HiFi Subjectivist ¦ Audio Forum ¦ NVA User Group

The best I can afford is the Cubix. I could place them 40-60 cm from the walls. Is this enough?

Cubix requires two pairs of power amps. You need Cube1.

kellerist wrote: ↑Sat Apr 28, 2018 8:13 am The best I can afford is the Cubix. I could place them 40-60 cm from the walls. Is this enough?

My experience is that they work best WAY closer to the rear wall than that.
Mine are heavily toed-in with the rear corner of the speaker 120mm from the wall.

zebbo wrote: ↑Sat Apr 28, 2018 9:25 am

kellerist wrote: ↑Sat Apr 28, 2018 8:13 am The best I can afford is the Cubix. I could place them 40-60 cm from the walls. Is this enough?

My experience is that they work best WAY closer to the rear wall than that.
Mine are heavily toed-in with the rear corner of the speaker 120mm from the wall.

Same here...

Both rear and side walls should be that close? My better half will kill me.

It is usually the opposite, wives hate speakers out in the room.

kellerist wrote: ↑Fri Apr 27, 2018 8:48 pm Some, but which? 1? X?

I have Cubettes, Cube 2s and Cubix pros. I did have Cubix and I've heard Cube 1s. I currently have them in three different, although all fairly large rooms (but with fairly normal ceiling heights - that's important).

The first cubes I heard were in a smallish but L shaped room sitting in one arm of the L at the junction. The assymmetry of the room mattered not one jot. What struck me was that there was something 'special' about the way they presented music. Roll forward a bit and I bought my Cubix (basically two Cube1s one on top of the other with the bottom tweeter pointing sideways. And the rest, as they say, is history.

You will find in the archives here information about how to set up cubes. The point is here that they work with the room (bass mid firing up) and not against it. So you move the cubes back and forward from a wall until you get the sound balance right and then toe them in (much more than with other speakers) until things snap into place. At the point the speakers melt away and you are left with the music on a stage.

The difference as you go up the range is some more bass extension but you also get, as with other steps in the NVA range, more of that 'NVA' thing: everything is generally clearer, there's more separation between different parts of the music, you can hear people playing together or not, you can hear fluffs and poor production. What people have described as 'lifting a veil' or 'window washing'.

My advice is to try to get to hear some Cubes to see if you like the sound or not (I found it pleasantly different, others might find it uncomfortably different).

Remember too that you can trade in if you trade up.

An i correct in thinking that the Cube's interaction with the ceiling is more important than with walls?

CN211276 wrote: ↑Sat Apr 28, 2018 1:13 pm An i correct in thinking that the Cube's interaction with the ceiling is more important than with walls?

Richard is obviously best to answer this but I don't think so, so long as the ceilings are normal domestic height. I don't think cubes will work in rooms with high ceilings. And I don't think it is just the ceiling, it is the entire room. We are normally playing music in a box of some sort. Whatever the speaker, the sound interacts with that box. I think the point of the Cube design is that it makes it easier to 'tune' the position of the speaker in the box and that they are designed to work in a box and not, as in 'point and squirt', against the box.