Positioning of speakers in echo-ey room

[ivan]

The room is probably just about the worst you could have for sound. It's a pool room I'm building and they have terrible accoustics! I don't think a big sheet of water in the middle helps much! The floor is tiled and walls are rendered - and can't put fabric in because of the damp. Almost nothing in the way of furniture. Can't put anything over the glass, as as the two walls are virtually all glass, it's not practical to put blinds or curtains on them. Speakers are just for playing music whilst in the pool. Pretty weird location of people in the room, because a lot of the time they will be effectively 'heads on the floor'!

I want to keep the speakers relatively high up because 1)it means I can run the wires where they won't be seen/tripped over and 2)They're less likely to get splashed.

I have a small transistor radio I listen to when I'm building, and even with that you can tell it's very echoey

[Crastney]

Your description makes it seem like you're putting up speakers to play music to people in a swimming pool... in which case sound quality is not going to be that important, so I'd stick them as high as you can in the corners. Keep them far away from any water splashes, and wires out of the way of tripping.
Nobody in a swimming pool is expecting perfect acoustics from a sound system.

[jonc_uk]

Ah ok - I was thinking more dance studio.

I would not put in the Peaveys. My suggestion is a larger number of smaller speakers. Your pool hall is slightly larger than mine although I have a vaulted ceiling with max height 6m. Reverb time when completely empty was 7 seconds! Adding the water and the odd piece of furniture has reduced it to about 3s.

The ideal with a very active room is for every ear to be listening directly to a speaker rather than a reflection off a wall. You want very even coverage with lots of sources all run at a moderate volume. As I said previously, you can't fight the room acoustics with volume.

I have 8x Bose single cube speakers, four down each side of the pool mounted at about 3.25m, 2x Linn Custom 106c ceiling speakers where there is an overhang and over the spa I have 4x Linn Custom 106c in the ceiling. In addition, the spa has a single Bose Freespace 3 ceiling mount sub pointing down and the 8 cubes are accompanied with 2 more Freespace 3 subs. The whole lot is very discreet, and sounds excellent given the room.

It is driven by 11 channels of amplification fed from a MiniDSP for crossover, EQ and time-alignment. All the speakers and amps were collected off eBay prior to the build. I doubt you would find a better sounding system installed in a domestic pool hall.

If you happened to be in the North-West you could pop by for a listen.

[ivan]

Yes, pool building! I've been building it over the last 5 or 6 years. I should have gone for multiple speakers, but already got the 2 x 15" peaveys - the plan was that I could unhook them and use them outdoors if I needed to. At least wiring isn't going to be too difficult with two!

I've got a little radio I listen to in there whilst working, and the echo makes broadcast speech quite difficult to follow. A bit like a mini train station!! I'm near S.Wales border, so quite a trek to the North West otherwise I'd definitely take you up on the offer.

[MikeNovack]

A pool building? Then even worse. You forgot to include the sound reflection from the water/air interface.

[jonc_uk]

Nice spacious room.

Those exposed trusses would make it easy to fix cables discretely and mount small speakers if you were inclined.