I took a trip down to gecko today on the sunniest day of the year to sit in a dark room listening to speakers
fortunately it was worth the trip & thanks to Rob for his time today.
I visited to listen to the MP150Mk2s and S150Ts & to discuss/try out different positions for the surrounds. Rob's small room is not that dissimilar to my lounge with respect to dimensions (his room is maybe 15-20% bigger on each dimension) so one might think the experience will be at least somewhat comparable to how they might sound at home. I have previously listened to the S150Mk2s and found them v enjoyable for both films & music, there's just no way they can fit though. As a result I found evaluating these quite straightforward, they were indistinguishable to how I remember the S150Mk2s sounding. The clarity of the sound they produce is what really sticks in the mind for me which seems to reflect the other comments in this thread so little more to add there.
More interesting was the surround placement. I changed my room setup last year from tripoles (M&K Surround 55 Mk2) in pseudo column surrounds mode to higher up on the wall, initially 1/4 room width from the side walls about 8' up (in a 10' ceiling room) on the rear walls with listening position directly underneath and subsequently slightly closer to the side walls at the same 8' height but now in line with, or slightly forward of, the MLP (which is currently slightly inset into a recess). Over the last year I realised I erred badly when making this decision as there has been something missing ever since (aka the surround soundstage
) which tends to only really reveal itself in particular dynamic scenes (which generally means a war film with bombs and bullets flying everywhere).
Rob had the room setup initially in the classic 110 ish degree splay for the rears at about chest height and we ran through some scenes/tracks that stress the surround sound stage. From memory; a chase scene from early part of avatar, apocalypse now opening scene, a track from police certifiable which involved lots of cymbals, some swedish multichannel radio demo called "the run", assorted acoustic tracks, king kong when jane is first taken by kong. We then moved them to round to 90 degrees and repeated a few scenes/tracks.
The discussion beforehand had been around the relative importance of reflected vs direct sound for creating the surround sound stage. In my setup, it's purely reflected (and doesn't really work). In Rob's, it is predominantly direct & augmented by reflected.
I think 3 things really stood out; the consistency of the quality/timbre of the sound, the sense of envelopment, the added fine detail.
I think jason (shep) made the 1st point in a recent post and I can definitely see this. The standout moment for this was in one of the The Police tracks when the drummer is busy playing a set of little cymbals, the way the highest notes pinged all around me was both completely consistent all the way around the soundstage and consistent with how I'd expect such a high pitched ping to reflect around me. There was no hint of brightness here, just a v crisp, v realistic ping.
I suspect the last 2 points are closely related and a function of placement and speaker quality. I just don't get that from my setup atm.
Next steps are a home demo & playing with placement in my room (which may struggle to accomodate the SL speaker in that position) which hopefully will happen in early May if schedules go to plan. My position is currently biased towards getting the onwalls (as these will fit perfectly from a room function/aesthestics perspective as well as sounding great) but somewhat sceptical about the tripoles as I think the placement options in my room may compromise them to the extent that it's not worth spending the money. I look forward to being proved wrong (or not!).