Thinking about buying (a) new monitor(s) for the Kemper for my man cave

Move your monitoring space out of that corner will have FAR MORE impact than buying new monitors.
Save your money.

Quote from Ingolf

Move your monitoring space out of that corner will have FAR MORE impact than buying new monitors.
Save your money.

Agreed

How are your ears in relation to the tweeters of those monitors, height-wise?

I assume then you are not using your monitors for any actual recording or mixing?

Surely you will require stereo for this?

Also those acoustic foams seem to be in the wrong place to me unless you have more elsewhere?... I would suggest you need them to the sides of your monitors to soak up any sound directed at the wall.

Yup. The corner-positioning is problematic at best, and is to be greatly discouraged.

The cheapest thing you can do meanwhile is to put the cabs upside down or on their side, in order to have their tweeters closer to your ears.

I refer you to my last comment on your other thread. It doesn't matter which monitors you get until you fix your room. Buying new monitors, and using foam as room treatment, is NOT the solution. I understand why my comments are not to your liking. I'm not telling you to buy a new toy, lol. But, at the very least, do yourself a favor and read the EDUCATION section found in the GIK Acoustics website. There's general information there that will help you place your current monitors in the right spots without spending a dime. It's FREE!

OK, let's put it this way. Hopefully this will help you understand why buying another set of monitors is not the solution to your problem. You're in a small room, and I assume it's pretty much a cube, right? If so, you're in the worse environment possible for a flat sound, even with treatment. However, room treatment still helps control the nulls and resonances that your room creates. Think of your room as the body of an acoustic guitar, except with an undesirable shape that makes certain frequencies resonate much more than others, while other frequencies almost disappear because they are perceived as too soft (even though they are not).

What you hear in an untreated (or illtreated) room is not what's actually coming out of your speakers. Why? Because the room is distorting reality (Yes, even when using near field monitors). See the problem? It doesn't matter how flat your speakers are if your room keeps getting in the way, by altering what you hear. So until you treat your listening environment, you will not be able to hear what's really coming out of your speakers. This, in turn, will make you boost the frequencies that you perceive as being too soft and attenuate the ones you perceive as too loud. Then you go to another room and the tone you spent so much time working on ends up being crap. It's a waste of time.

The reason why mixes done by a professional audio engineer sound good pretty much anywhere you play them is because they are done in well treated rooms, where the engineer can actually hear what's really going on in the mix. Obviously their skills and equipment comes into place as well. But this is no different when you try to create tones with the Kemper. The same principles apply.

Hope this helped!

Typical site...but there are loads !

http://arqen.com/acoustics-101/room-setup-speaker-placement/

Quote from spark240

Typical site...but there are loads !

http://arqen.com/acoustics-101/room-setup-speaker-placement/

That's a nice site with good info. Thanks for sharing!

10w73, I feel your pain in all this because I've been there. I had a cozy "guitar room" loaded with nice gear. And since I had retired from regularly playing out, my wife decorated the room for me. Then i wanted to start recording--the performance itch continued to need scratching. I had nice gear so I wanted the best recording gear I could afford. The KPA was one result--I needed more amps! But I was less happy to discover I needed to invest a chunk of change just to treat my room before I could adequately record with this great grear. Bummer! I discovered not only were many of my nice pictures, etc, going to have to come down, but the room would need ţo be reaaranged to achieve the best sonic qualities. By far he worst was having to spend the equivalent $$ of a nice guitar or amp to buy the correct acoustic treatments (bass traps, etc.). BUT, I AM SO GLAD I DID! Only gearheads/tone-lovers like KPA owners will understand what happened next: my eyes filled with tears when I sat in the new acoustic sweet spot and fired up my very same monitors. Had I been transported to Abbey Road Studios? Nope. My same monitors were now magic. Playing and recording in this same but new room is now a blast.

So, I understand how you feel hearing advice suggesting you need more than just a monitor change--but you are getting good advice. If you decide to go for the magic sound and not the quick fix, you will either need to do some reading to learn what you need, or you can get free help from some of the quality sites already recommended to you. I did a lot of reading, but still requested advice from GIK Acoustics. They promptly suuggested acoustic treatment options I could afford based on measurements and pictures of my room. I suggest if after determining what you need that the $$ are not quite there, subdue the quick fix itch and save for the acoustic treatment/room rearrangement. You'll never regret it and all your current and future gear will thank you for how good you've made it sound. Who knows? You might even wonder if you, too, are transported to a high dollar studio every time you listen in your new studio.

Nowadays there are also a number of DSPs able to operate upon the room's acoustic response in real time through a dynamic EQ. And they are getting cheaper and cheaper.
It might be worth considering one of those too.

Quote from viabcroce

Nowadays there are also a number of DSPs able to operate upon the room's acoustic response in real time through a dynamic EQ. And they are getting cheaper and cheaper.
It might be worth considering one of those too.

This is would be OK provided there is proper room treatment in place first. But, by itself, lots of acoustics professionals would disagree with using EQ as the only means to "treat" a room. Plus, the money spent on these softwares can be better put on more acoustical treatment.

Treat the problem at the source as much as possible, don't just put a bandaid on it. That's my philosophy :-).

I agree. But I'd also take into consideration other factors, for example how expensive a "satisfying treatment" would be or how definitive it can be.

If your budget doesn't allow for a complete solution, the leading consideration becomes what amount of improvement you can get for the money. With the DSPs getting cheaper and cheaper, they are becoming a good alternative.

Another case would for example be a rented flat, where you can't\don't want to invest money or can't move furniture.

I'll enforce I'm talking of dynamic EQ anyway.

In that sense, I agree with you. Not as a permanent solution, but as a temporary one based on the situation.

I guess my point is that what matters is "the sound's health". Honestly, I'd not care whether I avoid a static wave to take form or it's just a DSP not letting me hear it, provided the results are comparable of course, and specially if I end up spending less.

Granted, in real life there might be so many different scenarios and sound nuances needed to be taken care of that generalizing is impossible (for example, a DSP can clean the sound at a given listening spot, while a properly-designed room would give me a larger clean spot), what I am saying is that I have no preconceptions as regards the optimal way of getting the result, specially in terms of complexity and cost of the solving approach