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A question of flooring

L

Linnovice

pfm Member
Morning all. I am about to embark on a redecoration of my listening room. It’s not large, being 3.2m x 2.7m, has a concrete floor, one window (in the middle of a short wall) and one door.

At present it has a carpeted floor covering but I am considering changing to a wooden floor. Not a floating laminated variety, more a solid wooden glued kind.

I’d really appreciate hearing opinions as to the pros and cons of either option. I’ve looked around on the internet but without any clear advice.

My speakers are floor standing Linn Kabers and the furniture is mostly IKEA Kallax units housing the electrics, vinyls and tapes.
 
Are you worried how it will affect the sound of your system? If changing carpet anyway, lift it and put the system back in play, would give you a rough what it will sound like.

I don’t like carpets/rugs so have had wood/tile floors in listening rooms for many years even if shared purpose, various things can be done if you have a dedicated room that would not be acceptable in a family room as far as treatment goes. General opinion is a solid floor = brighter, livelier sound. You can hang heavy curtains, use a rug or two, get some studio treatments on walls/ceilings, look up GIK.

If it floats your boat DSP is a good option, MiniDSP and others have ready made stuff. REW is free software and a hundred quid gets a USB measurement mic UMIK-1 so you can work out where the room problems are.
 
Best room improvement I ever made was to put wool/rubber composite underlay down under a substantial carpet. Besides making the carpet super luxurious the system has never sounded better, It replaced old cork tiles on a suspended wood floor, also using Kabers. I wouldn't want anything brighter, and agree with giving it a try before laying the new floor but you would have to put the furniture back in too. My other Kaber system is in a smaller room with a concrete floor and a thinner carpet, it will get the wool treatment next time.
 
IME the harder the surface the more reflective the 'acoustic' , this normally results in a bright and more often than not a 'fatiguing' sound, and the more hard surfaces the worse it gets.
When we moved to our current house we found that the 26ft square kitchen, dining & living area , with a vaulted ceiling and tiled floor had the most horrible acoustic, really reflective & bright and seem to make even conversation awkward to actually hear , of course once equipped with table & chairs, curtains, blinds, sofas and a couple of floor coverings, it's ok, though there is a small TV and radio I wouldn't like to have a music system in it.
I'll never buy a house with a combined area again, kitchen and dining certainly but definitely not the open plan living spaces seemingly very popular nowadays and tiled floors belong in wet rooms, bathrooms, kitchen and utility areas.
Bit off topic there, wooden floors can be lovely but I bet you end up buying a rug.
 
People's preferences can be weird and so it may be wise to understand your own before spending any significant sums of money.

Reflections normally enhance the sound of acoustical instruments particularly reflections from the sides. This is why live music halls and practise spaces tend to be reverberant. A surround sound system has speakers at the side to provide (recorded) reflections from the side and so rooms for surround sound tend to be fairly dead because most of the reflections are in the recording. Stereo recordings do not contain reflections from the side and require the room to supply them and so benefit from a more reverberant room although not as much as that for live music because there is usually some reverberation in the recordings and rooms in the home are small increasing the density of reflections.

A hard floor and a hard ceiling can mean strong undamped vertical modes which are audibly intrusive. However, a carpet will have negligible absorption at the fundamental frequency but possibly quite a lot at high frequencies which is often not a good thing. Carpet with thick underlay might start to have a small effect on the fundamental but will absorb a lot of high frequencies. If you are below an attic and prepared to make alterations to the ceiling then one can install whatever absorption is required to control the vertical modes and the decay of sound in the room with a hard floor.
 
forester said:
Best room improvement I ever made was to put wool/rubber composite underlay down under a substantial carpet.
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Agreed. Any hard shiny floor sounds awful IMHO. I really struggle to listen to a system in such an environment.

The old studio live-end/dead-end approach really works, i.e. for every opposing pair of surfaces in the listening space one has to be either well-damped or a diffuser. This obviously includes the floor/ceiling. I learned about this way back in the ‘80s and have adapted it to every place I have lived. I really dislike the sound of live rooms, they prevent you hearing what is actually happening on the recording, let alone revealing the acoustic and soundstage of the recording venue as you are effectively imposing a constant local reverb effect, and no, digital room correction can’t ever fix it (that has little use beyond gross bass anomalies IMO).
 
Anyone a bit curious about DSP and Room EQ shouldn’t write it off, instead get a proper demo of something like Trinnov, Steinway, Danley, DIRAC or MiniDSP. A lot of Studios, especially smaller/home ones, alongside traditional methods of acoustic treatment are using some form of DSP/EQ/Monitor Calibration these days.

Lots of modern rooms have minimal decoration and lots of hard surfaces these days, using rugs, curtain drapes and pro acoustic foam won't cut it there for aesthetic and domestic harmony reasons, DSP defo has a place nowadays.

Do a Google and there are a lot of articles about the options available and the pros/cons, such as Sound on Sound, GearSpace and Music Tech sites.

Likewise Subs done properly and integrated carefully work very well, plumping them down and expecting miracles is a waste of time and money, you need to do the homework and put in some effort in to get decent to excellent results. All IMHO :)
 
DSP can only alter EQ (the amplitude of various frequencies), it can’t possibly impact slapback, flutter echo, splash, reverb etc. That has to be done with physical damping or diffusion, and a good thick carpet with underlay does a lot to dampen the floor/ceiling aspect. If a room sounds reverberant when you are talking, clap your hands or whatever it is going to sound absolutely horrible with a hi-fi system IME.

As ever best to start with a nicely shaped room (e.g. ‘golden ratio’) and to furnish it with a mind to how sound works IMHO.
 
Tony L said:
DSP can only alter EQ (the amplitude of various frequencies), it can’t possibly impact slapback, flutter echo, splash, reverb etc. That has to be done with physical damping or diffusion, and a good thick carpet with underlay does a lot to dampen the floor/ceiling aspect.

As ever best to start with a nicely shaped room (e.g. ‘golden ratio’) and to furnish it with a mind to how sound works IMHO.
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Yeah but lots of folk can’t do that and have to make the best of what they have access to, spare room or shared space, that’s where I believe using some sort of DSP is better than nothing.
 
hifinutt said:
afraid i love carpets !! wooden floors are cold , get dusty and can be a pain sonically .
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I do like proper vintage real wood flooring, traditional parquet flooring etc, but only in context of vast rugs covering all but the outer perimeter of the room. I lived in a modern loft conversion for a while with a modern ‘real wood’ laminate floor and hated it, it looked cliched (just like every estate agent picture of the past 30 years) and sounded like crap until I got some thick rugs and underlay down.
 
DSP/EQ should, IMO, be used as the 'icing on the cake' in situations where furniture and/or dedicated passive room treatments fail to adequately resolve the AMPLITUDE issues in the room. I have yet to be convinced that it can possibly have a genuine effect on reverberation times and, even if it could, I would be very sceptical about the mangling it would do to the original signal to achieve this.

My previous two listening rooms had wooden floors, the second of which I eventually added a bound carpet to, after continual dissatisfaction with the sound of my system (this is going back more than 15 years). The carpet covered the main central area of the floor and left approximately 2-ft of parquet exposed around the perimeter. The improvement in sound quality after adding the carpet was night and day, and I also happen to think it was an aesthetic improvement (beautiful golden hardwood oak parquet around the edge and yellowed softwood pine treads in the middle became rather busy on the eyes after a while!).

My current listening room is fully carpeted (I moved into it without decorating), and I've since added a large rug. If I were doing a room from scratch, I'd probably combine the designs of my current and former rooms and have a narrow perimeter of hardwood floor around the edge with the largest and thickest rug I could find/afford (I'd probably even put thick natural felt underlay under the rug provided I could still walk on it ok without turning my ankle!). You really want as much absorption on the floor as possible IME as it's almost always the closest reflective surface to your speakers.
 
Thanks all, I’m finding this information very informative and helpful. Looking at some of the system pictures on here I’m leaning towards carpet with a rug over, plus heavy curtains over the window. As most of the furniture will consist of hard flat surfaces I’m thinking the carpet/rug will counteract that to some extent.
 
Get a thick carpet. I have Ikea Vindum high pile rug over tile floor covering a pretty large area. Also, depending on how you can arrange your furniture, try to place fabric sofa along side walls. Experiment with the placement of furniture in the room as the sound of the hifi is greatly affected by the arrangement and everything else in the room.

I would agree with Tony on the limitations of DSP. Personally I'm not a fan of room correction and room treatment products (I used to fully treat the listening room when I had the system in a dedicated hifi/cinema room). I now use thick curtains, carpets, leafy plants, artwork on walls and furniture + proper arrangement to improve the sound of the system in the room.
 
Amber Audio said:
Lots of modern rooms have minimal decoration and lots of hard surfaces these days, using rugs, curtain drapes and pro acoustic foam won't cut it there for aesthetic and domestic harmony reasons, DSP defo has a place nowadays.
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Personally, my opinion is unless there's serious bass issues in the room that cannot be resolved with placement of speakers or any other methods, then perhaps DSP or digital room correction can be useful (although I do not have experience in this field) . Usually the detrimental effects of the room affecting the high frequencies ie. piercing treble, unnatural or bright sound etc. can be resolved with absorption and diffusion using furniture, upholstery or soft fabrics in the room. They may not be perfect in comparison to aftermarket room treatment products which will be more effective. Nevertheless they will be quite capable in alleviating some of the ill - effects of the acoustics in the room.

As for bass issues, the easy way out is to avoid large speakers in small rooms..
 
Recently removed carpet and replaced with engineered wood flooring over suspended floorboards. I had misgivings beforehand (this was Mrs P-T’s idea) but actually it’s been fine. Room not greatly different in size to the OP’s, with two sofas. I have a thin rug, which I keep rolled up under one sofa, in case things get out of hand, musically, when having a listening sesh, but haven’t really needed it.

Hard laminate would be very different, IME, and probably a no no, too many hard reflections, but proper wood flooring has been gratifyingly hassle free, from the hifi perspective.
 
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