My room is insulated by 6” to 17” of rock wool.
It’s semi anechoic.
It’s semi anechoic.
Noise floors
I'd like to address an issue that every single audiophile experiences, that being inherent/ambient steady state noise floors. Here we spend so much effort and money on our equipment in order to lower noise floor and increase resolution, transparency, only to lose some percentage of it on relatively high ambient noise floors. By this I mean the noise generated internally by home, hvac systems and so much more, add to that external, outside the home generated noise. Measuring over many years, over large variables, lowest readings of mid 20db to highest mid 50db in my dedicated listening room, these are steady state readings, any particular system in house may activate and or outdoor generated noises, which are even more variable, may kick in raising if from here.
And so, while we can address both these internal and external generated noise floors to some extent, we can't rid ourselves entirely of them. I presume there are widely varying levels of these noise floors for each of us, and it should be accounted for in reviews or evaluations of equipment. And could be reason for trusting only long term reviews, with varying noise floor levels within one's listening room, short term listening could have taken place during time of best or worse case room noise floor.
But mostly what bothers me is, here all this effort and money spent on equipment in attempt to lower noise floor, and so much of that lost by relatively ridiculous levels of steady state and/or ambient noise. Makes one think about getting closed back headphones, or moving out to extremely remote area to home with minimal internally generated noise. To think how much better the very system I presently have would sound in that environment!
And so, while we can address both these internal and external generated noise floors to some extent, we can't rid ourselves entirely of them. I presume there are widely varying levels of these noise floors for each of us, and it should be accounted for in reviews or evaluations of equipment. And could be reason for trusting only long term reviews, with varying noise floor levels within one's listening room, short term listening could have taken place during time of best or worse case room noise floor.
But mostly what bothers me is, here all this effort and money spent on equipment in attempt to lower noise floor, and so much of that lost by relatively ridiculous levels of steady state and/or ambient noise. Makes one think about getting closed back headphones, or moving out to extremely remote area to home with minimal internally generated noise. To think how much better the very system I presently have would sound in that environment!
Showing 6 responses by unreceivedogma
If you have too much ambient noise from sources external to your audio system, and if that bothers you, then you have to fix your room. It is that simple, and you don’t need a huge budget to do it. There’s a perceptual aspect to this. Having lived in NYC for 45 years, I’ve been trained by my environment to simply tune out a lot of stuff. There are fascinating studies that show how selective our brains are at deciding not only what to hear and what not to hear, but how our brains substitute sounds that aren’t really there, because our brain somehow expects them to be there (this phenomena is mostly related to language, but it’s a short distance to see how visual stimuli can trigger a phantom sound in the brain, and so on). But I digress. While in lower Manhattan in NYC, I had a lively room: tin ceiling, brick walls, very large glass windows, hardwood floors. And a fire station around the corner with false alarms daily, and a noisy open air club/bar/restaurant directly across the street. The wife and I moved to a small city in the Hudson Valley 4 years ago. We restored/renovated a 3.5 story brick townhouse so that it very nearly attains passive house performance standards. My home studio/office/and audio room is in the attic. My architect is a friend and classmate from our Cooper Union years. He has a masters from Harvard where he also studied acoustic engineering. To get the energy performance we aspired to, we used rockwool to insulate the walls (6”) and ceiling (17.5”), and restored historic windows with very tight interior storm windows that together equal the performance of triple pane. There is also 8” of rock wool between the joists underneath the floor boards. My architect said “I’ve known you for 40+ years. You’ve had this hobby since you were 14. Yet you’ve never heard your system sound the way it is meant to sound.” He told me to cover the walls and ceiling with fire resistant burlap instead of sheet rock. He said that if I did this, I would get recording studio acoustic performance from the room for the amount of money we were already spending anyway for thermal performance. We would get a semi-anechoic room. And my audio system’s capabilities would finally be fully revealed. Sure enough, when I have guests over for the first time, the first thing that they notice is not my 3,000 book library, nor my 6,000 LP library, but the quality of the sound in the room: “I don’t hear any echo! I don’t hear any sound from outside!” And my perception of the stereo (that’s what we called it in the 60s/70s/80s) system’s performance improved by a whopping 50% mas o menos. The adage is true: your room is 50% of your system, maybe more. Fix your room. As for the ambient sounds coming from your stereo: I once had to report to an executive creative director who must have felt that his job description was to go into a panic-driven tirade at any misstep. He would come yellin and screamin at me at the slightest thing. I’d wait for a minute or two for him to blow it out of his system and then I would say “The time you spent acting hysterical is time not spent addressing whatever problem that you are concerned about”. Similarly, noise floors being elevated by poor cable routing, failure to isolate mass-conducted vibration etc you all know the score here, is energy going into distortion instead of into the accurate reproduction of the source signal. Identify the issues and correct them. Best - ML theaudioatticvinylsundays.com |
SNS, thank you for that link. Very interesting, perhaps a bit more detail than I need but very cool to read. I was being a little coy in my comment above. In my view, the room isn’t half of the audio system, it’s a third. The other third is our brain itself, and what it brings to the listening experience. Listen to Poppy Crum’s (chief scientist at Dolby Lans) presentation here. https://youtu.be/BYTlN6wjcvQ more later. Best - ML theaudioatticvinylsundays.com |
Well, what’s your goal? 15 db? 10? 5? 0? There is a point of “silence” at which the mind is not designed to adapt. The mind needs some noise simply so that it can keep us balanced while standing up. The mind needs some noise because it is programmed to listen. Absent all ambience, it will listen to the sound of our own body: heartbeat, breathing, even the sound of the blood pulsing through your ears. Absent that sound, it will create its own: that’s what tinnitus is. A lab in Minnesota is so quiet that the longest anyone could stand being in it was about 45 minutes or so before they would want to run out screaming. My room is around mid to high 20s db. I think that is practical, and good enough, because frankly, once the LP starts playing, the mind takes care of the problem: it “diminishes” the ambience and makes it recede to imperceptibility. I think that Millercarbon was alluding to this in his first comment: beyond a certain point, what’s the point? https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/orfield-labs-quiet-chamber |