newbie Q - pairing & stacking

[LesConnally]

reading thru the archives, it seems alot of you here pair & stack mixes & matches of your monitors. anyone want to speak to this generally for my benefit?
thanks - just trying to learn

[boputnam]

Hey, Les...

Maybe give us some more colour on what you're doing or considering. :yes:

Generally speaking, this can work fine - the only thing you need be watchful of is phasing of components inter-cabinet. JBL did not design cabinets with pairing/stacking in mind. Rather, they optimized the networks for stand-alone faithful reproduction. Thus, there are inadvertent conflicts between different cabinets. 'nuff said...

[LesConnally]

I'm not really considering anything, specifically. I was reading of the concept here in the forums, and what made it resonate was at one point in testing the 4411 (which actually sounds a bit thin) one of it was on a left channel, and an altogether different speaker (a french Triangle actually) on the right (not sure if this is good for amps!), and together they sounded better than either pair separately. And so I started thinking that if all the electrons are flowing at the same speed, and everything is in phase, perhaps multiple speakers can fill in odd shortcomings of each other. Not altogether different, (except for the hugely important crossover thing) from satellites and subs.
so I was looking for more explanations of this stacking and pairing going ono that I see posted around here.

Les

[Guido]

Welcome Les!

For home use I would always prefer one large speaker per side rather than two or more smaller ones.

A pair of 4343 will do it anyway :D

[mikebake]

Generally, while fun, "stacking and pairing" is not a great idea, and you eventually come full circle to realizing that getting "it" done with a good, properly implemented single pair of speakers is better in the home.
Adding dedicated subs is okay, as there aren't generally the conflicts found when you start adding woofers/mids/tweeters to the picture.
Getting "less" to work "the best" seems to usually work better; get better drivers, used better cabinets, use a better crossover (maybe active), set it up better in the room, etc.