Teddy Ray
pfm Member
The point that I make in the OP is that room treatment is akin to changing the wrong wheel when you've got a puncture.
no it isnt.
it is one of the very few things that make a difference...and a REAL one
The point that I make in the OP is that room treatment is akin to changing the wrong wheel when you've got a puncture.
Quite. Unfortunately many here are distracted by the sound interacting with the room and cannot focus on the sounds made by the clarinet player. I seek a system that excels in the reproduction of the latter. I couldn't give a toss about the former.
Blzebub,
Remind me again, what room treatment you use to tame that colossal room of yours?
Like most of us, I would suggest that the answer to the treatment question is to carefully buy half decent kit (or event decent kit) demoed to suit the space. Granted a careful approach to setting the kit up helps, but treatments should provide at best a second order effect.....
Great thread this, highly amusing in places.
Five large rugs (one on the wall behind the listening position), two colossal sofas, two very large bookcases (one filled with records, the other with books), paintings on the walls, three large CD storage cabinets, two small tables, four enormous heavy velvet curtains, and concealed compressed paper damping panels around the room. It's a very benign room, as Ian Wright will confirm.
A small room like yours is never going to be good without treatment.
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...
for steven....i know you got soul.
Five large rugs (one on the wall behind the listening position), two colossal sofas, two very large bookcases (one filled with records, the other with books), paintings on the walls, three large CD storage cabinets, two small tables, four enormous heavy velvet curtains, and concealed compressed paper damping panels around the room. It's a very benign room, as Ian Wright will confirm.
A small room like yours is never going to be good without treatment.
To re-cap:
The room is 5 x 3.5 m, the speakers fire down the length. The walls are solid brick all round and the floor is solid concrete. There are three large framed prints; one behind the system and two behind the listening sofa situated 30 cm from the rear wall. The sofas have been shown, by their absence during the first month of living here, to soak up room reflections. The floor is carpeted throughout on underlay and there is a rug on top. In the corner on the right between the two sofas is a lamp table. On the left is another stand housing the Virgin TV box and DVD player. A large coffee table sits on the rug, the TV hangs from the wall above the fireplace and replaces a mirror mentioned in the OP. There are 2 windows on the right wall behind the larger of the two sofas with lined curtains not fashionable blinds.
The room is not an issue and has enabled the system to show up all the system changes I have made over the last six years. I have considered and tried placing the speakers across the room from the TV wall but that was boomy due to there being a bit of an alcove to the left of the listening position. I could fill this space with shelves and books etc but I still may not like the result after all the work. I have discussed with my wife moving the hi-fi rack and consumer unit to the right-hand corner where the lamp table so now sits so there is nothing between the speakers and she's given that one the thumbs-up. Nobody who has been here to have a listen has subsequently stated that the sofa on the right needs to move. One person who came here stated independently on this forum that this is non-critical. Whatsnext thinks he's lying in order to be polite but WN can safely be ignored.
I could get the room measured properly to determine the exact nature of any room modes but I doubt it would make a massive difference. If the listening sofa was right up against the rear wall I would consider using diffusers like Robert uses on that wall.
The room does fine; it sounds like a reasonably well-damped domestic room rather than an anechoic chamber. Experience tells me that a bass overhang issue can sometimes be cured by using an amplifier with more control, a source component that provides better bass definition and using decent supports. This isn't always the case and quite often it genuinely is the room but it is worth not jumping to hasty conclusions. If there is a boom at one particular frequency it will likely be a room mode. If the bass overhang is over a much wider frequency range, perhaps extending into the lower mid, it is likely to be an issue of insufficient control over the speakers. If there is just a slight "bloom" it will likely be a smearing effect within the system itself that can be addressed by better isolation of components.
All of the above is based on personal experience. When I went to audition the Audiolab CDQ at Superfi in Brum I took my amps with me. When I arrived the CDQ was hooked up to a Creek amplifier and a pair of Tannoy 6-inch Dual Concentric floor-standers that were selling at just over half-price, I believe, because the guys at the shop found it difficult to get them to work properly in the demo room. The system sounded boomy so I tried to re-position the speakers and adjust the spikes but to no avail.
We then swapped my own anplifiers in and the bass boom was completely gone. The speakers also "disappeared" into a deep soundstage and the shop assistant's jaw fell open...
The moral of the tale quite simply is engage the brain before jumping to conclusions; forget your political/theoretical/philosophical standpoint and just listen. Listening doesn't come with a cast-iron guarantee but then nothing apart from death is certain in this world. If an audible change is really really ****ing obvious, as with swapping the amps on that day at Superfi, it is probably real.
That does for me.
Do you think your post served any purpose? If so would you mind telling me what it is?
It just looks like pointless, irrelevant (although in no way offensive) ad-hominem to me. I would imagine something like that being uttered by a spotty teenager whose voice was breaking trying to be the classroom clown, with his school tie undone and his ink-stained shirt hanging out beneath his jumper.
Ian, I am open-minded
Do you think your post served any purpose? If so would you mind telling me what it is?
It just looks like pointless, irrelevant (although in no way offensive) ad-hominem to me. I would imagine something like that being uttered by a spotty teenager whose voice was breaking trying to be the classroom clown, with his school tie undone and his ink-stained shirt hanging out beneath his jumper.
Sooooooo self blind.