Acoustic treatment and acoustical control may and must cost peanuts if you listen to your ears and to nobody else....Make any change you are moved to do and listen....
Discount experts that sells something, the other experts argue against one another anyway ....Then your ears are master of your audio future, listen to them with trust....
I did it.... :)
I succeed....
Any upgrade seems ridiculous and worthless when you succeed....
Piano and symphonic masses dont forgive any room....
In a vast room , hall concert for example, equations do well.... Vast room are created for hundred of ears.....In a small room with diverse complex acoustical content and a peculiar geometry and topology, inhabit only by your 2 ears, you cannot replace the ears with simplistic rules and general equations....
Listenings experiments are the golden rule here... |
If I ask someone with Floyd Toole level knowledge of loudspeaker-in-room acoustics (which I can with Billy Woodman at ATC), he would tell me that consistent spectral content of direct vs reflections is the key to imaging. If the reflections look very similar in spectral content to the direct sound it will image well. That’s why he builds wide dispersion loudspeakers. Narrow dispersion loudspeakers, having different spectral content off axis than on axis, sends spectral energy that does NOT sound like the direct sound on reflection "zones" (love this word Duke, well done). Its all about the sum of these two complex sources of (direct vs reflected) energy at your ears, because when they combine with each other they partially cancel or completely cancel each other. Longer path = longer time= phase shift. This is the idea of nearfeild monitoring in studios, reduce the amount of reflected energy by sitting closer and moving the speakers further from the walls (smaller triangle). Now you can hear more of your monitor and less of the room. Engineers use this idea to help them get a more consistent sound in the different rooms they work in without changing speakers, using EQ or DSP (all of which adds another "veil" to the direct sound). I remember seeing Kevin Shirley mixing about 2 feet from his speakers which were about 2 feet apart. Not so much "room sound" in such a set up. Thanks very much for this informative very important post for me.... That help me to understand the way my controls devices work....And damn ! they work amazingly but i was not being able to understand why.... Your post is the first step for me to understand....The concept of the "spectral content" was lacking in my ignorant and rudimentary acoustical knowledge.... I created my acoustic controls by listenings experiments and intuition without being able to understand why my results at the end were so totally transformative, even if they are unorthodox to say the least....I will not go further here about that tough.... My best to you.... |
may I suggest that moving speakers into a near-field listening position, To no avail.... People dont realize that nearfield listening cannot canceal the room acoustic at all... I know that firsthand, i listen to the 2 positions and i had implemented not only passive but also active room controls... The impression that listening nearfield gives you some freedom from the room acoustic is only an illusion born with a comparison between the 2 positions before any working methods of controls were incrementally put in place....Without any changes in acoustic of the room, nearfield ans regular position of listening for sure are different but they are greatly affected by the presence or absence of room controls and treatment anyway.... You can’t do much with room acoustics until you reach a critical mass. My experience concur with that... Optimal results cannot be gained without this critical mass of active controls and passive treatment...An equilibrium between absorbing, reflecting and diffusing for me....And more than that also the use of active devices.... In acoustic of "small room" only your EARS can do the job, because of the geometry and topology of the room and because last and not least of the acoustical variable content of the room furnitures and objects....... Timbre instrument perception and imaging perception are phenomenon for living ears only.....They dont comes at their OPTIMAL actualization only by virtue of a correcting apparatus of any kind.... Ears are king in the kingdom of sound.... Especially " biased" one because it is these biased ears of yours that will listen your music in this room of yours....There is no 2 identical pair of ears by the way....And the complex structure and dynamical properties of your ears and of the room are ONE indissocciable phenomenon in the music experience.... :) |
We think we know acoustic.... But acoustic is like other science full with unresolved mysteries.... I just read an article, an interesting one, where 3 specialists discuss without being able to be in total accordance about the basic acoustical treatment....And they are specialists.... https://www.acousticsciences.com/media/articles/room-acoustics-audios-final-frontier Myself how can i change my room acoustic with cheap metal buckets glued together with an array of different stones on them ? The stones making a difference in the reverberation time control.... Is there a set of linear differential equation to explain that? :) For reflections we can use them or neutralize them..... In a small listening room it is better to use them......In a control room it is better to neutralize them..... Myself i use them .... With success..... « Complex waves of sound are akin to some cellular animals, they live a long life themselves but that look like milliseconds for us» -Groucho Marx |
A dedicated audio room is way much cheaper to treat and controls....Mine with 2 windows relatively small with irregular geometry, cost peanuts and the results are astounding, superior to many upgrading of my gear...
But a living room, being a common room ask for more esthetical solutions, then costly indeed....
My own room look like the seat of an arachneid that will use his many "fingers" to connect all with his silk cables.... :)
i could not do that without divorcing in a common room....
And like usual people never speak about active room controls of acoustics, only about passive materials treatment.... I begin to think that i had invented the concept..... It seems nobody has ever hear about it all...But active controls cannot be done in a common room anyway... |
Few people know that Goethe make his point against Newton in color theory....While Newton search for a theoretical mathematical corpuscules light theory, Goethe described for the first times in history the way of colors to comes from light and dark in the world in relation to physiology....Goethe was a colossus of intelligence but in too much fields for the average people to understand him really....And to this day, Goethe reflexions seems not to go to a dead end, like a corpuscule theory of light and colors... Edwin Land was a Goethe disciple for example.... :).
In acoustic there is something similar....And Michael Green put it right by noting that sound is also pressure, not an abstract mathematical wave only, but a living wave.... |
Very good observation...
« Sound is a plant more like an animal» -Groucho Marx
«Optic is ecology» -Harpo Marx |
Your software is only good for PASSIVE materials installation...
You ears can guide you to ACTIVE modification with ACTIVE device, , for example resonators...
No program exist to direct you in a specfic room with his particular geometry and content about the way to use resonators, and any active device...
In small room NO program do better than your ears...
By the way the ears SEE....
If not, you are deaf by social programmation........
:) |
Why not advising people to have fun....Trying their own ears a step at a time, with low cost materials and some creations of their own? i just do that and my room is heaven...( i just create a new form of diffusor)
It is remarkable that people trust formulas and not their ears.... Room geometry and content are acoustically complex, ready made formulas on a program will not do better at the end than your listenings playful experiments....
Be creative, free yourself, trust yourself, is my advice....
:)
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Like usual i react too swiftly to your post... I apologize to you... You are a good faith person and i am too passionnate... I apologize in double... https://www.audioholics.com/room-acoustics/room-reflections-human-adaptation This article is only few months ago...very interesting to say the least... I had not speak about my own way and experiments with my room here my goal was not to derail the thread... I only refer to them by the concept of active controls of room by relation to passive treatment of room... I related my 2 years journey in my thread... "Miracles in audio....." My goal was with only homemade device and very low cost materials transform an audio system to a totally new level... I expose how with the concepts of the 3 embeddings of an audio system, the most powerful being acoustic, but the electrical embeddings being also very powerful.... The mechanical embedding being important but less powerful...The acoustic methods has 2 way: active and passive.... The active way is almost unheard of in any audio thread... The "superstition" that we must eliminate reflection points instead of working with them comes from that ignorance about active controls and the way the brain work to recreate a lived sound event from a recording in an actual room.... Ok i dont wanted to derail the thread .... My deepest regards to you.... |
we speak about first reflections point and their obstructiveness or usefulness...
It seems to me that i was speaking about that...
It seems to you otherwise...
You do not enjoy a change of perspective it seems?
Perhaps it will be a good idea to read Floyd Toole article...You will have a cue of what i speak about ...
My best to you... I will go....
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The goal in the control room are not dissimilar to home audio: To clearly hear what’s on the recording, without any masking or other undesirable signature from the playback room. The room where the recording is made is one room... The control and mixing room is where the electronic controls of quality are... But the sound you will listen to is YOUR room, and what you will listen to will never be the ideal standardized generic preparation by mixing and equalization etc of the sound engineer...It will be your specific room... In a word your brain must learn how to retrieve the cues coming from the recording from the cues coming from your listening room...Your brain dont work like a sound engineer in the mixing room trying to be faithful to the recording only....Your brain need a room....And it will not be the recording room....It will be the room where you live....Your brain will be faithfull to the recording event to the limit of his own actual location: his room experience... And nobody only listen to what is on the recording hall, or lived event, it is ALWAYS a recreation... My point is how to make this recreation a stunning experience... It is ok to have " no masking or any undesirable signature from the play back engineer room" but how will you create ideal listening conditions in your own room? By using only passive treatment and erasing your room from the sound? By using active controls and giving to your room an active role? What is the best? The best is the cheapest way to create a stunnning audio experience is not upgrading your audio system to a more transparent one at prohibitive cost,but transforming your room in a positive player...The rewarding is astounding and the cost very low.... This is my experiment...This is my point.... Saying that we must listening our stereo system directly to keep the brain calm is saying something that makes no sense at all, except for those who think that electronic engineering is the key audio element ....But is is acoustic the fundamental player... You can replace any speakers or amplifier or dac, by an equal but different good one, but you cannot replace a room....We live with it and we can transform it tough.... In a word, the role plays by the room treated or not, controlled or not, is absolutely STUNNING, but unbeknownst to most audiophile focus centrered on their favorite electronic component they sometimes taste, it seems like branded cheese, keeping their brain " calm "outside the " tumult" of their room it seems, directing their attention to the recording....... :) This is my point.... |
Very good post thanks...
We must NEVER forget that acoustic preparation of a studio recording room has no relation at all with what must be used in a play back audiophile room.... This is not the same thing creating conditions to register something and creating conditions to listen to something.... In the first case the focus in on the instrument that will be recorded, in the second case the focus is about the way the ears/brain recreate the original event....And in these 2 cases the prparation and acoustic organization of the space(room and studio) dont goes under the exact same rules.... Floyd Toole explain that better than i will ever be....
But what is missing in your post is also that there is OTHER options than absorbing, reflecting or diffusing....
These concepts refer to passive treatments perpective...
How about active controls? Using resonance and grid of non electronic but active devices to guide and organize the mixing of direct and reflected waves?
How about putting in place the conditions to made possible "a potential informed wave" for the listening brain...
Most Audio people are slave of their idolized electronic prefered branded components, i am slave now of my room.... :)
Any electronic component ca be easily replaace with an equally good one, the room cannot and is at the heart of the audiophile experience, not the electronic component.... With dont listen to the electronic components we listen to the room ...No speakers sound the same in different room....
This is the way i go, with a success so great that there is no more relation between before and after.... |
Ok i get your point.... Sometimes i am too swift to react.... But you dont get mine....About the difference between passive materials treatment and active controls one.... :)
The scale you just draw is about reflections only, not about the recreation of the music from the sound event by the brain using the cues from the refective room and from the direct waves .... This scale is refering to passive controls methods not active one....There exist always 2 space in one, the recording space, and the actual room space.... The best method to recreate the event is using information not eliminating them only....That was my point.... Ok i will go silent....
My best to you.... |
i get your point and i apologize if i was insisting...
What you say makes more sense in a vast room, in a small one we are captive of reflections and using it is the best way.... Erasing then partially is not the only and not the better way....Most people listen music in small room like me....And not in a ideal acoustically designed big room...
Anechoic chamber are unbearable by the way....And we cannot have an anechoic chamber impression from a normal room....We can record something in an anechoic chamber, not living in it..... In an anechoic chamber we are missing all information cues that comes from our normal room.... And what Toole or any acoustican know is that the brain NEEDS the recording cues of the lived recording original musical event and the cues from the room where the audio system plays to recreate the music on the best scale possible...The final information comes from the mixing by the brain of the cues coming from the direct waves and the reflected one in a room....There is no normal room who mimic an anechoic one.... It is a delusion or a metaphor to convey a peculiar opinion like: i taste my wine but i prefer that the wine dont come from any glass at all.... And this saying says all.... :)
My best to you.... |
I like Toole, but let’s be clear that this is his personal opinion about what he likes. For some of us, the acoustics of live spaces can take a toll on our brain power. As others have written, filtering out a room all the time can be exhausting, including academic settings.
I personally want my room a little less present. I like my stereo to be the acoustic equivalent of looking across a mountain range. That feeling of relaxation you get when suddenly you feel like you can see forever, but with my ears. We ALWAYS listen to our room when we listen music, except that if the controls of the room is right we are not conscious of the room but better aware of the musical flow.... There is no "stereo equivalent of looking across a mointain range", it is not the audio stystem alone that create the sounds impressions, but the room.... It is an unseparable unity, this unity can be horrible or celestial with all the level between the 2.... The subjective impressions caused by the impact of a specific room are subjective and vary for each imdividual, but the recreation of the sound impressions by the brain/ears WITH the recording space cues and the actual cues of the room space are informations absolutely necessary to the experience....This recreation is based on the INFORMATION linked to the recording event and the room event for all of us, even if we are not conscious of the room because we are used to it...To be conscious of the room is simple, go to your basement et compare that sound with your kitchen, and the sound of the next church.... What Toole speak about are not only opinions, but serious trends in acoustical science, and we cannot answer to that:" i prefer the sound of my music coming from my stereo system", forgetting the room....We all want to forget the room... But to do so we MUST control the room....This is precisely the point i made and negating it reveal only that you are not conscious of what is the problem at all... :) If you have the impression that your room dont exist already without any workings of it it is probably a self ingrained conditionment of your perception.... When the boat takes water anybody can negate reality and say all is well i prefer the infinite view from the soaking boat... And we must realize that we are not conscious of the impact of our room on the sound except when we experiment with it.... I myself became conscious of the extraordinary contribution of the room by experiments... WITHOUT experiments we cannot be aware of this contributions at all...We can suspect it yes, but being aware of the enormous size of the impact, no, not at all... This is the point of acoustic treatment and controls in audio, where people invest big money in electronics and little or nothing in treatment and controls...This blinders were mine BEFORE my experiments in listenings.... The recording experiment you propose is only to reveal the presence of the room, but will not reveal the constructive/destructive impact of the room... When we lived in a room we became used to it, we are not conscious at all often of his destructive side....And anyway most people dont even believe their own ears.... Suffice to read audio forum to know that....Listening experiments is the ONLY way to create a room... Even computerized solutions has limits.... How much you are taxed by the space, how much you are willing to filter out is very individualized.
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Reflections within listening rooms are real and numerous. Some would argue that they all are problems to be eliminated. Others take a more philosophical view that they just provide information about the room, and the brain can figure it out. I’m somewhere in the middle, but leaning towards the latter. The science that has been done so far seems to be on my side.
article: Room Reflections & Human Adaptation for Small Room Acoustics by Floyd Toole Dr. Floyd Toole says that in 2019 article has impressive business and academic credentials, having held the postion of Corporate Vice President – Acoustical Engineering at Harman International from 1991 until he retired in 2007 and Senior Research Officer in the Acoustics and Signal Processing Group at the National Research Council of Canada. He knows perhaps what he is speaking about... My own experiments with my room acoustic, using reflections instead of killing them, make me think that he is right....I just stumble on this article few days ago, searching for a confirmation of my experiments that contradict many advices given on most audio thread.... It is not new, on many thread people advise to upgrade gear even without having ever embed it rightfully before... :) |
I will add that owning a small room can be a very good thing because it is more easy to use secondary reflections with a usable time synchronisation to work with...
Near listening dont eliminate the problem of the room at all contrary to a common misunderstanding...
Near listening is affected by the room presence or absence of controls almost at the same extent that regular listening position, only a bit less, then the false idea that near listening free the listener of the acoustical impact of the room comes from that erroneous impression...I speak here about small room where device like resonators can be very useful to controls sound....Big musical hall are another problem completely...
« Refracted waves all the way down are good and reverberations delicious»- Bat proverb
«My body hear better when i make love»-Groucho Marx
« Planets also hear better in that case, it is because of others body proximity brother»-Harpo Marx |
«Reflections within listening rooms are real and numerous. Some would argue that they all are problems to be eliminated. Others take a more philosophical view that they just provide information about the room, and the brain can figure it out. I’m somewhere in the middle, but leaning towards the latter. The science that has been done so far seems to be on my side.» These words are from Dr, Floyd Toole one of the foremost acoustician in the world in an article written 1 year ago.... https://www.audioholics.com/room-acoustics/room-reflections-human-adaptation Secondary reflections plays an active POSITIVE part in a small room and contrary to some sayings not a necessarily negative one at all if we learn how to use them.... Then the Active acoustical controls with a grid of resonators of different kind can play an important role in the way we use the complex interplay between direct sound and reflections.... Passive materials treatment is not enough contrary of what is said in most audio thread..... This is my last discovery.... My conclusion after my set set of experiments in the last 2 years, with my own devices, is that audio thread instead of being forums about the marketing of new designed electronic components should rather be for more than half of their content about acoustic and it will be better for this hobby.... No speakers can speak itself out of any room and without a room, and more than that, each speakers speak different languages in different rooms... Most peoples cannot afford dedicated room, and dont want to "work" after paying big money for their basic electronic components, that is the crux of the problem for audio forums...But this dont erase the truth in audio: Dont upgrade anything before embedding everything right... Acoustical embedding is the most impactful one, especially if the other two has been taken care of....Acoustical active embeddings can transform most good audio system to a complete new level.... :) |
Because acoustic equations ask for some origin point in space and time... But sound is not reducible to physical linear waves equations only, like many other phenomenon.... « The ears speak» -Groucho Marx then why is the first reflection on the adjacent wall any more impactful on SQ than the first reflection point anywhere along the edge of the sound wave. Because of the timing aspect..... But i created my room acoustic without being slave to an equation, on the contrary not obeying to the sound wave, i decide to command to the sound wave... This is active device controls of the room.... |
Mahgister,
Please make case for how front ported bookshelf speakers are impacted by room acoustics while listening to them in the near field? 3-4 feet. I don’t think my ears are that good. Joe What i just said has nothing to do with my alleged hearing accuracy.... I am not a bat first point... Second point i know what i speak about because modifications of the room acoustic change the imaging and even the tonal timbre perception, i know it by EXPERIENCE.... Between nearfield and regular listening there is ONLY a degree of variation of the relation, NEVER a complete separation, between the direct waves and the indirect one and their synchronisation.... What we perceive is always a reconstructed "informed wave", that is the sum of these 2, by the brain Fourier analyser... By the way my active controls resonators grids act also like some fixed beacons through these flowing waves helping the brain to recover the information and recreate it from the resulting complex waves of the room coming from many obstructions and devices....Nobody listen only to direct wave in a room nevermind where you seat....... There is NO case for arguing with experiments and experience....You ears are probably better than mine i am 69 years old but i hear very well for my age, my ears are informed by my listenings history... :) By the way what i speak about is new, because nobody or almost no one speak about active non electronic acoustical device controls( active or passive linked resonators connected to modified Schumann generator)... :) « There is sound in my ears even in a silent room...There is also a pair of ears in the sound wave body» -Groucho Marx «This is only the blood waving, or silence listening to itself» -Harpo Marx |
The most important part is getting to critical mass in absorption, and adding diffusion in the right areas. The laser-line, first reflection points, in my mind, have never born fruit. I think you are right... A room is so complex acoustically that it takes our ears to make it beautifully musical not only equations...First point reflections and other measurements make sense in a completely acoustically dedicated engineered ideal room...In normal irregularly and non ideally shaped room with furniture and non dedicated walls, with varied content materials being books, cd or whatever, it takes more than passive materials treatment of first reflection point by the book... :) A passive room treatment with some balance between absorption and diffusion will do but cannot resolve all the room/speakers topology/location and content problems without speaking about the specificity of each audio system.... I was happy when i begin to create in my dedicated room non electronical ACTIVE room controls with interlinked active and passive resonators of different type all connected to 10 cheap Schumann generators grid... Imaging, dynamic, soundstage, all is very good now, and a separation of the musical image from the speakers is possible .... What most people dont realize is that nearfield listening is affected very much by the room acoustic...It is a myth to say that with near listening we are free from the room acoustic...But we cannot know what is missing if we have never experience it in the first place... I know i listen near field (3feet) and in a more regular position (8 feet) and the sound is so good in my 2 positions that i dont prefer one to another.... Complete different experience with one thing in common : an encompassing soundstage (near listening) or a soundstage free from the speakers location (regular listening) in the 2 cases the sound dont come from the speakers... And it is a myth to think that tonal accuracy can be separated complety from imaging...This 2 different qualities are ALWAYS related to one another through the acoutical performance of the room... All my devices and materials are homemade and are very low costs by the way.....i incrementally add something one day after the other for the passive room treatment...Same thing for the more complex creation of the active controls.... Being audiophile is only remembering his listening history and using it like a tool.... |
