Hello Ethan
I have been spending a fair amount of time on the AVS Home Theater construction forum. Logans and other dipolar speakers are usually not recommended for home theater applications. Whats your thoughts on this? Can room treatments help with the short comings in this enviroment?
Thanks
Lance
Lance,
As the resident HT bigot around here, having designed my home around my HT, which in turn was designed around my ML set, I can confidently state: It works just fine.
However, one cannot just take a room of the appropriate dimensions and expect that to work. For any speaker, but especially for large line arrays and more so for large dipole line arrays (like MLS’s), the room acoustics are tricky and must be dealt with.
For standard dynamic speakers, the room acoustics interface is fairly straightforward to deal with, and always includes appropriate bass trapping and dealing with first reflections and other such stuff.
Large line arrays broadcast large ‘near field’ SPL profiles in the mid-range through the highs, this is a benefit, but comes with a price of dealing with more reflections from objects in room, walls behind the listener and possible HF room ‘ringing’ problems.
The fact that our ESL’s are dipoles leads to dealing with the rear wave has been discussed in this thread.
I strongly advocate isolating or dampening the rear wave, especially for HT purposes. As localization and frequency response smoothness improve dramatically.
Matter of fact, I’m now of the opinion that the ideal setup for large ESL’s is an infinite baffle alignment. This would require totally custom room design, but it would be totally killer sound-wise
I’m planning to do that someday, with three CLX across the front in an IB alignment. Look for it someday.
See my system for current state of what I believe to be one of the cleanest, most powerful and musical systems I’ve ever heard. So the answer is it can be done and yes, it takes more effort, but the results are superior IMHO.
