Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Digital Pianos - Electronic Pianos - Synths & Keyboards Bad initial results with stereo receiver sound

$100 speakers are lame. You get what you pay for.

Now, for the price of a pair of new speakers you could instead get MUCH MUCH better used speakers.

You might want to try craigs list. It's not uncommon to see speakers that cost $500 (when new) sell for $100 used.

How were your speakers positioned? I originally had a pair of high quality stereo speakers set up next to my keyboard for playing. After a year or two I finally invested in some near field studio monitors. I noticed a real improvement in the sound clarity. Home audio speakers are not designed for listening in the near field. Is there a chance that what you are noticing is the change in speaker position and more importantly the listening position the speakers are designed for?

I paid $49 each for these at Frys but even at normal street price they are not expensive
Polk R50 $120
Fry's normal price of $199 is a joke. No one else sels them for that price. NewEgg.com always has them for a better price except if you are lucky to get them on one of Fry's loss-leader sales but they sell out in hours at the $49 price.

About the "bass boom". these is a very good chance it is casued by the room and not so much the speakers. if you say it happens at 100Hz I'd think it's the room even more.

You description of the sound seem like the explaination below might apply. You can test it before spending money on more equipment. . Test with just your ears or for $50 buy a sound level meter from radio shack be be more analytic and make plots. (Yes the cheap 'rat shack" meter is very popular and well regarded.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resonant_room_modes

The above might be a little hard to understand at first but basically it says an empty room with six reflective flat surfaces is going to sound horrible and don't blame the speakers, good speakers will sound horrible too.

I actually found some Polk R50s on craigslist... 4 of them for $200. Im going to try to get 2 for $70 if I can cantact the seller. Though as was said earlier, maybe home theater speakers arent good for near field listening??

And when I tried my speakers they were relatively far away, about normal couch listening distance. Its not the room, I genuinely think its just the signal from the piano.

This is fairly frustrating (speaker choice). I dont want large speakers, Id like 4 bookshelf sized speakers so that I can hide them under/behind the piano and not take up any extra room, but everyone is saying for my price range they are $#!+.

Good news!! I tried me EQ and it worked WONDERS for the sound. Its still not exactly where I want it, but its MUCH better. Im thinking its actually the receiver that is really lacking in midrange output. We'll see if thr receiver that my girlfriend is giving me helps.

I went to Frys and bought some of the 5 1/8" sony bookshelf speakers and they are surprisingly good for $25 EACH. They have good mids and highs to give the piano a clear voice. I have them hooked up to the B channel of my receiver, and the large floor speakers are on channel A. I have them both running at the same time with no problems. Im not pushing the amp hard by any means so I have no worries that it will overheat. The sound is so much better than with the internal speakers, Im really happy.

I contacted the craigslist seller who has the Polk R50s, and he would take no less than $100 for 2 of them. So Im going to go try them out and see if they sound better than my KLH speakers. I tried them in the store and they seemed to have alot more mids than the other speakers, but it could have been the receiver or the room. Bass wasnt too impressive though... again could have just been the room. Regardless, they are better quality than my KLHs so Im sure they will sound great.

Indeed. An EQ works wonders. As for the receiver lacking in the midrange ... not likely. Amplifiers these days are as flat as flat gets. Generally you'd suspect the speakers, especially since you're using two very different speakers for each channel.
The speakers on keyboards (and on most consoles up to about the $4000+ range) are lame. A little help from a modest external sound system works wonders.
ChrisA reports that you can get the Polks BRAND NEW for around $100. So if that seller wants $100 for a used pair, he must be smoking some funny weed.

Whats interesting is both of the speakers sounded "scooped" without the EQ. Ive noticed it with this amplifier ever since I bought it years ago, never sounded quite right to me. Ive even got the entire range from 400hz to 2.5khz pegged to the max on my EQ and the rest about normal. It doesnt seem like I have enough EQ range to play with as it still lacks some punch in the mids (only talking about piano here, not music at this point). Something just doesnt sound "right" you know? This (and the fact that without the EQ the amp has NO midrange detail regardless of the speaker used) is what leads me to believe the receiver is at fault.



I thought ChrisA mentioned something like $65 each, but even so FRYs has them for $100 each right now. Even online I cant find them for much less. For what they are, $100 for a pair is amazing!

Does your receiver have a "Loudness" button? If so, enabling this feature applies a crude inverse Fletcher-Munson EQ curve to the output. Basically it boosts the bass and treble at lower volumes to make up for the human ear's response falling response here.

Nope. This is my receiver: Technics SA-AX730

Oh I forgot to mention an interesting point. I had to turn the bass eq on the receiver (it only has bass and treble) all the way down to 0 and the treble to 50% for it to sound decent. The curve on my separate EQ looks something like this. I still cant get a totally natural midrange sound, something sounds artificial. Ill keep working on it!

I know that this was mentioned earlier, but BE SURE that the receiver is set to the 2-channel mode - no surround.
The speakers can make all the difference - I use a pair (or occasionally 2 pair) of vintage Klipsch KG-4's. They are plenty loud and sound much more accurate than any PA speaker or "standard" home speaker that I have tried. And I've tried a few. I use no tone or eq adjustments on the amplifier, but I have tweaked the piano sound a bit.

Wow, I think I'd work that thing into the trash.

I think you are on the right track! I really wish I had a few different receivers to compare this one to, Ill have to wait for sunday to be able to compare my girlfriends old ass receiver (it was her fathers).

ChrisA reports that you can get the Polks BRAND NEW for around $100. So if that seller wants $100 for a used pair, he must be smoking some funny weed. [/quote]

Normal street price is about $110 EACH. I was able to get them for $49 each but I doubt we will ever see that price again. Frys has them on sale right now at $99 EACH. So if you see them used in good condition for $100 a PAIR that is about right, 50% of retail for current model in-production gear is about right for used.

So I just went to see the man who was selling the polk speakers... he gave me the deal of the year!!! He initially wanted $200 for 4 R50s, but I told him I only needed 2 and I offered $80. He declined and said hed take $100 for 2. So I agreed to come look. When I got there he said "man I really need to get rid of all four of these speakers cause I just got a new system. How about $150 for all four." I grinned and said "hmm... I really just dont need 4, but thats a good deal... I really hadnt wanted to spend more than $100..." So we talked some more (this late 40's ex marine was at least 6'6" and 275 lbs... HUGE freaking guy) and he was playing some mind games jokingly and kept trying to get me to buy them. After some more talking we discovered we were both engineers from Georgia Tech and he seemed to like that alot so he said "aw heck just take them all for $100! Pass the good deal on to someone else in the future!" The dude scared the heck out of me, he seemed like he could be in the mafia or something, had a real odd devious air about him. So I accepted, gave him the money, grabbed the speakers and got the heck out of there! Thoughts of his sledgehammer sized hands (no exaggeration) punching a hole through my solar plexus and taking his speakers back crept into my head as I was packing up, but he turned out to just be drunk, not a killer.

So, Im the proud owner of 4 cherry colored, like new, Polk R50s! FOR $100!!!!

Joey, Your comment about turning the bassEQ all the way down, leads me to add my own observations. When I take the line out from a CD player to my CambridgeSoundwords 2.1 system, I add about 30% of the bass boast to listen to a piano CD. But when I connect my DP, I have to turn the bass all the way back, and it is still too much. I have observed this with my NP-30, and a couple of previous keyboards. My guess is that the small amps in these very portable instruments are EQ'd to give more bass (the illusion of bass that is) thru the very small, $2 built-in speakers, and that the headphone jack, which is used for a TSR out, is not adjusted back to flat. So "mud" is what you hear trying to go into a stereo receiver. And who knows what the "curve" of this output looks like in other ways? So I'm not surprised that you're getting closer with your 7-band EQ.

My Korg SP-170 headphone out seems to be flatter--I add a little boast to the bass of the same 2.1 system to make it sound good to my ear.

You folks with the electronics/engineering minds, does this make any sense?

I think you may be right, that does make sense. Although when I use my studio monitor headphones the EQ seems to be perfect. Either way, I just hooked up my R50s and ss-b1000s through the other receiver I just brought home and man, even without the EQ it sounds great. Again I turned the bass all the way down, but it hits the sweet spot there and sounds great. Im going to add an EQ just to play around with it, but MAN Im happy now! The R50s sound AMAZING. Thanks to ChrisA for pointing them out to me.

Great find! There are lots of great speaker deals out there, ripe for the grabbing at low, low prices.

I went that route, too, and I got a great deal. But I can't match your story about Mr. Big Guy.

I added the EQ and it does sound better. Pretty close to right where I had hoped it would be sound wise. Theres still a little unpleasant "ringing" in the upper-bass/lower-mid range, but I think that has to do with the fact that Im sitting SO close to the speakers and am practically inbetween them. They are made to be at home theater distance, so Ill just deal with it. I tried turning them sideways facing left/right and also directly backwards, and both positions produced different sounds. Better in some ways, worse in others. So Im leaving them facing forward but slightly turned in for now.

Its definitely good overall though. Cant wait for my wooden stand and pedal bar to arrive monday, Ill post pics in the pic/setup thread once its all finished.

EDIT: I have some of that polyfill stuff that people use to stuff in their speakers cabinets. Its supposed to improve the bass response of speakers and remove "boomy" bass. Im thinking of trying this to see if it gets rid of that ringing bass I mentioned. Has anyone here ever tried this??

Polyfill changes the behaviour of the airspring in the enclosure go from "adiabatic" to "isothermal". Basically it makes the enclosure seem bigger than it really is. If the enclosure is too small for the woofer (common) then polyfill could help. The best way to tell is by plugging the woofer TS parameters into a calculator and measuring the internal volume of the enclosure.

If this is a ported enclosure than a different tuning might help.

Often the woofer and enclosure are both POS, and it's easier to do it right from scratch.