Pros and Cons of Sealed Listening Rooms

[Ron Resnick]

Is it better to have a listening room which is sealed -- one in which you can close the door and allow the room to be pressurized by the low frequency reproduction of the speakers -- or is it better to have a listening room which is open to the sides or to the back? What are the factors pro and con?

Does the answer to this question depend upon the size of the sealed room versus the open room?

Is it relevant that most concert halls are not sealed with closed doors?

What is your experience?

 

[ddk]

Is it better to have a listening room which is sealed -- one in which you can close the door and allow the room to be pressurized by the low frequency reproduction of the speakers -- or is it better to have a listening room which is open to the sides or to the back? What are the factors pro and con?

Does the answer to this question depend upon the size of the sealed room versus the open room?

Is it relevant that most concert halls are not sealed with closed doors?

What is your experience?

My experience with sealed and/or suspended rooms has been very negative for audio listening rooms.

david

 

[BlueFox]

A couple of years ago I was at Magico listening to speakers in their sealed listening room. When Alon played the S5s I commented that it sounded just like mine. However, mine are in the living room with one side open to the kitchen and dining room.

 

[kach22i]

If the walls are designed to flex like Joe Pittman's room it could be less of a problem.

Base confinement or containment in a bunker or basement is to be avoided in any case.

Like a steam engine, there needs to be a safety valve for the pressure to escape or be turned into mechanical/thermal energy.

PDF:
http://www.kosmic.us/KOSMIC Virtual Reality Wall Panels.pdf

First posted here:
https://www.audionirvana.org/forum/...h-for-a-simple-solution-with-paper-thin-walls

 

[Ron Resnick]

My experience with sealed and/or suspended rooms has been very negative for audio listening rooms.

david

That is very interesting, David, as many audiophiles pride themselves on being able to seal the listening space.

 

[ddk]

A truly sealed listening room is an expensive endeavor and I always wonder which problem they’re trying solve by building one but I know the problems that they run into.

david

 

[Mike Lavigne]

largish closed rectangular 'golden ratio' rooms are best ways to start out.

i think the issue is whether the bass in the room works well, and it's helpful to have the option of closing it up. if it's open significantly and there is a large suck-out you can't solve (even moving the speakers and listening position around) then you are stuck. but you can't really generalize about open rooms, it's too complicated. a room that can be closed simply puts you more in control, but does not guarantee any perfection.

in my acoustically designed room, it took years and experience to get the details right. i do think fundamentally it was sized and shaped well, but the finer points were arrived at methodically over time. my room is sealed, but not 100%. the front walls are very stout, with added Quietrock + 3/4" plywood, and the ceiling is heavy 3/4" finish grade plywood. the whole room is cocooned in 2 layers of 5/8" sheetrock screwed and glued. but around the outlets and door it's not perfectly sealed.

even sized and shaped well, the structure variability is also an issue. solid room boundaries and all that appropriate to the size.

my room works but not exactly sure why.

i was in a room dug out under a garage (in the Bay Area) once that used a bank vault door to seal it. it was absolutely sealed. honestly i don't recall how good it sounded (it was in 2004), so it must not have made much of an impression.

 

[kach22i]

my room works but not exactly sure why..

If I recall correctly your corner bass traps are so large they act like adjacent rooms, like the lobby of an opera house does.

That's your steam valve.

The "My Little Barn" space has the high ceiling and wood roof construction as it's steam valve.

 

[Mike Lavigne]

If I recall correctly your corner bass traps are so large they act like adjacent rooms, like the lobby of an opera house does.

That's your steam valve.

The "My Little Barn" space has the high ceiling and wood roof construction as it's steam vale.

there are 'still' -4- built in bass traps at the rear of my room that are each about 15" x 15" x 11 feet tall. at the front on the sides there are cold air returns on each side that are effectively bass traps too.

those are all that are left of my original bass traps. i removed the 15' x 10' long front side traps in 2011, and in 2015 i fully closed up my whole ceiling bass trap. those were both massive.

 

[Folsom]

To me this is a strange question because to say a room is "pressurized" is mostly silliness that people say when they have speakers that don't bleed anything off for room gain, but are in a small enough room that they get significant gain. Speaker manufactures that make very large, very expensive speakers, don't expect people to put them in the walk in closet so they usually don't account for room gain since there won't really be any if the room is large (aka if you can afford MM7's you might have a barn or something substantial to put them in).

Here's something people don't think about a lot... the ambient sound. We are strangely, maybe freakishly, good at being able to read spaces with our ears. It's easy to be alert of small rooms, which may be distracting relative to the music - it certainly doesn't make one feel like they're at the symphony. To avoid that you probably couldn't have drywall or wood as the main surface... you need something absorptive. But then you're on a path of fine tuning which might work out, maybe you'll just be frustrated.

Also smaller rooms will have reflections occurring more times before they loose energy than a large room, so having an opening can reduce them. That can help make the ambient feeling not so closed in.

To what DDK is saying, if you treat one octave so that it's "perfect" you have to do all of them. It's a lot of work. Also spaces that are very massively absorptive often weird people out, too. A lot of people get a panic attach being in an anechoic chamber - sometimes even saying they were in it for an hour or more when it's been 5-10 minutes.

Rooms that let little out might just be signalling "my wife can't hear it so I can listen when I want"

 

[Duke LeJeune]

Ime whether given a speaker + room combination sounds best with door(s) open or closed depends on the specifics, BUT...

An opening like a doorway into the rest of the house can function as a broadband absorber, in that energy which goes into it doesn't come out, or does so at greatly reduced SPL. This can be especially apparent in the bass region, where door(s) closed = more bass and door(s) open = smoother bass.

And I agree with Folsom's assessment that door(s) closed = a stronger "small room signature". This may have to be balanced against door(s) closed = a lower ambient noise floor.

 

[KeithR]

I’m sure there are good examples of both- see Albert Porter and MikeLs completely different rooms.

 

[Mike Lavigne]

one issue i did not mention is side to side balance, which is many times the frustration of an open room with large openings. rarely is the opening symmetrical, so the sound stage and tonal/bottom octave balance can be problematic. this might be more significant than the pressurizing issue. it can require some very inventive speaker set-up approaches to minimize. we've seen plenty of threads asking for advice solving these type issues.

 

[dcathro]

For me, the best solution is a well treated symmetrical sealed room, and the worst is an asymmetrical untreated open plan area.

I say well treated, because the sealed room keeps all the energy inside and it has to be managed correctly - expensive.

Open plan with adjoining rooms can create echo chambers that can really screw up the sound, and it is very hard to treat an irregular room well.

23 years ago, I had a sealed studio in London with professional acoustic treatment. The doors to the room were air tight and weighed about 200kg each. All windows were studio double glazed, and the walls were double layer breeze block and brick. The dimensions were 30' x 22' x 8'. The weakest part of the room was the ceiling which was plaster board and studs covered by heavy insulation. The acoustic treatment was very substantial, completed by Nick Whitaker, and the sound in the room was incredible.

from 2007, for about 12 years my listening space has been open planned with lots of openings, and no matter what I tried, I could never get better than mediocre sound. I am now in a small rectangular room, 16' x 12' x 8', which has two doorways. I have done everything I can to reduce the amount of energy leaking from the room, and have applied my own acoustics. The room is not as good as the studio, but I am very happy.

 

[JackD201]

A truly sealed listening room is an expensive endeavor and I always wonder which problem they’re trying solve by building one but I know the problems that they run into.

david

The problem? Trying to keep external sound from coming in.

 

[andromedaaudio]

Sealed for sure , otherwise i wouldnt even bother .
First of all if no external noise can come in and you can play as loud you want, my main objective is already achieved .
One can RELAX.
It needs to be of the right size / shape to begin with.
Some help of a good acoustian is very important , but i would certainly expect quite a of bit changing /tuning before its what one wants.

 

[Ron Resnick]

Worrying about "sound coming in" is a completely valid concern, but not one which I had in mind when I started the thread.

Assuming we are not worried about sound coming in,* and assuming we are not worried about disturbing non-listeners elsewhere in our home, I was thinking solely about the comparative sonics from the point of you of the listener in the listening room.

*At the last minute, right before our appliances were installed in the kitchen, I thought to place Sorbothane discs under the feet of the refrigerator, the freezer, the wine refrigerator and the dishwasher, and to line the cabinets of those appliances with sound absorbing insulation. I should have originally specified much larger cabinet cavities so I could surround the appliances with thick sound insulation material all around the appliances, but by the time I thought of it there was room only for thin sheets of insulation. Hopefully that is materially better than nothing.

 

[Al M.]

Sealed, because of pressurizing, energizing the room. It depends though on the walls. With concrete walls open may be better because of bass bouncing around. But with wooden walls like mine, sealed is a no brainer, at least for me. I have excellent bass, but I also do have room treatments. Nothing wrong with these. If your room doesn't need them, fine, if it does, fine too. There is no dogmatic yes/no answer on room treatments.

 

[Ron Resnick]

Why is it good to "pressurize" the room, Al? Is the BSO hall pressurized during performances?

Can't a listening room with large openings achieve the same low-frequency projection as a sealed listening room by adding subwoofers?

How does this relate to the notion that some believe that the most realistic and natural reproduction of sound would be achieved if we put our stereos in an open field?

 

[Al M.]

Why is it good to "pressurize" the room, Al? Is the BSO hall pressurized during performances?

Yes, Ron, I perceive it that way.