Revel B12 - Manual (Page 13)

13
REVEL Concerta B12
Owner’s Manual
PLACEMENT/OPTIMIZA-
TION OVERVIEW
Below 300Hz, loudspeaker and listener
locations have a profound impact on the
way sound is reproduced. All rooms have
“standing waves,” where certain frequen-
cies are emphasized or diminished. Their
complex patterns can combine to intro-
duce tremendous sound coloration at low
frequencies.
The B12’s Room EQ parametric equaliza-
tion system offers a powerful tool to help
compensate for these effects. However, no
electronic system alone can fully compen-
sate for the dramatic effects of room
acoustics. Every room will have locations
where “nulls” at specific frequencies occur.
These cancellations of the sound are like
“black holes,” which no amount of equal-
ization can fill. The best results are always
achieved through careful placement of
both the loudspeakers and the listening
position. Optimum placement can be
determined through the use of computer
modeling programs, or by trial-and-error
measurements. If at all possible, find the
best loudspeaker and listener locations
before proceeding with adjustments of the
Revel parametric equalizers.
• To help determine good locations for
the subwoofer(s) and the listener(s), we
recommend making high-resolution
in-room response measurements. Your
authorized Revel dealer can make the
appropriate measurements using suit-
able equipment to assure optimum
results. Further information, including
how to perform in-room measurements
yourself can also be found at
www.revelspeakers.com.
Note
The Concerta B12 parametric equalizer
can be used with sound measurement
equipment having at least one-tenth-
octave resolution at 20Hz. Do not use
crude measurement devices, such as most
real-time or any one-third-octave analyz-
ers, to measure low-frequency performance
in a listening room. Room boundaries
often cause modes or standing waves with
very narrow-band peaks and dips that are
beyond this equipment’s measurement-res-
olution capability. Adjusting the paramet-
ric equalizer based on this data can result
in very misleading results and degraded
sound quality.
GENERAL PLACEMENT
GUIDELINES
• As a general rule, placing a subwoofer
in the corner of a room, as shown in
Figure 6 (below), will result in the max-
imum number of “peaks” and mini-
mum number of “dips” in the
response. Most dips cannot be equal-
ized, but they can be minimized
through optimum placement of sub-
woofer(s) and the listening position.
The resulting peaks can be corrected
through the use of the B12 subwoofer’s
built-in parametric equalization.
Figure 6: B12 Placement