Other speakers in room

[Broccoli]

Hello, have a small question for you all:

As we all know, having passive speakers in your listening room is bad for the sound quality. What I wonder is if the effect is additive, i.e. the more passive speakers you add, the worse it will get. Or is it rather the first passive speaker that will make the biggest change, and adding more speakers won't do much difference? Or maybe there can't be said anything general about this?

(The reason I wonder is that I'm living in a pretty small apartment, and making the listening room completely free from passive speakers is simply too impractical. One ordinary phone, one cell phone, two computers with built-in speakers, headphones..

I'm now thinking of buying a new not too expensive tv, and considering I won't get my listening room free from speakers, I'm thinking of if it's worth it to make the effort and get one without inbuilt speakers. I don't need the tv function anyway (just need it for films), so I could buy a computer display, but they are pretty expensive in the size you want for watching movies.)

[lejonklou]

Hm, interesting. I have never heard this question before. Should be rather easy to find out by a little experimenting.

Anybody have any experience with this?

By the way, in my room it was well worth the effort to open the TV and remove the 2 speakers inside. Rather easy to refit them as well, if I should need to.

[Broccoli]

Hm, interesting. I have never heard this question before. Should be rather easy to find out by a little experimenting.

Yeah, but you need to be good at hearing not-so-big differences fast, which I'm unfortunately not.

By the way, in my room it was well worth the effort to open the TV and remove the 2 speakers inside. Rather easy to refit them as well, if I should need to.

That's an option. I did that when I still lived at home (and thankfully my mother accepted it, though she probably thought I was a little crazy :)). I've actually heard (from Anders at Tonläget) that the picture tube in an old style TV set is adjusted to having the magnetic field from the speakers present, and that the picture tube would be damaged after a while if you removed the speakers (didn't tell mum about that). After a few years the picture actually started to look a bit strange, but that could of course have been for some other reason.

Anyway, this shouldn't be a problem for the LCD technique which is unaffected by magnetic fields, am I right? How about plasma screens?

I wonder how hard it would be to dig into my portable computer and remove those speakers... Maybe when the guarantee is no longer valid.

[lejonklou]

Thanks for the information about the possibility that the cathode TV could be adjusted differently with speaker than without! Normally the speakers are magnetically screened so that their effect on the cathode tube is minimal, but Anders could be right in this.

Thankfully I never noticed any change in picture quality after the surgery and rest assured that your mother's TV did NOT develop a fault because of your tweak if it happened years later. Any magnetic influence the speaker might have on the cathode tube will take effect at once or not at all.

You are correct that LCD's and plasma screens should be completely unaffected.

Regarding the multiple passive speaker issue, I will try making some experiments soon and report back.

[Broccoli]

Any magnetic influence the speaker might have on the cathode tube will take effect at once or not at all.

If I remember correctly (but this must have been ten years ago), Anders was actually talking about an effect in the long and not the short term. But what you say seem more plausible.

Great that you will make tests!