Last week a friend wanted to move his home cinema from one room which was considerably larger, to a slightly smaller room, which was right next to the other, for reason I can't talk about on this forums.
Now I know the images are not too clear, in fact they look darn right awful, I believe it was the light level in the room, and yes I was using the flash! I guess the lighting balance was way off, anyway never mind about that I can always try again.
I have placed additional images here for you too see what the loudspeakers look like. As you can see the placement of the loudspeakers may look great or ok to most, the sound balancing was just pitiful, timbre balance was WAY OFF, there was no chance in hell that I could get this to sound correct in this room, and believe me I have tried this before when it was in the larger room, I think I have some old pictures of the larger room somewhere, I'll post them later.
Anyway, seeing that the loudspeakers are been operated via the internal amplification from the Kenwood KRF-X9050D THX select, and with no way of possibly EQ the fronts with separate amplifies and EQ, from the "Kenwood KRF-X9050D THX select" RCA phone outputs, I could only reduce the level of the left and right, leaving the centre channel at (0db).
I run wideband pink noise from the dts demonstration set-up disc, tracks 8 9 and 10 for the fronts, balance was equal for the B7W DM601, left and right, where the centre channel failed with a dullness, nearly all the brightness in the high frequency response was lost, now this could be the design of the B&W CC6 or it could have been overdriven by the previous owner who owned the loudspeaker.
So I could only guess that most soundtracks are going to be very loud on the left and right channels, and via reducing the level by only -4db per channel left and right, it should help to maintain a fairly reasonable sound stage, with moderate transparency in sound panning, but I would have to pop on back with a few films and if possible the RTA analyzer to check the frequency response and frequency range as well.
But my friend is a really strange kinder person, he doesn't like it being checked out, as he feels it's a waste of time, well that isn't far from the truth, if your going to break new grounds, then your going to need the tools to aid you along with the task aren't you!
Here's an older picture of his home cinema, I believe this is the only one I have, and well, looks a bit on the dark side I guess, must be lighting of the room VS the flash, I should have turned the light off in the room as the camera was set for white balance.
Anyway you can see this room was slightly larger, and the placement of the fronts is not too bad, but there where quite a few problems with the sound reproduction, one of them was the mismatching combination, some parts of the sound was lacking kick within the frequency response between, 100Hz and 80Hz this would be the centre channel, the rear of the B&W CC6 is ported and the unit is bi-wirable as well if needed.
It failed on quite a lot of films like Star Trek and The Matrix where mixers put plenty of low end support to give the film creditability, well it was just lost in this room, adding some of the low end from the RCA phone centre pre-output to one of the additional pre-inputs on the Yamaha YST SW-120 sub, added a little kick, but it was too problematic with other frequencies from the LFE.1 over taxiing the unit, with near to bottoming out!
