Steven Toy
Accuphase newbie
In February 2009 my wife kindly treated me to a few days in the Smoke to celebrate my fortieth birthday. We decided to visit the Tate Modern and leaving the Tube we walked through a tunnel heading towards Thames. We passed a busker playing the clarinet. The acoustics in this tunnel were truly dreadful with lots of reverb and echo and yet the sound of the instrument and the way it was being played were truly breathtaking. I just had to stop and listen.
Later, this got me thinking and I was reminded of it by all the scoffing and carping from the pfm politburo (audio division) about the fact that I have been paying lots of attention to mains, cables, connectors, supports yet I am completely overlooking The Most Important Thing - room acoustics. They have all decided, despite the fact that they've never visited me and heard my system, that the room sounds really awful and until I address this very issue (and probably even if I do) all my musings will be devoid of any credibility.
It would appear that some of them really don't have my best interest at heart at all and their responses are nothing more thn idle mischievous keyboard clickery. Either that or they are just terribly misguided by what they see of a sofa in a photograph taken at a certain angle. They have decided that the offending cream leather monstrosity Just Has To Go. What they don't realise is that when we moved into this house in September 2006 we had to wait another month for the sofas to arrive as we'd ordered them two months previously and there was a three-month delivery lead time.
During this first month the hi-fi was set up in the same position as it is now. We had curtains, a carpet, the TV cabinet, three framed Dali prints and a mirror on the wall but no sofas. We sat on those fold-away camping chairs with cup holders in the arms. The room sounded terrible, it was all boomy and echoey. Listening to my system really wasn't very enjoyable at all. The sofas finally arrived and the cup holders were replaced by a coffee table. The room sounded a lot better. We also replaced glass lamp shades with cloth ones and placed a rug in the middle of the floor under the coffee table to soak up any remaining excess energy. Room treatment was now complete as far as I was concerned and I could focus on the system as and when time and funds allowed.
Anyway, I digress...
After I'd heard the busker in the tunnel I knew exactly what I required from my system. I wanted it to be able to capture the essence, soul, dynamics and harmonics of instruments such as that clarinet and I wanted to capture all the nuances of the performance of the musicians. I knew that my hi-fi was never going to replicate exactly that live sound but I thought I could at least get as close as was humanly possible within the constraints of the possible and affordable. With this aim in mind, room acoustics (beyond being rid of the truly awful) are an irrelevance (IMHO). If the clarinet player didn't need a ruler-flat in-room frequency response to work his magic then neither did a hi-fi system.
This is how I see it: Bad rooms do seem to amplify smearing effects within the electro-mechanical audio chain so why not try to be rid of them at source?
Here's a hypothetical challenge: take a recording of the clarinet busker in a "perfect" acoustic environment, assemble a hi-fi system in a tunnel leading towards the Tate Modern and your goal is for the hi-fi to capture the vibrant sound of the clarinet-playing busker playing in the same place. The budget will be an interest-free loan of £20,000 that is repayable over however long it takes for the busker's open clarinet case on the floor to recoup the money from the coinage deposited therein by passers-by.
There will be two teams meeting the challenge in two separate but acoustically-identical tunnels:
Team one will be the pfm politburo (audio division) who will arrive armed with gizmos that perform frequency sweeps, there will be a laptop with CARA Tunnel Correction software installed, Active Digital Tunnel Equalisation, diffusers and wads and wads of sculpted acoustic foam to line the tunnel walls with. This will account for 50% of the budget. The remaining £10,000 will be split as follows: £9750 for active speakers and £250 for the DAC and cabling. The laptop will act as a music server.
Team Two will be the silent pfm majority. You can just imagine how they will spend the money...
Later, this got me thinking and I was reminded of it by all the scoffing and carping from the pfm politburo (audio division) about the fact that I have been paying lots of attention to mains, cables, connectors, supports yet I am completely overlooking The Most Important Thing - room acoustics. They have all decided, despite the fact that they've never visited me and heard my system, that the room sounds really awful and until I address this very issue (and probably even if I do) all my musings will be devoid of any credibility.
It would appear that some of them really don't have my best interest at heart at all and their responses are nothing more thn idle mischievous keyboard clickery. Either that or they are just terribly misguided by what they see of a sofa in a photograph taken at a certain angle. They have decided that the offending cream leather monstrosity Just Has To Go. What they don't realise is that when we moved into this house in September 2006 we had to wait another month for the sofas to arrive as we'd ordered them two months previously and there was a three-month delivery lead time.
During this first month the hi-fi was set up in the same position as it is now. We had curtains, a carpet, the TV cabinet, three framed Dali prints and a mirror on the wall but no sofas. We sat on those fold-away camping chairs with cup holders in the arms. The room sounded terrible, it was all boomy and echoey. Listening to my system really wasn't very enjoyable at all. The sofas finally arrived and the cup holders were replaced by a coffee table. The room sounded a lot better. We also replaced glass lamp shades with cloth ones and placed a rug in the middle of the floor under the coffee table to soak up any remaining excess energy. Room treatment was now complete as far as I was concerned and I could focus on the system as and when time and funds allowed.
Anyway, I digress...
After I'd heard the busker in the tunnel I knew exactly what I required from my system. I wanted it to be able to capture the essence, soul, dynamics and harmonics of instruments such as that clarinet and I wanted to capture all the nuances of the performance of the musicians. I knew that my hi-fi was never going to replicate exactly that live sound but I thought I could at least get as close as was humanly possible within the constraints of the possible and affordable. With this aim in mind, room acoustics (beyond being rid of the truly awful) are an irrelevance (IMHO). If the clarinet player didn't need a ruler-flat in-room frequency response to work his magic then neither did a hi-fi system.
This is how I see it: Bad rooms do seem to amplify smearing effects within the electro-mechanical audio chain so why not try to be rid of them at source?
Here's a hypothetical challenge: take a recording of the clarinet busker in a "perfect" acoustic environment, assemble a hi-fi system in a tunnel leading towards the Tate Modern and your goal is for the hi-fi to capture the vibrant sound of the clarinet-playing busker playing in the same place. The budget will be an interest-free loan of £20,000 that is repayable over however long it takes for the busker's open clarinet case on the floor to recoup the money from the coinage deposited therein by passers-by.
There will be two teams meeting the challenge in two separate but acoustically-identical tunnels:
Team one will be the pfm politburo (audio division) who will arrive armed with gizmos that perform frequency sweeps, there will be a laptop with CARA Tunnel Correction software installed, Active Digital Tunnel Equalisation, diffusers and wads and wads of sculpted acoustic foam to line the tunnel walls with. This will account for 50% of the budget. The remaining £10,000 will be split as follows: £9750 for active speakers and £250 for the DAC and cabling. The laptop will act as a music server.
Team Two will be the silent pfm majority. You can just imagine how they will spend the money...
