Most rooms don’t need acoustical treatment.
Why? Because acoustical treatments presented are in virtually empty rooms. Unrealistic.
my rooms have furniture and clutter. These rooms don’t really have a need for treatment. It’s snake oil, voodoo science.
So why is accoustical panels gonna help? No one can answer this, most have no clue.
my rooms have furniture and clutter. These rooms don’t really have a need for treatment. It’s snake oil, voodoo science.
So why is accoustical panels gonna help? No one can answer this, most have no clue.
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I dislike the use of DSP for acoustic corrections for speakers. Some manufacturers feel that is the solution to mate their speakers to rooms. I built my listening room to accommodate most speakers, especially those that reach deep bass (my cut-off is now 25 Hz). My room isn't perfect but it is good in so many factors that I can concentrate on minor tweaks (or upgraded cables/equipment). Lonemountain is correct-DSP won't make an adequate sounding room great sounding. |
It seems that human ears react better to first wavefront of relatively "large" bandwith called a " voice timbre" not to a precise test frequency signal one after the others, like a microphone feeding it back to a correcting program... Then i succeeded to correct my room with materials passive treatment but mainly with an Helmholtz "mechanical equalizer" calibrated by the the first wavefront of sound created by the specific timing of the frequencies of early and late reflections adding themselves to the direct waves from the speakers and coming also from the waves modified themselves by their near 80 crossings of the different zones pressure of my room each one second... This mechanical equalizer is made, not of bottles like the original one, but of tubes and pipes, sometimes one inserted in an another thinner one, with a short or longer neck(various type of straws) which length i tuned with hearing and listening experiments... It takes me a week and perhaps 50 hours to tune the 22 tubes and pipes....Location is important... All refining parameters were dictated by sound like a piano tuner use his ears and implemented by cut in section of various diameter of straws inserted in one another.... I also use golden section in 3 set of 3 pipes among all the other singular 13 tubes and pipes... My longer tube is 8 feet long under my 81/2 feet ceiling.... Correcting these 9 pipes together was the more easy part , they were very impactful ...I also used 5 smaller pipes of various size near the tweeter of one speaker (3) and near the bass driver of the other speaker (2) to create a more audible first wavefront signal without changing the basic identical parameters of the speakers but only their response to the room but not their frequency response more their first wavefront timing response... It worked marvellously.... It was my adding modification piece in relation to speakers, to the original mechanical equalizer before the invention of the speakers itself.... I say all that because Helmholtz was able to set a room without DSP better than DSP... WHY? We forget that, and we called DSP a progress and it is one indeed for "precise" measurements of a tested frequency in relation with a "precise" location in millimeters... BUT we forgot that human ears is used to hear not a frequency alone, but a wavefront constituted of many frequencies together, usually a human vocal timbre, and we forgot that a room must be tested for itself not from and for a precise location in millimeter mainly ... And a room is not a set of passive bouncing walls waiting for the tested emitted frequency anyway, but an enclosure for the human voice, and an heterogeneous set of variable presssure zones, with the tubes and pipes being some of them... The mechanical equalizer work on all audible frequencies not only on bass like many think, and they work at same time from near listening location and regular location in the room...not from an ideal "imaging spot" that is never an ideal spot anyway, the ideal spot is not made only for "imaging" but also for the " listener envelopment" factor ....The belief that near listening shield us from the room problems is completely erroneous in "small" room... DSP is and could be a marvellous tool, but those who think that he can replace human ears must wait that new learning neural algorithm implement it in an A.I. expert system... Soon it will be done.... But the cost will be high.... In few years tough we will use it... For now my ears is the main tool and it is enough... It is a good thing also to learn acoustic by ears not by equations mainly.... I am not a scientist at all.... All that is my experience only and could be wrongly explained .... But here we describe our own experience and i tried.... |
I forgot to say that my room is now near perfectly refined for my particular structured hearing abilities and potentials not for ALL human ears like in a very great hall...But i dont doubt that my room sound relatively well tuned for all ears...It seems so if i see the reaction of my children... Acoustic of irregular or difficult small normal room obey and react to sound in a different way than a theater, or than an ideally acoustically designed audio rrom... Geometry, topology and content matters.... The mechanical equalizer was a cheap way in money to design my own audio room without the need to reconstruct my room...Passive absorbing, reflecting, and diffusive materials, even well balanced are not enough sometimes...Especially in 13 feet, irregular, but square room with 2 windows and with a complex acoustic content.... We must accomodate the response of the room to the speakers not only the speakers to the room... the mechanical equalizer can do the 2 function at the same time without modifying the basic parameters of the speakers directly...The different pressures new zones created by the equalizer itself are intermediary between the speakers and the room in the 2 directions, because the pipes grid begin with a few inches straws from the speakers and increase to 8 feet high, like observed an astute observer, oldhvymec ,the organ tuning pipe in a church... We can call the Helmholtz mechanical equalizer, a "silent organ" indeed and i called it so indeed in my first post about it in my thread... My best to all.... |
DSP is just a tool, which most professionals use as part of their toolkit. Room design, acoustic treatments, speaker location, and DSP together is the best solution for most. Sometimes you can’t treat the room, sometimes you can’t place the speakers where you want to.I agree with you... My mechanical equalizer so powerful it is cannot be used in a living room and setting it by ears is not for everyone... Not much more that setting a piano strings is for everyone... But i learned much in the process about speakers/ room /ears relations... Audiophile experience is here not in electronic design upgrade... Acoustic is key but you know yourself already that...But most did not.... Thanks for your numerous interesting threads.... |
Electronics and speakers are at most 50% or less and the other 50% or more is easily the room. But, we seem to have ’know it alls’ like the OP who seem to think the room doesn’t matter. It is kinda funny when guys spend thousands of dollars on power cables and such, but refuse to spend a dime on the room. For instance, if the upholstery on your big couch is leather or something else will have a much bigger impact on the sound than if your power cable cost 40 bucks or 4000 bucks (facepalm!). |
Though an interesting premise that acoustic treatments are poppycock, I find the OP to be that instead, and rolling this into the snake oil channel is just ignorant. My experience was the exact opposite and by adding a few treatments to my room and a throw rug my audio enjoyment was increased by 10 fold. Now I do thing is all works together and is part of the formula in the search for acoustic perfection, a goal we will never achieve. Treatments, furniture, cables and yes even fuses all play a part, but many not in every system or listening room. Just go into this hobby or obsession with an open mind. A closed mind limits your friends, audience, and enjoyment and makes you a lonely and angry. |
I love reading this thread. Its really clear window into the real world of home audio: part misinformation, some hearsay, some reality. For example, the idea that you can "fix" anything in your playback system about a recording is impossible. You can change it, for sure, but its like cables, who knows what is "correct"? I have the unique benefit of walking into the famous LA studios and knowing what the room sounds like and talking to the engineer who built the record and understanding the sound of the pro gear he used to make it. I walk the hi fi shows and I can tell you its a very rare day when I hear a playback system sound ANYTHING like the recording. |
Of course. Because that is nothing to do with it. In fact, of all the different ideas audiophiles have about what they are trying to do, to recreate the sound the recording engineers heard in the studio has got to be the furthest from it you can get! I mean, think about it. Sinatra-Basie was done back in 1962. Are we supposed to have systems that make it sound like it did coming off those 1950's era speakers? With all their colorations? I don't think so! Some think the goal is to recreate the sound of the original performance. This is a little closer to the truth. This is also probably a lot closer to what the producer and recording engineers were trying to do. Capture the sound of the performance. But still, not quite right. Closer to the truth to say they are trying to capture the spirit of the performance. The feeling. The vibe. Otherwise, why place microphones inside drums, and stuff like that? See? Who ever sat with their head inside a kick drum? So why on Earth would anyone talk about recreating the sound heard in the studio? It is nuts. What they do instead, they create art. Auditory art. Just like Picasso did not draw a woman to look anything like what you see with your eyes, but he did somehow capture the spirit of woman. Not "a" woman. Woman. That kind of thing. What we do with our systems is put our auditory art on display. I was in the home one time of a man who was really into Remington. No not the guns, the bronze sculpture artist. He must have had 20 of them, with the best ones in a living room. Wired with lights and a panel he could push a button and the lighting would fade out on one and fade in on another. Or several at one time. Just amazing. Probably Remington never had anything like this in his studio. Probably Picasso never saw any of his paintings under MOMA lighting. I wonder, are there art snobs who would sniff at how they were there in the loft and they never have seen any of his paintings that looked anything like what they did there? A perfectly good metaphor that shows how silly it is to try and recreate the sound in the studio. |
I am by nature a skeptic. And many things (IMHO) in the audiophile world are indeed snake oil. That said, in my 13x16 living room, couch chairs and all… I bought two 24x24 box difusor’s and sat them on top of a chair back, which sits between my speakers, no doubt about it, hands down, immediately beyond a reasonable doubt completely changed the room dynamics for the BETTER. The sound stage suddenly had depth and basically a larger presence. I was truly amazed. |
my rooms have furniture and clutter. These rooms don’t really have a need for treatment. It’s snake oil, voodoo science. If your furniture addresses all the acoustical issues in your room, yes. However, that is somewhat doubtful. Many home theatre setup have auto IQ systems precisely because very few rooms are acoustically neutral. I'm normally a person that scoffs at measuring equipment as my ears almost always proves the measurements to be of no value, but acoustics is an area where measurements by and large correspond with our hearing. If you take a simple sound pressure meter (i.e. decibel meter), you can feed different frequencies into your system and measure the sound pressure (volume). You will see swing of 20db, 30db, sometimes even more across the audible frequency range, and these swing will be differ in different areas in your room. Addressing some very simple things, like the first reflection point will dramatically increase the focus and sound staging of your sound system. The changes are not subtle. You'll be bowled over by just how good your system really sounds. Ps. A little stone or clock in the corner of the room isn't going to do it. Have a look at what the pro audio guys do. |
@deep_333 It is kinda funny when guys spend thousands of dollars on power cables and such, but refuse to spend a dime on the room. If we were smart, we’d spend 50% of our budget on our rooms. But we aren’t smart (myself included) Even though I know it works as I have experience of it, I loath to spend $500 on diffusers but will happily spend $2,000 on power cables. 😂🤣 |
Not sure I agree with you there- that it doesn't matter. While its true those of us without direct studio or live music experience have an extreme challenge knowing for certain what is sonically "correct", I think the goal of many audiophiles is a piano needs to sound like a piano. Many of us have heard a real ones so not the impossible target. Some room treatments are ill advised and don't help, but it is true that the speaker and room are a bonded pair. One influences the other in more ways than most understand including most manufacturers. The science of acoustics and sound is not simple, easy to explain or linear. Just trying to explain a decibel gives most us a brain freeze, and the entire subject of how a the environment influences a speaker can be a lifetime of study. It truly is a rubik's cube. |
