Room loading, overloading (e.g. room size matters)

Some say you must size the speaker for the room. Others say it doesn’t matter.

My original plan to have a listening auditorium when I bought my house didn’t pan out, so I had some rather large speakers placed into a respectably small room assigned to me by the boss.

I’ve also read and researched quite a bit about acoustic treatments and have applied such treatments to the room including diffusion, absorption and bass trapping.

My question is this:

  1. If a large speaker and a small speaker both measure the same dB sensitivity across a near linear frequency response curve with the same response range – and
  2. you have the ability to utilize any kind of acoustic treatment, and
  3. you’re restricted to the one small room,

Does it still matter if the speaker is large or small?

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Short answer: No, it doesn’t.

Long answer: see this great video from Acoustics Insider:

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Thank You for posting this video. The presenter offers what I think are excellent points of selecting speaker. In particular: his emphasis on finding the optimal listening position first.

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