sound disappointing in your room indicates that the problem is not the speakers: it is the room itself, and the way you have them set up in the room. So I would suggest that before trying to do anything to the speakers, you first set them up correctly for that room, then treat the room correctly for that setup, then make the final adjustments that might be needed on the speakers themselves. Also, there is no point in trying to use an equalizer (either a software plug or an external hardware unit), since room problems cannot be treated by equalization (despite what some manufacturers try to tell you), for a very simple reasons: room problems occur in the time domain, not just the frequency domain, but equalizers only work in the frequency domain. So forget trying to "fix" the room with EQ: that approach is doomed to failure. Also, for studio monitors, the signal path needs to be as clean and simple as possible, with NOTHING in between the DAW and the speakers except some good quality cable. Adding any type of hardware at all is a bad idea: it cannot make the sound "better". All it can do is change it in some way so that it is no longer true, and the entire point of studio monitors is NOT to make music sound good: the point is to tell the truth about what the music REALLY sounds like. The whole, ugly, blatant, in-your-face truth. That is the number one purpose of studio monitors. So I would start by setting up the speakers correctly, on suitable massively heavy stands, with suitable isolation pads, using the usual geometry for studios (perfect symmetry, 1.2m axis height, 60° axis intercept at the mix position, speaker location up against the front wall at 28% of room width , listening position location at 38% of room depth, etc.), then do the usual basic treatment needed for any small studio (superchunks in the four vertical corners, deep absorption on the rear wall and on the first reflection points, as well as between the speakers and the front wall), then do a full acoustic analysis of the room using REW, and post the data file here for analysis. We can then look at how the room is responding, and suggest what your next steps should be in treating it. Having said all that, since your room is small you certainly will need to start out by setting the low shelf on the speakers to -6dB. That goes without saying; it corrects the power imbalance issue (baffle-step issue) caused by placing having the speakers set up to project into half-space. The other controls should remain flat. Once you have that setup done correctly, you'll start to hear how those Adam's really sound: they are really good speakers, and will not disappoint, if set up correctly in a suitable acoustic environment. - Stuart -