#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…
Anthony Grimani and industry veteran Frank White have collaborated on this Top 50 list of things Anthony has consistently seen go wrong with audio integration in home theaters (and we’re talking more than 1,000 installations around the world in the past 25 years). Jeremy Glowacki, editorial director of Residential Systems, spotlighted some of these issues in December, as did Bob Archer in CEPro in March 2016. The list is growing every week so be sure to check back for the latest!
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…