Room acoustics

ronniemo
Yes, Room acoustics play an invaluable role in listening pleasure. I bought a pair of used speakers listening to them in a acoustically professionally treated room, took them home and wasn’t even close. They are good speakers but not as good as what I had heard. I was buying them on what I had heard their in their room. So you have to be aware of that when buying equipment. When it comes to room acoustics just read and learn on how to make room sound better. Unless you have 20 or so grand and get it done professionally. Enjoy the music!!!

>>>>One can’t help wondering what other goodies the system you heard had going for it, lurking about, besides visible acoustic treatments. Perhaps things you couldn’t see. Super expensive cables, perhaps. Blue Fuses? Some quantum thingies. Things the OP would undoubtedly call oil of the snake. 🐍After all, they ARE trying to sell you something. Speakers or amps, or whatever. So it would behoove them to get the sound in the room as good as possible, you know to maximize the chance of a sale. On the other hand, there is a specialty audio store in this area that use to have a policy of no room treatments and no tweaks. The idea being they wanted to present the pure sound of the various components in the system. Which kind of doesn’t make any sense either.

Five 'll get you ten it's seismic vibration. 

My secret methodology for treating room anomalies. You need to find and map out all the sound pressure peaks in the room, incluing the 3 dimension space of the room. The most effective way to do this is using a test tone (s) and SPL meter. I select test tone(s) around 315 Hz or thereabouts since that frequency is very revealing, and effective, but you can use other frequencies, too. This will allow you to find all sound pressure peaks that are say, 6 dB (i.e., 4 times higher!) above the average sound pressure in the room. Generally speaking, these peaks will be found in room corners, at first reflection points and on the wall between the speakers, on the wall behind the listener but also at random and unexpected locations around the room, including in the 3D SPACE of the room. Sometimes right where the listening chair is located! 😧 All of those peaks 6 dB or higher act as "speakers" that interfere with the primary sound produced by the speakers. The objective is to reduce those peaks as much as possible - without producing side effects. But trying to treat the room by ear is a fool’s errand. It’s like trying to solve n simultaneous equations in n + x unknowns. Sure, you can do better than nothing but you will only find a local maximum, not the real maximum.

There are a great number of devices that can be employed to defeat the peaks once you’ve located them. I can vouch for Traps, Hemlholtz resonators, tiny little bowl acoustic resonators, crystals, Mpingo discs, Room Tunes Echo Tunes, Golden Sound’s Acoustic Discs, Skyline diffuser, but not (rpt not) SONEX.