#8 Uneven bass coverage
Uneven bass coverage: Some seats have more bass than other.
Bass waves fill a room and crash around the walls, ceiling and floor just like storm waves would in a harbor…
#7 Narrow coverage in panel speakers (H and V)
Narrow coverage in panel speakers (H and V). You have to sit right on axis to hear the full sound spectrum, and the sweet spot is narrow.
Large panel radiator speakers seem so mythical thanks to their “low mass” radiator materials…
#6 Vertical Lobing in line array speakers
Vertical Lobing in line array speakers: The sound quality and clarity changes as you listen at different heights in the room.
Line arrays have uneven sound quality and response in the middle and high frequencies, despite what their manufacturers would want you to hear…
#5 Speaker drivers blown right out of the box
Speaker drivers (Tweeters, Mids, Woofers) blown right out of the box: The sound is bad and YOU have to fix it.
You would hope that final QC at the factory would catch defective products, but some do get through, and now you have just joined the QC team…
#4 Insufficient bass headroom
Insufficient bass headroom: The bass peaks just aren’t loud enough for full impact
It’s simple; you need to play at least 110dB of clean and tight bass in a home cinema to get listeners to crack a smile. Many home theaters have plainly anemic bass that tops out at 90dB; barely enough to get any reaction…
#3 Center channel speakers with horizontal lobing
Center channel speakers with horizontal lobing: The mid-frequency sound is different across the room, and dialog lacks clarity
The typical Center speaker is made of two woofers and one tweeter. The two woofers launch waves into the room, which at some frequencies will cancel each other out when you aren’t right in front of the speaker…
#2 Grounding issues and hum loops
Grounding issues and hum loops: There is often hum in system, and it is hard to fix it.
Most have been there: The project has gone just too dang smoothly. The gear arrived on time, the construction schedule was maintained – karma, chi, and wha are in balance…
#1 Uneven bass response
Uneven bass response: Some frequencies are much louder than others.
This topic comes from our list of the top 50 recurring problems in home theater systems – gathered over the last 25 years from more than 1,000 high-performance installation projects…