I’m often asked about my speakers and room size.  I have heard my Rival speakers in a 8′ x 10′ room.  I delivered them to my customer and we took out the speakers he had in there and replaced them with the Rivals and a new amplifier.  In his seating position, you could lean forward and almost touch the front of each speaker.  The system sounded wonderful.  About a month after installation, he emailed to say the he thought the midrange was a bit too forward.  I agreed with him, since he was sitting right on top of two powerful midrange horns.  He turned them down 1db and was very pleased with the new balance.  Big speakers can work in small spaces.  I’ve heard it many times.  You CAN listen to Volti speakers in nearfield configuration.  The integration of the drivers is THAT good.

When I listen to music, I often turn it up loud enough so I can feel the bass.  Music has bass.  Music has bass.  And in case you didn’t quite get what I am saying here – music has bass.  To not have bass is to not have the full musical experience.  I hear people complain about a system ‘overdriving’ a room.  Pfffft.  It’s not overdriving, it’s called ‘feeling the bass’.  It’s part of the musical experience.   The music is not overdriving the room, it’s energizing the room and that’s why you feel it.  There’s nothing wrong with that.  It’s normal.  Have these people never been to a concert?

I don’t have time to sit and listen to music on a system that’s not giving me the excitement of the full musical experience.  I don’t have time.  I have things to do.  Sitting and listening at 70db with no feeling to the music is like sitting and watching paint dry.  One minute and I’m bored.  I need more than that.  If someone is scared to drive the system loud enough to energize the room so they can feel the music, then I wonder why they are putting so much money, time, and energy into a hifi system in the first place.  A table top radio would do the trick.

Life is too short to not have the feeling of the music.  My time is too valuable to sit and listen to a system that doesn’t give it to me 100%.  This is what Volti speakers are all about.  If you don’t want it 100%, then there are plenty of boring hifi box speakers out there to buy.  Lot’s of people like that kind of polite, gentle, 70db sound.  Good for them.  But that sound is not for me.  I need to be fully engaged, the same way I am fully engaged when I’m sitting ten feet away from someone playing the piano, or ten feet away from a string quartet, or in the audience at a rock concert.  Live events get my full attention.  I’m not bored.  When I listen to my system at home, I want the same thing.  I want the performers in front of me, and I want the full impact of what they are playing for me.  I will sit and pay attention and enjoy that performance the same way I would if it was live in front of me.  The full range of bass is part of that experience, and at a live performance you feel the bass.

Here’s the thing.  Energizing a smaller room with big speakers takes a lot less power and volume level than energizing a larger room with smaller speakers.  To my way of thinking, it’s better to have big speakers in a small room.  I don’t turn the volume as high, I get less distortion and a more effortless presentation to the music, and I can enjoy the feedback from the room as it is energized at this lower volume level.  Bigger rooms require a higher volume level and perhaps larger speakers to get to the same point of energizing the room.

So you’ve got a room that is not working well with the bass your speakers are putting out.  What do you do to fix it?  I feel for you, because it’s not easy to deal with.  Bass nodes and cancellations are the culprit.  I can think of a few ways to deal with these issues.  There may be more, but this is off the top of my head.

• Use smaller speakers with less bass – boring, not acceptable to me

• Always play music at a low enough volume level so there is less bass – boring, not acceptable to me

• Change the location of the speakers in the room so that the nodes and cancellations are less noticeable, which allows us to have more bass – a must try and cross your fingers, because this is the best solution all the way around if it works

• Room treatments to eliminate bass nodes – probably won’t work, but may be worth a try

• Use signal processing to reduce those frequencies that are being excited in the room and increase those frequencies that are being cancelled – screw up my simple, pristine signal by putting it through a mystery box that probably has two-cent parts in it that my whole signal goes through?  Not acceptable, and probably is not going to work all that well anyway.  Will likely cause other issues.  As I’m sitting and trying to listen to music (versus listening to a hifi system), I will constantly be thinking what I could tweak to make things better, when in fact any tweaking I do will probably make it worse.

• Move the system to a different room that has fewer issues – another good solution IMO

In the Volti lineup, the Razz, Lucera, and Rival all have powerful bass that is in the proper proportion from low to high.  They will all interact with any room pretty much the same way.  In terms of the physical size of each of the models in your room – each one is going to take up a relatively small plot of space on the floor of your room.  The few inches of difference from one to the other really doesn’t impact floor space to any great degree.  The real differences between these three models have more to do with sensitivity and driver quality.  Moving up in the range results in a higher level of sound quality and refinement at each step.  Buy the one you can afford and enjoy the fantastic presentation of music they will give you.  A musical engagement that few other speakers can match.

Greg