Hi Everyone,
I was hoping to do a blog a week or so before Christmas about a successful install of a pair of the PMC Fenestria’s Speakers, the first pair sold into the UK in fact, but unfortunately it wasn’t the smoothest installation which after a 2nd visit yesterday proved 100% that it is the room that is the issue, I have always said that your room is the most important part of your HiFi which really does get overlooked by a lot of HiFi Enthusiasts and this really did prove it so I thought it would be worth writing a few words on the issue encountered as I definitely learnt a thing or 2.
So the customer, Hi Steve, like me is a big PMC enthusiast, he has a PMC Cinema room + in other rooms he has a pair of 24′s, 26′s and Fact.8′s so as soon as he heard we had the Fenestria’s on demo he was straight in here and was suitably impressed and ordered a pair. Keen to get them in before Christmas PMC were very helpful and with just a few days to spare we went to the customers house to install them, before we get stuck into the issue we were having I should state they were going into a nice size room and were to be driven by a Naim NAC 252/NAP 300 and ND555 Streamer so they should have just slotted in nice and easy and worked a treat as they had some great kit behind them the reality was quite different.
So I arrived at the customer’s and with some help from PMC we started to assembling the Fenestria’s which really is a 2 man job and before you knew it we had everything connected up and was ready to enjoy some music so the customer queued up a few tracks and then the issue materialised, basically the mid range and treble sounded gorgeous but the bass was all over the place, I have never heard anything like it before, it just overpowered everything, so not to be beaten we spent the next few hours moving them around the room to several different locations, not the easiest job at 80KG’s each, but wherever they ended up we still had the uncontrolled bass, even the experienced guys from PMC had never heard such a bad room before, so in the end we had no choice but to admit defeat and leave it that we would revisit it in the New Year, which we did yesterday.
Now I must admit I was 100% expecting that we would try a few things but in the end I would have to pull the speakers out, I was even thinking I may take them home which wouldn’t have been the end of the world 🙂 So thinking of different options I took my demo pair of Wilson Sabrina’s with me to see if a different speaker would help but we encountered exactly the same issue, so then we tried the PMC Fact.8′s and again the bass was uncontrolled, so that proved to us that it wasn’t the Fenestria’s that were the problem but it was 100% the room, but we did find that in a couple of areas of the room the bass boom was significantly less and using my demo track of choice, the classic ‘Teardrop’ by Massive Attack we actually found 2 small areas in the room where the sound was pretty much as good as in my demo room but you really had to be in that small sweet spot, in the rest of the room is was still quite poor, luckily the sweet spot was exactly where the customer was thinking of sitting so we set up the listening position here and left much more hopeful that a solution could be found.
I still think a little room treatment and maybe even some small DSP applied could really help so we are looking into this now, but I can hostly say I have never heard a speaker behave like this before but in life you will always get faced with certain challenges and as long as you give it your best shot and hopefully learn something along the way then it is actually good experience whatever the outcome and one thing is for sure the Fenestria’s sound so damn good it is definitely worth a little effort to really get the best from them and I am sure by the time we are finished we will have them really singing 🙂
To Be Continued ……..
Cheers,
Paul.
