On Friday, November 29, 2013 8:51:32 AM UTC-5, wrote:
I'm making some additions to my stereo system and I'll try to explain this as concise as possible. I have two additional speakers which I'd like to connect to the receiver in the living room. The room is about 15 X 22 feet. The existing two speakers are situated against an inside wall facing the windows. They are properly phased and sound very good. One of these existing speakers (left side speaker A system), is very slightly caddy corner so that it projects into the room. I would like to connect the additional left side counterpart on the opposite window wall so that it's speaker, (proposed speaker B system) is doing the same thing from the corner it's in. The new right speaker from proposed system B will essentially facing it's counterpart from speaker A system,separated by about 15 feet. What I'm trying to accomplish is more sound filling the room from more directions and hopefully simulating a sort of pseudo "surround" type of effect. But I'm not sure about how this is going to work out. Perhaps this is a mistake, so I thought I'd ask.



If all four speakers are facing one another and are in phase, and by this I mean before connecting to the receiver confirming that a small battery makes all four cones move in the same direction, connected like this what happens when the two lefts for instance are outputting the same signal. With the cones facing each other, will the projected sound buck and effectively try to cancel? Or should both cones in proposed B system be in phase as a pair but out of phase with respect to A system? Or should I forget the whole thing and just stick with my two existing A speakers? I hope I've explained this well. Thanks for any advice. Lenny

Well I tried a few different scenarios and eventually I ended up with all four speakers in phase connected to both A and B front outputs. It would have been really nice if I could have used the rear speaker circuit of the receiver as it was intended, but unfortunately that was not possible.

I never mentioned that the receiver is an old Sansui QRX5500. That was a top of the line 4 channel SQ unit circa 1975. Sadly neither the four channel or the SQ circuit no longer is functioning, and after spending a gret deal of time trying to repair this several years ago I finally abandoned the project.

This unit, although a quality piece of equipment was built like your typical brick **** house, with circuit boards, harnesses, switch banks, etc. "layered" on top of one another. It makes signal tracing, not to mention parts replacement an absolute nightmare. But it does work well on two channel mode so that's how I use it.

I have to say the sound quality assessment of this project was really difficult. As was mentioned by others in the discussion, depending upon where you stand in the room certainly influences the way this sounds. The fact is that every arrangement seemed to sound fairly good. However lacking the proper equipment to scientifically do this, (and if I had wanted to get that technical anyway), the final decision was at best a good guess.

I did notice that with the final setup, that is everything in phase, left and right rears facing fronts from across the room the bass seemed especially strong. In fact standing in the kitchen, two rooms away, I could feel Iron butterfly pounding in my chest. I've never heard sound like this from my system before so I must have done something right.

In fact I was thinking about how good some of my old records were actually sounding. I haven't listened to many of these in quite some time and I noticed that I could hardly hear any scratches. Wow, ttis Stanton cartridge with the elliptical stylus tracking at 1.25 grams must be really something. Then I remembered the results of my last hearing test, which pretty much showed that essentially everything is down almost 40DB above eight KHZ, which essentially translates to "deaf as a doorknob", and I realized that yes they're still scratched. The difference is, I just can't hear it anymore.

Now if I could only upgrade that, so that music could once again sound like I remember it....Thanks to everyone for your advice and suggestions. Lenny