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Carpet Killed High Frequencies In My Music Listening Area

My basement play room is 14’x30’.  My music listening area is 14’x12’ of that. The remainder of that room holds my pool table.  I decided to install new floors.  In the pool table area and the rest of my basement will be “luxury vinyl” flooring.  In my listening area, I went from an area rug to wall-to-wall carpet.  

Now, high frequencies are faint and some music sounds dull. Bass is fine and the mid range sounds better than before.  Vocals and most instruments sound better.  Gone is the cymbal decay, solid ringing of bells, and other percussion sounds are dull.

The carpet is a week old, the rest of the flooring is scheduled to be installed on October 15th.  I’m tempted to have the carpet replaced with luxury vinyl and go back to my area rug.  I’d rather find a way to increase the high frequencies because I like how my system sounds otherwise.

My system,
PS Audio BHK pre amp
PS Audio BHK 250 power amp
PS Audio DSD DAC
PS Audio Stellar phone pre
Innous Zenith MKII streamer
Technics SL-1200G TT
Tannoy DC8 Ti speakers
Transparent super XLR interconnects for my digital gear and Transparent RCA interconnects for my TT
AudioQuest Rocket 88 speaker cables

What can I do to bring out the high frequencies?  

  
128x128oldschool1948

Showing 2 responses by oldschool1948

oldschool1948's avatar
oldschool1948 OP
488 posts
 
I appreciate the helpful responses.  Since installing the carpet, I've been tinkering with my system setup.  I placed my speakers on 1" bamboo butcher blocks so that I could move them easier, and I'm still using the stock Tannoy speaker footers.  The speakers are not resting on a completely stable surface as before.  I will remove the footers and the butcher blocks so the speaker spikes are resting on the floor.  Hopefully, this will help.

Because my room is small, I've positioned the speakers (tweeters) 48" from the front wall and 29" from the side walls. The tweeters are 80" apart. My sitting position is 94" perpendicular from the speakers.

Ultimately, I will use  ISOACOUSTICS GAIA III speaker isolators with the speakers, and the speakers sitting on Butcher Block speaker stands with spikes.

I am using cable elevators on my speaker cables and power cords.  I've toed the speakers in where the tweeters are pointing just outside my left and right shoulders.  I will tinker with that a bit and post my findings.

Thanks again for the suggestions.




oldschool1948's avatar
oldschool1948 OP
488 posts
 
With the speakers on spikes alone pointed straight, the change in highs and overall SQ is remarkable.  As compared to before, everything sounds better.  The new sound is more detailed, clearer, crisper, and much more natural.

I’ll now work on imaging and soundstage.  It was good before, I expect it to be better now.  Once I get things dialed in, I’ll start to look at room treatment again. After this carpet scare :-), I’ll be much more careful about what I do :-).

Thanks again to everyone for your constructive comments.  The more I learn about this hobby, the more I realize how much I still don’t know.  I’m just amazed at how much of a difference spikes alone has made.      
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