Guru Tips and Tricks

By: Ken Humphreys
Speaker Engineer

So you’re thinking about adding sound to where you really like to spend a nice day – outdoors on your patio, deck or maybe by the pool – but you’re not quite sure what you’re getting into. Well, allow us to lend a hand.

What to Look for in Outdoor Speakers

You’ve probably noticed how awful most outdoor speakers sound. Maybe even thought something like “Geez, I guess that’s just the price to be paid for outdoor sound”. Well, it simply doesn’t need to be that way. The problem is that outdoor speaker placement requires a very different sound balance to produce the natural sound you’re used to indoors, especially with regard to the bass level. Without nearby walls to contain omni-directional bass waves your music ends up sounding bass-shy and tinny. The solution is to tune the sound specifically for outdoor use. Done properly, this requires a bass adjustment switch to allow your speaker to be adapted to its proximity to outdoor walls.

Of course, in order to equalize a bass boost into a speaker, it needs to have bass potential in the first place. Turns out that good bass is an engineering trade off for efficiency and enclosure size. If these speakers are of a sensible size, they will need to have modest efficiency, at best, in order to allow for the bass levels needed for high quality outdoor sound reproduction. Meaning that they will need to have decent power handling to play loud enough to permit moderate sound levels even if on the other side of your yard.

Another consideration is if the speaker has the means to be positioned where you want them to go and where they have a chance of sounding good. Can they be aimed into the listening area? Are they easy to mount? Can you live with their size and appearance? Are there color choices?

And lastly but most obviously, you’ll want an outdoor speaker designed to survive the great outdoors for years. It needs to be made of materials meant to take what Mother Nature can dish out – materials like UV resistant plastics, butyl rubber, non-corroding metals, fiberglass, powder coated surfaces and adhesives that can withstand the elements.

Things to Think About Before Installing Your Outdoor Speakers

Where your outdoor speakers end up will play a large role with both their sound quality and how well they’ll be protected from the elements. Fortunately, what’s good for one is usually good for the other.

Optimizing for Sound

• To get the best bass and loudness potential, you’ll want to position your speakers with their backs against a wall. Any room boundary, such as the “ceiling” shown here, will help.
• Separating your speakers so that they are about as far apart as they are from the listener is ideal for the best stereo effect… but only if you’re positioned in the sweet spot half way between the two speakers. If you’re going to be anywhere else, consider moving the speakers closer together so that you don’t end up hearing the piano but missing the guitar.
• Most of the better outdoor speakers are aimable and will adequately cover a range of about 60° – 70° (30° – 35° off axis) with a little better sound off to the side if they are mounted vertically.

Protect Your Speakers from the Elements

• Mount your speakers under eaves and in shady areas
• Black holds up better in direct sunlight since it withstands UV better

Wiring Guidelines

• Don’t staple or nail through the speaker wire
• Only use wire rated for outdoor use
• Check out speaker selectors and stereo volume controls for a more integrated solution

Conclusion

Improve your outdoor living by bringing your favorite music with you. With a little bit of information guiding you in the right direction, your backyard, patio or pool area can have a soundtrack that will last a lifetime. Enjoy!

By: Jeff Dorgay

Publisher, Tone Audio

You heard right – vinyl, as in LP’s that you probably remember from a long time ago, perhaps even in your parents music collection. Believe it or not, the analog record has been making a strong comeback for about the last 10 years now, and is getting stronger every year. At the end of the 80’s, everyone was ready to write the epitaph for vinyl and a lot of people gave away (and threw away!!) their records expecting “perfect sound forever.” But the LP was a format that just refused to die and with the turntable having a rebirth, it is still a format that music lovers are very interested in. And believe it or not, even a lot of current releases are pressed on vinyl for short runs; usually about 5-10 thousand copies.

Granted it’s not like the old days, where millions of records were sold every month, but record sales have stayed consistent at a few million copies per year, so they are still enjoying solid sales.

Why would anyone want to go that far back in time, in this world of iPods and Squeezeboxes? There are a number of reasons, but most of all, it’s a lot of fun. Call me nostalgic, (or just another almost 50 year old person who is losing their nearfield vision) but I still enjoy holding a large piece of art in my hands where I can actually read the album credits!

A lot of music never made its way to the CD format. If you are more of a collector, rather than just someone interested in the most current music, there is a huge treasure trove of music out there on LP records that you just won’t have access to on CD. This is especially true if your musical tastes stray anywhere from the mainstream path.

While collectors have driven the price of the rare stuff through the ceiling, there is still a lot of great used vinyl to be had, and chances are very good that you probably have a great used record stores a lot closer than you think. It’s always a blast to go to the record store and bring home a pile of records for the cost of a few CD’s!

Many of the major online audiophile retailers have a number of the latest reissues, but my favorite place to buy LP’s is SoundStage Direct. (www.soundstagedirect.com) They have most of the popular “audiophile” pressings and a huge collection of current vinyl pressings. This is by far my favorite place to shop for records, but I’m always on the hunt for more vinyl.

So, once you have decided to get your hands on a turntable, the sky is the limit on budget. There are a few decent entry level turntables, like the Rega P1 that will have you spinning vinyl in no time for about $350 with minimal setup all the way to the hundred thousand dollar (not a misprint!) level. Yes, if you are a crazed LP addict, you could easily have more equity in your record player than your house!

At first glance this task might seem daunting, especially when you see just how many choices that there are but it’s not as hard as you think. Here’s a few things to consider that should put it in perspective:

The most important question is software: Do you have an existing collection of records that haven’t been played for a while that you would like to get back to, or are you starting from scratch? (Sorry about the obvious pun…) Often, this is the most overlooked by the budding vinyl enthusiast who’s just returned from an audio show, dealer or friends house, whipped into a frenzy of analog excitement. Step back and analyze the situation. If you only have a hundred LP’s or so, you might not want to jump of the cliff and spend a few thousand dollars right away. However I have seen turntables in systems worth as much as a decent BMW with 25 records sitting there on the shelf that rarely get played.

We want to avoid that situation. If you have a friend like that, now might be the time to try and talk them out of said turntable. I’ve found that comments like “Dude, no one plays records anymore, you should just get rid of that thing!” at the appropriate moment can pay off in spades!

Next question, hardware: How good is your current system? As much fun as it is to go shopping, to get the most enjoyment out of your first turntable purchase, it’s critical to have the performance of your turntable be fairly close to that of the rest of your system. If you have a decent budget system, as cool as that megabucks turntable will look on the shelf, it’s a waste of performance and money. (that you could spend buying more records!) Conversely, if you have a fantastic system that is capable of resolving a lot of musical detail, getting a budget table won’t offer up enough sound to keep you happy.

There are pretty much two basic kinds of turntables these days: belt drive and direct drive. Most audiophile tables are belt drive, but the direct drive table is making a solid comeback, especially on the entry level with the resurgence of the Technics SL-1200. Yep, this is the table many of us had back in high school and are still in use by DJ’s all over the world today. Cost: About $4-500 brand new (without cartridge) Advantages: bullet proof, excellent speed accuracy, easy to set up. Disadvantages: Ultimately lacking in highest fidelity applications, but can be upgraded somewhat, albeit for the techie minded only.

More common is the belt drive turntable, which uses a small motor, a pulley system and a rubber band like belt to drive the turntable platter. You can find this system in effect from under 200 to over one hundred thousand dollars and is by far the most popular. The belt helps to isolate the platter that your record spins on from the vibration of the motor, and it acts like a natural shock absorber. TIP: Vibration is your turntable’s enemy.  Do everything you can to eliminate it from your system, the better your turntable will sound. Don’t put your turntable on top of your subwoofer, no matter how cool it looks there!

A quick detour: Are you a journey person or a destination person? If you like the journey, you will probably be intrigued with the aspects of turntable set up. Should you still want to travel down this path, I suggest Michael Fremer’s DVD: 21st Century Analog. It offers a lot of information on basic turntable setup, walking you through the setup of three very common turntables. You can pick one up at the Needle Doctor for $30 and get a good feel for what you are getting into. I guarantee you will get a few good laughs, as Mr. Fremer is a very funny guy! Perhaps you will be inspired by the shots of his record collection as well.

If you are a destination person and just want to start playing records, make sure you can find a good dealer, online retailer or friend that will properly set up your new turntable. This is definitely the easy way to go and I must admit after chasing the vinyl rabbit down its hole for many years now, isn’t the worst way to go!

Then you will have to think about phono cartridges (the needle) and possibly a phono preamplifier, because you can’t just plug a turntable in to any open input on your amplifier or receiver. The signal from a phono cartridge is at a much lower level than what comes out of your CD player. Again, there are two basic types of phono cartridges, Moving Magnet and Moving Coil. I could write a book on this alone, but to make it simple, the Moving Magnet cartridge is probably the way to go for the beginning to intermediate vinyl enthusiast, as they will plug into most phono inputs, or should you need an outboard phono preamplifier, can get by with a simpler circuit, because the Moving Magnet cartridges have a higher signal output than the moving coil cartridges.

However, the moving coil cartridges will almost always provide you with more detail, resolution and musicality than the moving magnet varieties (there are a few exceptions to this rule, so no nasty letters please…), but they will need a more elaborate phono preamplifier to boost up the tiny signal that comes out of them so that your amplifier or receiver can use it.

If your receiver or integrated amplifier does not have an input marked “phono” Regardless of what you decide to spend on a turntable, one of the most enjoyable things about listening to records is the sound. If you take a peek on any online forum today, you will see major discussions about whether music recorded to LP sounds better or worse than CD, but I think one thing we can all agree on is that analog does have a warmer sound quality, and that is what a lot of hardcore music lovers enjoy.

Is it for you? There’s only one way to find out! Get your hands on a turntable and start spinning. We’ll go further into the intricacies of phono cartridges, phono preamplifiers and turntable setup in the next lesson. We hope you enjoy the journey!

By: Ken Humphreys
Speaker Engineer

Other than your speakers, the most important thing determining musical quality is where you place your speakers (and your favorite easy chair) in your room. But sadly, with little commercial interest to defend the crucial role speaker placement plays, this subject gets neglected.

Your speaker placement affects three things – bass performance, virtual sound location (sound stage and imaging,) and the livability of your room. We’ll explore each of these separately, but keep in mind that these three objectives may compete with each other — optimizing one could be at the others’ expense. As in any relationship, you can expect to make compromises. So let’s dive in to the wonderland of two channel speaker placement.

How Do They Go Low?

Room boundaries affect bass so much that speakers need to be designed for a fairly specific location within a room in order to keep the bass in balance with the rest of the sound. So the first rule is to put the speakers where they’re meant to go. If the manufacturer isn’t clear about this, trust your ears – but here are some rules of thumb that should get you pretty close for starters:

1. Small speakers should be on stands or a bookshelf so that their tweeters are near your ear level and their backs near to the wall. If they have an air vent on the back, they should be kept at least a few inches from the wall.
2. Tower speakers should be placed about 2’ (or more) from the back wall.
3. Avoid corners. Two exceptions are speakers designed for corners (rare as the albatross) and subwoofers. See our course How to Get the Most From Your Sub for subwoofer placement tips.
4. Avoid left / right symmetry, especially with respect to corners, halls and walls. It’s okay to have your speakers symmetrical with each other, but make sure they’re not exactly symmetrical to the room.

When evaluating bass performance by ear, listen for balance. You can always bring the level of deep bass up or down by moving the speakers closer or further from walls and corners. You’ll want to keep the bass fairly constant as you move around the listening area. Try putting on a CD with a strong, repeating bass line (pink noise, if you have access to it, is even better than Pink Floyd) and move around the room. You may be shocked at how uneven the bass can be. Re-position the speakers until the bass is fairly even and listen for a bass quality that is strong but tight — not boomy or droning. It’s tricky to even out the sound so some bass notes don’t dominate while others disappear, but be patient.

If you’re using subwoofers, you still might want to experiment with the left and right placement of your speakers, concentrating on maintaining the mid-bass richness so that male vocals don’t sound thin or lacking body. If you notice this loss, try moving the speakers a little further out into the room.

Sound Stage & The Sweet Spot

A worthy pair of speakers can perform an amazing illusion reminiscent of looking through a 3-D ViewMaster™. When correctly placed, a three-dimensional sound stage magically appears between your speakers. Instruments and sounds appear to come from locations where your eyes tell you there’s nothing! This isn’t magic, it’s physics! Making this happen dramatically requires getting many things right – good stereo material, controlling room reflections, good speakers – but most importantly, getting your speakers and listening area set-up properly. Fortunately, this is pretty easy:

1. The listening area needs to be exactly in the center of both speakers. Use a tape measure if you want to get really accurate.
2. The distance between the speakers should be 75% to 100% of the distance that you are from them.
3. You’ll want to keep your speakers at least 2 feet away from walls and the floor (tower speakers are OK on the floor.) Don’t worry too much if this isn’t practical, if you move them closer to the wall, the virtual soundstage will still appear – it just won’t have the same depth.
4. Likewise, you’ll want to keep your listening area more than 2’ from any walls or large reflective objects.
5. It helps to have a room that deals well with sound reflections – sound absorbers like rugs and drapes, sound scatterers like bookcases and “things” all help.
6. Some speakers are better at this than others with smaller speakers often having the advantage.

Most modern audio systems are set up for multi-channel home theater use, but lead a double life when you play a stereo CD. The front left and right speakers transform themselves from a supporting role handling off-screen effects to the lead performers. When these stereo speakers revert back to their home theater roles, the supporting cast of center channel speaker and surround speakers make it much easier to envelop you with surround sound. Additionally, this effect isn’t limited to one “sweet spot” like the stereo sound stage described above, but can be shared by others who are nearby. Properly setting up your home theater surround sound is covered in another class but, for now, know that the speakers you so carefully positioned for great music performance will work very well for home theater as well.

Room livability

One should never forget that the whole idea is to create a room for enjoyment – making sensible compromises in the name of comfort or aesthetics is certainly no crime. Besides — your spouse wasn’t going to let you get away with putting those speakers in the middle of the bedroom anyway.

In Conclusion

Moving gear and couches around isn’t fun or glamorous. Which is why many of the guidelines above are aimed at helping you position things well with a minimum of “experimentation”. But once you have completed this important (and free we might add) exercise, you’ll be amazed at how good your system sounds.

By Oliver Amnuayphol
Home Theater Guru

If you’ve ever setup a subwoofer in your home theater system, chances are you’ve noticed that the bass sounds ripe ‘n rumble-y in some parts of the room but not so good in others. This is due to your room’s acoustic properties and its tendency to reinforce or cancel specific bass frequencies depending on where your subwoofer and listening positions are located in relation to the room and to each other. Carefully locating your seat and sub in the room can minimize this effect a bit, but what if you have a dedicated theater room, or don’t watch movies alone? In this case, getting good bass becomes much more difficult. Since you can only optimize a subwoofer’s placement for a specific part of the room, a couple of well-placed listeners may get good bass, but the rest won’t. Even today’s advanced auto-calibration programs can’t accurately optimize bass for several different areas of the room, and room treatments like bass traps aren’t very effective at the lowest frequencies (sub 50 Hz) unless they are impractically large. What can a bass lover do?

The answer is: Get two subwoofers! That’s right: if you want the smoothest, most even bass across the whole room, having dual subwoofers is the way to go. That’s because two subs, placed at strategic locations in the room, will help to smooth out bass modes and nodes (peaks and dips, respectively) throughout the room for more even bass distribution. You’ll also notice improved low bass extension and greater headroom, as well as more complete reproduction of the whole range of bass sounds for more a realistic, life-like experience. Here’s what you need to know if you’re thinking about going the dual subwoofer route:

Consider Dual Subwoofers if you have:

- Multiple seating positions: While it’s possible to optimize the spatial relationship between your room, subwoofer, and one listening position, it’s near impossible to do this for several seats. Two subwoofers properly placed will provide smoother, more consistent bass coverage to all the listeners in the space.

- A dedicated theater room: For the same reasons as above, only to the nth degree—nothing can replicate the theater experience like two subwoofers can!

- Large overall space: Bass from a single sub tends to get lost in large overall spaces, so if you have a large room or an open floor plan (i.e. no walls between the living room, kitchen, and/or hallways, etc.), two subs are almost a requirement for realistic bass quality and low bass extension.

- A single, primary listening position but are jonesin’ for the smoothest bass response.

Where to place the subs?

Ordinarily we’d suggest the crawl method to snuff out the best location for your subwoofer, but doing this optimizes it for only a single listening position and is irrelevant once you have multiple seats and more than one sub. So then, how do you get two subs to produce great bass in your place? Experimentation is the answer: Since there are no guaranteed best spots when it comes to positioning multiple subwoofers, moving it around and listening over and over is really the only way to get the subs locked-in with your lair. But if you have a rectangular room, you can use some general placement guidelines as starting points. Of course, your listening positions will also affect where in the room the subs sound their best, but once you’ve got that dialed in, check out some of the most popular dual subwoofer placement options below:

---

If you have a rectangular-shaped, dedicated theater room, multiple rows of seating, or just want excellent bass coverage, placing two subwoofers midway along the lengths of opposing sidewalls is the best recommendation. These locations yield the smoothest and most even bass distribution across the widest space due to something known as axial mode cancellation, thereby maximizing bass impact for the most listeners. You can also try placing your bass bins at opposing midwall points across the width if you just can’t position them along the length.

---

Corner loading both subwoofers in the front corners of the room provides the most bass because it maximally excites all of the room’s resonances, thereby yielding more bass output for the same given volume setting than one that’s not corner loaded. Moreover, you can lower the overall sub volume to consequently increase headroom and decrease distortion. The downside is that corner placement can also provide too much reinforcement, causing the bass to sound boomy or uneven. If this happens, try bringing them out from the corners little by little, starting with around one foot of space between each sub and each adjacent wall.

---

At this point you may be asking yourself, "Is it possible to get the best of both worlds, i.e. a blend of corner and midwall placement bass?" The answer is a definite maybe: Try positioning the subs along the front wall with the woofer cone centers at the 1/4 and 3/4 distances of the room width. Rooms that are sympathetic with subs at these locations will yield almost as much bass output as corner placement but with a smoother overall frequency response. Of course, this reduces overall output compared to full corner placement, but most quality subwoofers nowadays have more than enough headroom to compensate.

---

Unfortunately, we can’t always place the subs and our chairs in ideal parts of the room due to aesthetic or visual constraints: Many of us simply can’t remodel our room around our subwoofers or have open floor plans, irregularly shaped rooms, etc. Luckily there may still be a solution—opposite corner placement. Putting the subs in the opposite front and back corners will maximally reinforce bass output like the front corners but will more evenly distribute bass throughout the room. Try tweaking the subs’ positions little by little to see if there are sweet spots where the bass locks with the room. If you’re a bass freak, try this one even if you can do one of the placement options mentioned earlier: You may find this is your preferred bone-crunching, teeth-rattling option.

---

Dialing in the Subwoofers:

After you’ve fine tuned your subs according to one of the above options, the last things to do are to tweak the subs’ volume levels, crossovers, and phase controls. To achieve proper phasing on your subs, play a steady test tone centered at your crossover frequency (i.e. 80Hz tone for same crossover setting) and have a friend vary the phase controls on each sub up and down until you hear the strongest tone and your subwoofer will now be in phase. All that’s left is to sit back, relax, and feel the good vibrations!

Further Exploration:

Though the options listed above will get you almost full sonic nirvana, they are far from exhaustive; If you’d like more in-depth information on bass/room interactions or just want to totally geek-out, check out the following links:

- Subwoofer Placement – The Place for Bass Part 1 – Great technical and scientific guide to the subwoofer/room interactions and thorough explanation of room modes and nodes.

- Home Theater Multiple Subwoofer Set-Up and Calibration Guide – In-Depth look at measuring and calibrating multiple subwoofers.

- Loudspeakers and Rooms for Multichannel Audio Reproduction, Part 3 – Getting the Bass Right – Super technical white paper on optimizing multiple subwoofers for home theater and multichannel audio from The Man, Dr. Floyd E. Toole.

(Totally boss diagrams in this course courtesy Audioholics).