Today I stoped by at my local B&O dealer just to pick up a new powerlink cable for 20 Euro.....unfortunately I left with an order of a pair Beolab 5. Hmmm....this could happen. Furthermore, he just got one pair deliverd today so I picked them up in the afternoon and drove them to their new home.

Quite heavy new friends I have to say!

 
Anyway, I moved my current Beolab 3 and Beolab 2 to my office and hooked up the lab 5 to my BV 3-32. After some calibration effort and test of differnt postions the first learning of the day:

1. budget some money for room treatment. These monster just have so much bass, too much for my room. Even with the calibration. So I need to get some acustic treatment very soon...

OK, let's see how they perform in a suround setup (BV3-32 as center, two lab 3 as rears, Toshiba HD-DVD and a JVC Full HD projector). Not bad at all.....but second learning of the day:

2. a BV3 performed quite nice as a center speaker with the two lab 3 and the lab 2, with the lab 5 the BV was just blown away!!! There was no crisp and nice center anymore, like someone put a carpet on the BV3. So I need a new center....

So new center means new TV. Too bad.... I orderd a new Panasonic 50" Plasma with the new G10 panel and to keep my dealer happy a BS3 as well.... 

Now looking forward  to get the new stuff quite soon

 

Karsten 

 

 

What centre speaker are you getting?

Some folk just seem to have far too much £££££££££

Karsten, I myself have been living with BL5's for the last 6 months and am loving coming home every day! Best money i've ever spent.

1.) If you have picture frames, vases and things of sorts make sure you put rubber stoppers behind or under them. Stops all the vibrations, you can get some from a hardware store.

2.) Use speaker option 4 on the remote (BL5 front, BL3 back). Will sound much better than option 5 with BV3 speakers.

Cheers, Jez.

Maybe he won a large sum of money?!

Jez, great that you have so much fun with that giants....

 

My initial plan was to place the BS3 and the other sources in an USM Haller side board between the lab 5, but with that amount of bass the steel panels of it might vibrate like hell.... 

For the first run I will use a Lab 3 as Center. Hopefully they can keep up with the lab 5.

 

Karsten 

 

You should just be able to configure it with no centre speaker, which would be better than speaker 4 in the meantime...

 

what kind of acoustic treatment?

I would have thought closer furnishings would simply absorb a higher percentage of the sound, as it isn't as spread out when closer to the speaker.

 

A better bet to simulate a small room would just be to face the speaker into a corner and calibrate it... 

Thank you all for your thoughts!

Unfortunately room acustic is not an easy task, especially at low frequenzies. 2 years ago an acustic expert checked my room and I spent a couple of hours with him to understand some parts (at least) it. 

Unfortunately moving the furniture around is not good enough....

http://www.wvier.de/images/Seitenwand.jpg 

I will call him again next week at keep you posted!

Karsten

Hi Kawo,

May I ask how big the room is and do you have a carpet or hardfloor surface?
I ask because I'd like a pair of BeoLab 5's at some point but wondering if I'd
experience similar problems. I've seen Lab 5's in photos in literally all sizes of
room from very small to huge.

Do you think it's more the shape of the room that is the issue?

Cheers 

Reox,

from my expierience the surface of the floor is in an average listening room your smallest problem! Usually low frequencies and the first reflections are the biggest problems. Our ear is able to differenciate sound from different locations if the time difference is at least 10ms. If a loudspeaker is positioned close to a wall or you sit in close to a wall you need to absorb the first reflections to enjoy crisp direct sound because it is usually less the 10ms. So some absorber can do this job. Also difusor (not sure if this is the right english word ...) support the idea of not having to many first reflections.

For low frequencies the room size is very important. There are calculations available what problem you will have for a certain room size.

Again, not easy stuff and I am not an expert!

Karsten

P.S. my room is 4 m x 10m, but I will build a wall with two sliding doors to seperate the home cinema. The final part will be 4m by 3,60 

 

In the folder they say 'you can place them everywhere'. Big house small house,much furniture or less,it's make no difference!

you can place them in a corner if you want too!

 

koning:

 In the folder they say 'you can place them everywhere'. Big house small house,much furniture or less,it's make no difference!

you can place them in a corner if you want too!

 

To a degree. It's not perfect, there is no way they can do it perfectly. However you can place them with much more freedom than other speakers...

Place them as you would a pair of audiophile "traditional" speakers, with care and attention to potential unwanted reflections and standing waves -- then you'll end up with a pair of speakers that will outgun most other speakers on the planet.

Follow the "recommendation" that you can place them anywhere, and you end up with speakers that won't outgun most other speakers on the planet. 

Carpet or hardfloor surfaces shouldn't make a big difference. Obviousley carpet would be better but the reason the the Beolab 5's have such big discs is so the sound envelopes out 90 degrees but doesn't hit the floor. The sub  driver on BeoLab 5's face the ground because sub bass below 50 Hz is omni directional, therefore not being effected by it's placement. The calibration is simply so the sub doesn't over power the upper bass, mid and tweeters.

Tones between 2000/4000 giving the most troubles (echo/delay) on a hard floor

Jez:

Carpet or hardfloor surfaces shouldn't make a big difference.

Actually, the purpose of a carpet would be to absorb primary, secondary and tertiary (etc) reflections, as the sound bounces around your room. 

Here's a sound recordist studio, untreated:

What's shown are just the primary and secondary reflections (red and blue), but the sound bounces around - and sound moves in all four dimensions, so it's quite a potential soup. (In later years, B&O have consistently photographed their products in environments that can only be called audio nightmares, with concrete floors and walls and large plate-glass windows - totally useless for any focused listening as such rooms are reverb generators).

Reverb occurs to the extent that the sound waves are not dampened by the physics of the room they are propagating in.  

Here's how that studio would be treated, in order to ensure that the sound engineer hears what's being played through the monitors:

However, in a studio you want to kill "all" reflections, in order to lift the original signal so that it can be evaluated analytically. At home you don't have to be that extreme - in fact, you would find it tiring to listen to the clinical sound reproduction needed to hear flaws in the recording.

Do however remember that the resonance in the performance is already in the recording, and you don't want your room to add or subtract from that. You want it to be as neutral as possible - that doesn't have to be expensive, or ugly. Just requires a little forethought.  

Some info on reverb and reflections, from the point of view of digitally creating it.

http://www.headwize.com/tech/lake2_tech.htm 

And here's a good 5-part article from Sound on Sound on treating one's listening room:

http://www.soundonsound.com/search?section=%2F&Keyword=room+for+improvement

Yes, I get the picture, I've been in many studios in my life but at the end of the day it's your living room and still has to be livable. Unless you have room for a dedicated listening room, that would be great! By the way great info.

If I remember correctly, Geoffrey Martin, Tonmeister at B&O, said that you should have the rear wall covered with teddybears.

That ought to take care of some of the reflexions. And you'd still be able to live there. At least if you have small children.

That's a very good one

Hi again, 

Pardon the naive question but, as a temporary measure, doesn't just turning down
the bass using the tone controls on your system cut out almost all of the bass?

Surely the BeoLab 5's, with the tone control for bass set to the lowest minus setting,
don't make a sizeable room rumble with low frequencies?

I've auditioned the BeoLab 5's and they sounded less bassy, in some respects,
than my BeoLab 8000/BeoLab 2 set up although I realise the actual specifications
would care to differ and I was in two different spaces.

Cheers
 

Reox:

Hi again, 

Pardon the naive question but, as a temporary measure, doesn't just turning down
the bass using the tone controls on your system cut out almost all of the bass?

Surely the BeoLab 5's, with the tone control for bass set to the lowest minus setting,
don't make a sizeable room rumble with low frequencies?

Not if using a digital conection, as the tone controls do not modify the digital output in any way. Also, the tone controls are incredibly basic in comparison to the BeoLab 5's built in EQ. The tone controls just adjust overall bass level below a certain frequency, which isn't what is needed. A bassy room will generally show a huge boost around a specific frequency, and often a lack of bass in other frequencies.

I've auditioned the BeoLab 5's and they sounded less bassy, in some respects,

than my BeoLab 8000/BeoLab 2 set up although I realise the actual specifications
would care to differ and I was in two different spaces.

Cheers

I've generally found that the BeoLab 2 makes too much bass when used with the older speakers such as the BeoLab 8000s. It always seems so boomy unless used with BeoLab 1s/BeoLab 3s.

>Not if using a digital conection, as the tone controls do not modify the digital output in any way.

Aah, I see.

>Also, the tone controls are incredibly basic in comparison to the BeoLab 5's built in EQ. 

So is there a way to access some kind of built in graphic equaliser for the Lab 5's? 

I listen to a lot of bass heavy electronica, amongst many other things, and I'm pretty happy
with the 8000/BeoLab 2 set up for this purpose. Once the BeoLab 2 is positioned correctly
I've found I have quite a lot of control over the prominence of lower frequencies in a given track
via the switch at the back of the BeoLab 2 and the tone controls. It would be nice to have
a similar amount of control with BeoLab 5's.

Cheers