Pleasurably better, not measurably better

@erik_squires 

Thanks for that. I've noticed a lot of audiophiles who use extensive room treatments often leave the ceiling lightly treated or not treated at all. Some of them say they don't like it with too much absorption on the ceiling. Others might just be reticent to hang things on their ceiling. Do you focus on first reflection points when using ceiling  treatments? 

In regard to my post, while listening to headphones I wouldn't expect the ceiling absorbers to do much unless the headphones were very leaky and projected considerably more sound power away from my ears than towards them. 

Pleasurably better could go way beyond just the sound quality of a system. I personally love butter smooth FM tuner dials that have a good deal of mass and inertia and can coast a bit if you turn them quickly. A little static in the signal on a stormy night can add to my sense of coziness. I also like the little incandescent lights on the fronts of old analog dials and indicators rather than matrix panel displays. I think an LED would do as well as long as it was also warm white like the incandescent.

When it comes to sound quality, the debate is not only what sounds better, but what differences can we actually hear vs. differences that we perceive as a result of suggestion from our other senses. I’m all for allowing for other sensory input to color my perception of the sound quality in a positive way. I’ve noticed with binaural recordings on headphones that I cannot get a realistic sense of the sound having a large spaciousness to it if I’m seeing that I’m in a small bedroom. I just can’t do it. My eyes effect how I perceive the sound. The senses work together to create an impression. If I get into a larger room with a higher ceiling I can then perceive the sound as more spacious and enjoyable. Also while wearing headphones if I move my head around it can destroy the spacious effect temporarily. I need to sit still and face in a constant direction. Perhaps head tracking headphones could help with that. Maybe some day I'll get some. 

@erik_squires 

If you ONLY treat first reflection points I can barely hear any benefit at all.  It is only when the room overall has enough treatment to quiet it down that the 1st reflection points matter.

That makes a lot of sense, and matches some of my experiences. Truth be told, even though I sell acoustic treatments I'm not necessarily as experienced with listening directly to the effects they have as many of my customers and other people are who have the means to employ extensive treatments in their rooms and experiment a lot. I have set up the sound room we have here with increasing amounts of treatment and noticed that at a certain point where all the walls were well treated and the floor was treated as well, that's when the room walls "disappearing" effect really started to work for me, making for a quite compelling listening experience. Unfortunately that setup had to be disassembled as we were getting overwhelmed with stock we couldn't move out because of a shortage of shipping containers. Right now the room is set up with a studio mixing/mastering AttackWall arrangement. That is interesting to listen to and compare to my recollection of the hifi setup. I like the AttackWall because it's clear, clean and precise but it doesn't create the ambient effect that the full room treatment did. I enjoy it but in a different way. 

One thing I’ve found very pleasurable is stereo crosstalk cancellation. I love the sound it creates, but find the methods used to achieve it difficult to live with. It tends to be a real "head in a vice" kind of listening experience, often with a divider panel right in my face. I’ve always thought that 2 channel stereo upmixing to more channels could be a better solution, but there’s no easy way to do it cleanly. There are sophisticated methods but I haven’t tried them yet.

Last night I decided to try a rather messy and easy way of turning two channel recordings into three channel playback. The center channel is created by simply summing L+R, the Left channel is mixed as L-R, the Right channel is mixed as R-L. It occurred to me that if these three channels were played through speakers positioned correctly they would produce crosstalk elimination while also allowing sounds from different directions in the sound field to approach the head in roughly the right directions. It works and sounds pretty good, but the more surprising thing was how pleasant it sounded anywhere in the room. I tried setting up the speakers closer or further apart, arranged in a U-shape, or all flat against the wall. Regardless it produced a nice sense of spaciousness on stereo recordings with center panned vocalists and instrumentals staying behind the center speaker no matter where I moved in the room, with a respectable sense of depth. This ain’t accurate. It’s messy. But if you’re not in the sweet spot, or even if you are in the sweet spot, it does make center panned sounds much cleaner as there’s no interference patterns or cross talk on anything panned center, and overall it’s just a downright pleasant arrangement to listen to when you’re sitting off axis or moving around the room.

In some ways, this arrangement is "pleasurably better."