John Sayers' Recording Studio Design Forum Archive

Hello Everyone --

This forum is great. I just found it a few days ago (a guy over on the Digidesign forum gave a shout out).

I've got some questions about a room I'm building in my basement. I'm planning to soffit mount my monitors. It's a smallish room, a hair over 14' wide at the widest and a little over 21' long. I'll probably post a layout over in the studio design area for some advice (or maybe abuse). The distance between the monitors will be about 8 feet, which will put me at an 8 foot listening distance. I was thinking of picking up a pair of JBL LSR32's. However, I've heard from some that 3-ways require a minimum listening distance to pull the image together due to the physical distance between the bass and mid driver elements. While that makes sense, I thought it might be more of a concern with monitors on stands, with no angle in the vertical plane (assuming the drivers are in a vertical orientation). If the monitors are angled properly to put the drivers equidistant, would this still be an issue?

Also, I have seen that Barefoot recommends 4-5 woofer diameters to either side of the monitor. For the LSR32's this would require the soffit to be 10 feet wide or so, as the woofer is 12 inches. My soffit will be 5 or 6 feet wide. How hard and fast of a recommendation is this?

Any input would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Morgan

As I read my post again, I don't think I put it quite as clear as I could have. When I said the warning not to sit too close to a 3-way monitor made sense, I guess I meant pretty much the opposite. It seems to me that the distance to the cabinet should make no difference as long as the drivers are the same distance from the listening position. I would guess that since most nearfield setups allow no vertical tilt adjustment, the nasty sound that some blame on insufficient distance from the speaker is actually a frequency smearing caused by the drivers being at different distances. In other words, it makes sense that one might have heard poor sound from a 3-way nearfield setup, but the distance shouldn't be the culprit, should it? Wouldn't a 3-way placed 20 feet away also suffer frequency smear if the drivers were not aligned properly?

Again, any help from the experts here would be great.

Morgan

Found this old post and thought I'd reply to see if you ever built your room and soffit-mounted your LSR32s?

I'm planning on getting a pair of LSR32s for soffit mounting and wondered what you thought of yours?