Whats are the different theories on room acoustics to create a great sounding room?

caesar

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I have been to homes of guys with very expensive systems that had lot of diffusers in the room but had very wooly bass. Ouch!!!! - What a waste of a great system!!!! And what a waste of extra $$,$$$ for the great bass drivers!!!

So what is the percentage of diffusion vs. absorption should there be in a good room?

Reading the tons of very good material on Ethan Winer's Real Traps site (almost too much material, actually, for a regular person to digest), one comes away that Mr. Winer's theory is that the room should be as dead as possible.

I also attended a seminar by Rives audio a while back. His point was that the room should be "neither live nor dead". He did not offer any specifics, though, nor communicate what he really meant.

So what are there different theories to create a great sounding room?
 

Bruce B

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I'm sure Art could better tell you, but there are no rules of thumb. I know MY room is is 55/30/15 , absorption/reflection/diffusion.
 

Kal Rubinson

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Reading the tons of very good material on Ethan Winer's Real Traps site (almost too much material, actually, for a regular person to digest), one comes away that Mr. Winer's theory is that the room should be as dead as possible.
I do not think that is correct. He believes that you cannot have too many bass traps but he certainly advises using traps with reflective skins on them once the number starts to get large (as in his rooms).

So what are there different theories to create a great sounding room?
There are 2 eminently readable books that will inform you:
Everest: Master Handbook of Acoustics
Toole: Sound Reproduction
 

microstrip

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There are 2 eminently readable books that will inform you:
Everest: Master Handbook of Acoustics
Toole: Sound Reproduction

Ceasar,

These excellent books will you inform you, but you will not find there "theories on room acoustics to create a great sounding room" or magic recipes to do it.

On the contrary, they will show you that small room acoustics are really a difficult problem and that a "practical theory that is usable in real rooms" is still to be found.

If you go through Toole's book you will find that many of the current assumptions that disseminate through newsgroups and some sites can be quite questionable.

After reading both books I understood better why people must be prepared to pay a very reasonable amount of money to experts and known companies to have their rooms treated. Knowledge, access to quality materials and skilled manpower, capacity to understand client preferences, time and large experience are keywords to small room acoustics successful professionals.
 

JackD201

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The key is to know what the owner considers "a good sounding room". For the professionals it is determined by the room's use, for the hobbyists it is a matter of preference. That said, there is no substitute for working with a certified acoustician who can translate what you want into the percentage of room coverage for each type of treatment and their locations. Before the days of advanced modeling and simulation it was common to first make a room as dead as door nails and then subtract until the desired balance is reached. Today modeling and simulation are much improved but it is not uncommon for slight additions to be made as taking this approach is much more economical.

I set up a system with VR-9s and the acoustic package was done by Art. We sent him the blueprints and construction details along with the furniture and system layout and he gave us 3 packages to choose from. The client was very happy with the final results as was I. I've been in two other fully ASC rooms, that of Sounds and Images, Cebu City which features a Harbeth, Lamm, Accuphase system and Sound Intentions in Danville (That's Steve W. by the way). What all three have in common is what Marty likes to call very close to the B&K curve. These rooms are in no way dead, but more importantly they do not ring.
 

garylkoh

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Just like with loudspeakers, what constitutes a "great sounding room" may be vastly different to different people. Rooms, like with loudspeakers are a balance of compromises. Just as I don't think that it is possible to design a perfect loudspeaker, it is just as difficult to design the perfect room. With digital source components and amplifiers, it is possible to have a unsmoothed frequency response that is perfectly flat. Typical loudspeaker measurements are 1/3 octave smoothing. Getting the loudspeaker reasonably flat within +/- 3dB is already a challenge. In another thread, you see how a very highly regarded loudspeaker has "ragged" FR. If you looked at the response unsmoothed, you'd run screaming away from it - and almost every other loudspeaker/headphones.

The best measuring loudspeaker I've heard was the Mackie HR824. It measures beautifully, even down to 1/12 octave smoothing with +/- 1.5dB throughout it's rated frequency range from 37Hz to 20kHz. It's got a beautiful dispersion pattern with the tweeter almost perfectly matching the woofer. Harmonic distortion is less than 0.5% from 100Hz to 20kHz. But yet, I can't stand listening to it.

Rooms are the same - I've been in "prefectly measuring" rooms that give me a blinding headache.
 

FrantzM

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Hi

Simply dropping a large number of absorbing items in a room does not equate in good sounding rooms, this require much more and many will tell you that the same number of Tube traps , bass traps or whatever placed differently change he sound dramatically. I do understand the notion of preference but a room which does impose too much of its character on the reproduction is not adequate IMO... As a practical experience I have noticed that badly positioning Bass traps results in an impression of a "weak" bass . Often simply measuring the FR at the listening position show a drop in mid bass and lower midrange with the resultant :lightweight: sound
Room can be made to sound quite neutral and there are different ways to reach this goal .. They require in most cases a dedicated room. One made for the purpose and frankly often require a level of understanding of small room acoustics that most audiophiles do not possess .. seems to me that the best deal is to have such done by a qualified person .. There are several , some of them are or were on this very forum .. It is eminently possible to have a room properly treated that brings the best in your speakers ... In most instances it must be dedicated.
What I have not found a good answer for is the following: Can a room be designed for all speakers? I tend to think that that is a room design that suits a type (not a brand mind you) of speakers i-e what works for a dipole may not for a point source ...
 

FrantzM

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OT

Gary

I have heard the Mackie myself and believe it is a good speaker for a cash strapped audiophile .. With this Mackie, a good DAC and a laptop one can have a more than decent system IMO .. Often I wonder what it would have sounded like if it were approached from a different perspective .. A true High End minimum compromise perspective ... maybe better amps , better material for the enclosure, etc. ... I agree with you that ultimately it is not as satisfying as many high end speakers ...
 

garylkoh

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Frantz, I agree. For the price, it is difficult to beat for the audiophile on a budget - no need to buy amps, and they are a great neutral platform to build off. Certainly at that price, the audiophile could do far, far worse.
 

Steve Williams

Site Founder, Site Owner, Administrator
The key is to know what the owner considers "a good sounding room". For the professionals it is determined by the room's use, for the hobbyists it is a matter of preference. That said, there is no substitute for working with a certified acoustician who can translate what you want into the percentage of room coverage for each type of treatment and their locations. Before the days of advanced modeling and simulation it was common to first make a room as dead as door nails and then subtract until the desired balance is reached. Today modeling and simulation are much improved but it is not uncommon for slight additions to be made as taking this approach is much more economical.

I set up a system with VR-9s and the acoustic package was done by Art. We sent him the blueprints and construction details along with the furniture and system layout and he gave us 3 packages to choose from. The client was very happy with the final results as was I. I've been in two other fully ASC rooms, that of Sounds and Images, Cebu City which features a Harbeth, Lamm, Accuphase system and Sound Intentions in Danville (That's Steve W. by the way). What all three have in common is what Marty likes to call very close to the B&K curve. These rooms are in no way dead, but more importantly they do not ring.

Hey thanks for the kind words Jack

I can say that my room is ASC designed by Art Noxon from top to bottom and I couldn't be happier
 

Mobiusman

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I would like to offer a somewhat different approach to room design that might at first sound backwards, but actually emulates live music, allegedly the goal of most audiophiles. What I am about to describe is the summary of what I learned during an 18 month exploration in the mid 80's during which time I spoke with and interviewed a number of acoustical engineers, musicians and visited a number of studios. I then spent the next year and a half and approximately $100k creating a dedicated space based on the best of what I learned during the previous 18 months and all of my listening. In the 25 years since I designed and built my room, divorce has ripped it from my hands, but the principles live on because physics and audio physiology do not change.

I went through three steps in the construction of my ideal room. The first and most critical step, because if it is wrong, all that will follow will be wrong, is to stop and think about how humans, and all animals process sound. The second step was to create a design concept for a finite indoor space that best recreates the best listening environment given the premise of excellent source properly recorded and assuming that the physics and physiology of human hearing are sacrosanct. The third step is the reality step -- building the best space given your real-world space limitations, your budget and trying to maintain your marriage/relationship with your significant other.

Step 1--Important factors in physics and hearing physiology.
The physics part is actually quite simple in theory and potentially complex unless you are building your listening space outside with no reflective surfaces, a situation I now have in my current home. Pardon my gross simplification of acoustical engineering since I am not an acoustical engineer and I do want you to read this post. Basically animal hearing physiology is based on three simple premises: 1) our ears act like a pair of binaural microphones; 2) our brain integrates these two binaural inputs to form perceived sound; and 3) recreating the reality of the sound source is done via a series of primary direct waves that arrive at each ear with different times of propagation in combination with secondary, tertiary, etc. reflected waves that are all integrated by the brain to recreate the actual three dimensional source.

Unfortunately the animal hearing system works best in a wide open area with little or no reflected waves because there is less for the brain to sort out making it much easier to localize the source via an essentially accurate recreation of the source by analyzing the specific time delays of the same signal at each ear. I say unfortunately, because almost all of high end audio listening is done in enclosed spaces which produce many undesirable reflected waves once the sound leaves our speakers. I realize that most of what we listen to is recorded in studios and arenas that also produce reflected waves which gives the ambient effect on the recording, BUT our rooms add additional reflections to the original ambient reflections that degrade the accuracy and reality of the original sound.

So in summary, the theoretically ideal listening reproduction environment is one that delivers only primary waves from the speakers. However, anyone who has ever listened in an anechoic environment knows that it does not sound real and certainly is not exciting. So, in my opinion, the best interior listening environment is one that controls the primary and reflected waves as they are perceived at the listening position.

Step 2 The Ultimate Interior Acoustical Design Concept that controls primary and reflected waves
First let's get one important thing out of the way, as the diversity of opinion on this site clearly demonstrates, what is perceived as "best" is highly personal. My definition of what is best in audio is easily tested by closing your eyes to eliminate all visual cues and try to relax and see how believably the system recreates your concept of the original source of what you're listening to. While this may sound hard to do, it is actually very easy, if you allow yourself to believe. If you have ever gone to an audio show like CES or RMAF, you know what rooms to walk into before you enter because the rooms that sound good inside also sound better than the crappy ones, while you in the halls, because fortunately our brains know what REAL sounds like as it traverses doorways and bounces of the walls of hotel walls. We also know what crappy sound sounds like when it takes the same path.

Before you design your room you must consider what type of speakers you are going to put in the room, because dipoles create different issues than unipolar models. At the time that I started my design experiment, I was using Magneplanar Tympani 3a's, augmented by Decca supertweeters with two large M&K subwoofers--definitely a difficult dipolar configuration. Soon after the room was completed I converted to Martin Logan CLS's and two of the largest Entec subwoofers, then a number of Martin Logan and Entec upgrades, both stock and highly customized, a wide array of preampfliers and amplifiers, both tube and solid state in various combinations, Dunlavy SC V's and ultimately a custom pair of Wisdom M-75's with hand picked reference drivers, supported with an augmenting subwoofer to bring the low end 3 db down response down to 14 hz before it essentially disappeared. What was amazing is that the room worked equally well for the dipole speakers and the unipole speakers, although it was a bit more magical with the dipolar ones.

Here's where I expect that I will challenge the logic of many of you reading this. The "live end dead end" concept of design is great because it goes a long way to decreasing standing waves and a bunch of less than desirable reflected waves, truly one of the most negative aspects of any playback system. The principle is simple enough--make one end of the reflective path dead, or essentially non-reflecting, and allow the other end to be live via pass through or reflection. The important question is one that is rarely asked because in my opinion, conventional wisdom has it backwards--Which end should be live and and which end should be dead. Inside of a box speaker, where this concept originated, the answer is simple, the back wall should be dead to damp or eliminate the rear waves of the driver in a an acoustic reflex "sealed" enclosure, or to damp cabinet resonances in a ported enclosure.

HOWEVER, when transferring this concept to room design, everything is different because now you are inside the enclosure and not in the path of the waves coming off the front of the enclosure. Unfortunately, somehow this was overlooked in a lot of live end dead room designs where the wall behind the speakers was deadened and almost nothing was done to the wall behind the listening position. The human and animal hearing system works best when it does not have to process reflected sounds that already passed behind (relative to source propagation) our physical positions. This information is largely phase incoherent, relative to the source with a wide array of time delays and makes the task of the brain sorting out the original source overwhelming. Naturally this problem is mitigated somewhat if you are sitting a substantial distance, at least 10-15 feet, in front of the first reflecting surface behind you and/or that surface is highly acoustically absorbent.

This is also highly important with regard to your ceiling because in the real outside world, there is no ceiling and essentially no reflection from above. Similarly the reflected waves from the floor of your listening room and the side walls matter. because they all add to the reflected waves that ultimately come to the listening position. An important concept that I was reminded of at the last CES is that the ear and brain are pretty smart about sorting out original from reflected waves if there is sufficient time between them that they can be interpreted as separate phenomena. This is why it is important for optical cables and speaker cables to be at least 2 meters long so that the internally reflected waves are clearly perceived by the sensors at the other end and your ears as different waves than the primary wave rather than as distortions of the primary waves.

Most of us know that the problems of wave interference increase dramatically as the wavelength increases. This is particularly true in an enclosed space with low frequencies, hence the need for bass traps to trap the long high energy waves and hopefully keep them from returning to the enclosed space. High frequency waves are much easier to control because their wavelengths are so short that reflected waves rapidly get lost in the noise floor of the room, while the direct waves create the critical fundamental image. If you are skeptical about what I have said, try listening in your room with door closed versus open, thus serving as a vent to let bass pressure out of the enclosed space and note the differences. Let me share a dramatic example that occurred in my home where I had my custom room. My home was 100 feet long with my room in the basement about 30 feet from one end of the house. If I opened the door about 18 inches on the side facing the long end of the house, opened the door at the top of the stairs and the far end of the house and then made sure that all of the doors were open through the central hallway on the floor above to the other end of the house (100 feet away), I could control the tightness of the bass in my music room by controlling how open a window was on the far end of the house, almost 200 acoustical feet away!!!!

So what am I saying? Live end dead end rooms make all the sense in the world as long as the dead end is BEHIND the listening position. Said another way, whatever passes by your ears is best left there, behind you, so that your brain does not have to work to decode all of the garbage that bounces back. Hopefully the recording engineer did that once in the original space and they certainly did not intend on having to deal with a second set of reflected waves from behind in your listening room. Okay if I have not already lost you for this blasphemy, what do you do with the wall behind the speakers, not to mention the side walls? The answer in one word is DIFFUSION. By diffusion, I mean randomizing the waves of different lengths with regard to reflected angles and time domains. The engineer that I finally settled on for my room design was the chief engineer for the last of the Beach Boys albums when they were using 48 tracks and in my opinion had the best and most spacious sound of all of their work, offered me what was probably the single most important point for my room design---diffused reflected waves are very appealing to the listener as long as the non-reflected waves are phase and time domain coherent.

There are many ways to diffuse waves, some very expensive and many very sterile looking. If you have the space the single easiest and cheapest way is move your speakers far away 10-15 feet from the rear and side walls. Unfortunately since most of us do not have sufficient real estate to do this we need creative solutions. The solution we chose for my room was both visually appealing and only moderately expensive. I mounted 5 tons of jagged rock in irregular patterns on my rear wall which was part of the house foundation and thus already concrete. It was important to have the proper variances in depth to create the proper assortment of time delays in the reflected waves, in my case a depth range of 11 inches. The jagged edges took care of the reflected angles. This wall wrapped around to the first 4 linear feet of the side walls for visual and acoutical reasons.

Here's where it got weird----not all rocks sound the same. I found that sedimentary rock with some compressed sand and alternating layers of quartz and iron sounded the best in my room. While the 5 tons of rocks only cost several hundred dollars, the freight to ship them from Georgia to NJ was another matter. Also I had to take off from work when they were installed because the masons always want to make them symmetrical, which would have hurt the randomness of the diffuser. Oh yeah, each rock had to be held in place until the mortar dried sufficiently to support its weight, making the job somewhat labor intensive.

The next most important wall is the wall behind the listening position because it can be the source of those terrible back waves that screw with the primary waves. The design we settled on was quite simple, yet elegant. We divided the rear wall into equal thirds with the central third the most important because it was directly behind the listening position. This central third served as a massive acoustical trap 8 feet wide, 8 feet deep, floor to ceiling constructed entirely out of 12 inch thick concrete to eliminate essentially all resonances. Inside this trap hung plywood baffles 18 inches wide with 15 inches of R 19 insulation glued to each wide side and were suspended by acoustical isolators with a resonance frequency of 3 Hz to the top of the trap. All of these baffles were positioned so that their wide sides were parallel to the path of the sound to minimize reflection off of the plywood baffles. These subassemblies were fitted so snuggly into the trap that it took over a day to insert them. The outer thirds of the rear wall used the same design except that they were only 18 inches deep and contained only one baffle with R 19 fitted snuggly on each side on edge across its entire width. The entire rear wall was covered with an acoustically transparent cloth for visual reasons.

The side walls come next. They too were made out of concrete blocks 12 inches thick. Unfortunately, I was persuaded to not fill them with sand, which caused them to ring slightly, although very few people could hear it, but I could it. Inside the room, the walls were covered with tongue and grove unfinished cyprus because the designer and I felt it produced the best sound for our installation. It is critical that the wood be unfinished if you want to take advantage of the sound of its resonances, relatively low frequencies for cyprus because it is a soft wood. The key to the side walls was their angle relative to the wall behind the speakers and the wall behind the listening position. For every 10 linear feet of side wall, they angled out 18 inches as they proceeded rearward. This focused all of the reflected waves off of the side walls into the center third, the deep trap of the rear wall. The doors in both side walls were solid doors which weighed a ton and needed custom hinges designed to hold them in place and especially long bolts on their door knobs to keep them from resonating.

The ceiling was a brilliant move on the part of my acoustical consultant. As is the case with many basements, my ceiling was lower than what I would have desired, maybe 15 feet ideally. In fact it was only 7 feet high. So what we did was design an infinite baffle ceiling from 125 Hz up and admitted defeat with regard to the longer waves below 125 Hz and hoped that the traps would diminish their effects. In the next section I will explain who we achieved this goal, but suffice it say, it worked incredibly well, albeit, not as well as a true 15 foot ceiling.

Before I go on to the floor design, let's remember that this room was in the my basement with rooms above, namely one of my daughter's bedrooms over part of the room. I had a design criteria that required that I could play my music as loud as I desired 24/7 without concern for bothering my family members. This meant sometimes listening sessions that buried my Pass X 600's meters' needles into 4 ohm load, not all easy to do, and had the leds on my Bryston 7B's permanently red, also into 4 ohms, allegedly impossible according to Brian Russell. Oh did I mention that I had 100 amps of filtered power just for this room with a separate grounding system to a ground pit. Consequently the ceiling was completely suspended by acoutiscal isolators with a resonant frequency of 3 Hz and the side walls had silicon interfaces that separated them from the upper floor to reduce vibration transmission. Unfortunately 14 Hz bass is pure energy and while my daughter could not hear my music, I periodically knocked books off of the bookshelves in her room or rumbled her awake.

The floor was quite simple with one exception. It was basically carpet over padding over a concrete slab with 5 feet of hardwood flooring under where the speakers were to better promote the first initial reflection off the floor, which was real important for acoustical instruments. What made the floor special was the network of conduits we put into the slab that connected the electronics to each other and the speakers so that there were no visible cable anywhere. Be sure to remember to put pilot lines in each conduit for the initial snaking!!!.

Step 3 -- Building in the real world
Where ever possible I tried to use what was already present, which in my case included a chimney that served as the central support for two staggered I beams that held up the next floor, the concrete slab of the house and an outside foundation wall. The rest was pure compromise and work-arounds. The chimney became a side of the central acoustical trap on the rear wall. The nearer of the two I beams set the depth of the room and the foundation wall served as the support for the rock wall behind the speakers.

The ceiling is the big secret because of its infinite baffle design, although very easy to recreate. Other than a barrier that covered the silicon buffers along the side walls to reduce vibration upwards, the entire ceiling was a drop ceiling using ceiling rails that held 4'x8' panels of Corning Linear Glass Cloth, which is essentially flat from 125 Hz up. The ceiling rails hung on acoustical isolators attached to the joists and had as much R-19 as could be stuffed into the remaining space other than to provide a thermal barrier around the lights embedded in the ceiling.

While loosing my beloved music rooms was one of the things that I missed most about leaving the house, using many of the things that I learned from building this room still serve me well in much less friendly environments.

Two Post Scripts
1) The jerk who bought my house was a know it all who knew the truth about everything. When I went back post sale to help him understand the many custom features about the house, especially the music room, he proudly showed me his music set up in the my beloved room. He had read in Stereo Review about live end dead end rooms and had his speakers against my dead end behind the listener wall and he sat in front of my live end behind the speaker wall.

2) I now live on the water of a large bay in NJ (Barnegat Bay) I have a multi layer deck which terminates on a 4 foot wide board walk about 3 feet above the water. My outdoor system consists of some Stereostones on the layer of the deck just above the board walk and thus about 5 feet above the bay. The source for these speakers is a simple nothing special Sony mini stereo, which I a plan to upgrade this year because I have the "sickness". The sound from these speakers produces an openness that exceeds just about any indoor system I have ever heard, including my beloved music room in my Franklin Lakes home.
 
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caesar

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I do not think that is correct. He believes that you cannot have too many bass traps but he certainly advises using traps with reflective skins on them once the number starts to get large (as in his rooms).

Thanks. I have no doubt that you are correct about his beliefs. However, the material he posted shouts - ABSORPTION!

Only looking closely at his product features, does one find the mention of the reflective coating, with little rationale behind it.
 

Kal Rubinson

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Thanks. I have no doubt that you are correct about his beliefs. However, the material he posted shouts - ABSORPTION!

Only looking closely at his product features, does one find the mention of the reflective coating, with little rationale behind it.
True. He headlines bass traps The rest of his message is in small print.
 

Steve Williams

Site Founder, Site Owner, Administrator
The best measuring loudspeaker I've heard was the Mackie HR824. It measures beautifully, even down to 1/12 octave smoothing with +/- 1.5dB throughout it's rated frequency range from 37Hz to 20kHz. It's got a beautiful dispersion pattern with the tweeter almost perfectly matching the woofer. Harmonic distortion is less than 0.5% from 100Hz to 20kHz. But yet, I can't stand listening to it.

This post reminds me of a thread I started here re "Do Speakers That Measure Good Always Sound Great"

http://www.whatsbestforum.com/showt...Always-Sound-Great&p=8596&viewfull=1#post8596
 

JackD201

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Hey thanks for the kind words Jack

I can say that my room is ASC designed by Art Noxon from top to bottom and I couldn't be happier

I just call it like I hear it Steve.
 

John Brooks

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This is a great topic and great discussion. Thanks Russ for sharing your experience in acoustic theory and practice.

For those of us who don't have the luxury of designing and building a dedicated room these insights are enlightening, but we have to make significant compromises in applying them. Sort of like making Thanksgiving dinner when one member of the family is gluten intolerant and another is dairy-free. Our application of the design principles (recipe) will be somewhat limited by the ingredients we are allowed to use.

My listening room is 12' x 24' x 8' and the rear third of it serves as a guest bedroom. While it is only used in this capacity 6-10 days per year, nonetheless it is a physical design constraint with regard to listening position (hence speaker placement) and aesthetic design constraint with regard to rear wall treatment. Nonetheless, it is a joy to be in pursuit of great live sound within these parameters! :)
 

fas42

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If you have ever gone to an audio show like CES or RMAF, you know what rooms to walk into before you enter because the rooms that sound good inside also sound better than the crappy ones, while you in the halls, because fortunately our brains know what REAL sounds like as it traverses doorways and bounces of the walls of hotel walls. We also know what crappy sound sounds like when it takes the same path.
I will comment on just one part of that remarkable story: the quote above says it all for me. A good system will sound real 2" from a speaker, it wll sound just as real 70 feet away at the other end of the house. If it does that then that's good enough for me ...

Frank
 

Kal Rubinson

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If you have ever gone to an audio show like CES or RMAF, you know what rooms to walk into before you enter because the rooms that sound good inside also sound better than the crappy ones, while you in the halls, because fortunately our brains know what REAL sounds like as it traverses doorways and bounces of the walls of hotel walls. We also know what crappy sound sounds like when it takes the same path.
Sure and that's what makes covering the shows as a member of the press somewhat less than a voyage of delight and surprise.
I will comment on just one part of that remarkable story: the quote above says it all for me. A good system will sound real 2" from a speaker, it wll sound just as real 70 feet away at the other end of the house. If it does that then that's good enough for me ...
Two vignettes:
I recall the first Stereophile show I attended as a writer. Late in the day, a bunch of writers took a hike to a restaurant and, during our walk down an LA street with traffic whizzing by and amidst a fully-engaging 5 way conversation, we all came to a silent stop at the same instant: From an open 4th floor window, we heard live music and none of us had any doubt of it.

I do most of my writing from my office which is separated from my living/listening room by the dining room and, yet, I come to the same general conclusions about what sounds better (in a relative sense) from either room. I cannot tell you how many times (every day!) that I hear something that makes me jump from my desk to hear (even better) what is going on in the listening room.
 

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