Diffusion generally is a good thing and excellent listening rooms typically have diffusion in abundance. Great sounding rooms are either large enough or absorptive enough to discourage strong standing waves in the listening area. Good sounding rooms that present a proper spatial image tend to be very symmetrical in layout, left to right.
Under these idyllic room conditions speaker placement is frequently a simple task. In an idyllic world the speakers would be well out in the room, typically about 1/3 the distance of the rooms front to back dimension. The listener would be at mid point in the room or slightly to the rear of mid-point. The listener and the speakers would form an equilateral triangle, such that the distance speaker to speaker would be identical to the distance from either speaker to listener. The distance from speaker to sidewall would be unequal to the distance from the speaker to the back wall. To solidify the acoustic image placement in stereo or multi-channel recordings at the listening position the speakers will typically be toed in slightly toward the listening position, rather than square with the rear and sidewalls. The tweeter height of the speaker will be either at the same height as the listener’s ear or in some way angled as to achieve an equivalent result. The SR-2 cabinets have adjustable feet, front and rear to optimize apparent driver height.
Lucky are the very few listeners who have well placed equipment in a well-engineered dedicated listening space either by design or happenstance. For the rest of us we have the Pass Laboratories SR-2. The Pass Laboratories SR-2 Loudspeaker was built to address less than perfect rooms and less than perfect speaker placement.
SR2 Owners Manual | Rev 0.2 | 7 |
