Room Treatment

@lalitk 

I have every square inch of my walls covered with 5” of rock wool, and every square inch of my ceiling covered with 14” of rock wool. The floors mostly covered either Moroccan cotton rugs  

I have a very dead, semi-anechoic room. It works perfectly. You can hear the difference when you walk in, before any music is played. 

So I am wondering what you mean by overdoing it? 

@lalitk

@seanheis1

@raam

I am THRILLED with the sound.

yes: all the dimensionality and atmospherics is coming from the groove almost entirely.

The room is not dead, I am getting full spectrum.

And, the sound is somehow holographic: on some recordings, sounds seem to originate from either side or behind me. I suspect this has something to do with the woofer placement, which is behind me.

To be clear: I am not arguing that you cannot kill a room with over-damping. I am arguing that most experienced audiophiles would look at my room and say: this has to sound terrible.

But it is the opposite.

My architect went to Harvard to get his masters. A good friend of his from back in those days was an acoustical engineer who now holds a number of patents. When my architect told him about my restoration of an historic home to its original aesthetic, while also making it near-passive house in energy performance, he also told him btw the client is also an audiophile. That is when he hit on the idea (based on some of his ongoing theoretical work) of the room treatment. Allegedly, until me, no one had done it yet.

I’m always up for experimentation and as it was a gut reno of a building that was distressed and abandoned for 21 years, it cost me nothing to frame it out and put the rock wool insulation in as I was going to do anyway for thermal barrier and fire resistance reasons, install the audio, crank it up, settle back and let it rip. If it worked, cover it with fire resistant burlap. If it didn’t work, up goes the sheet rock.

I covered it with burlap: his friend nailed it. No need to spend $$$$$s on expensive traps, diffusers, absorbers etc, all of which are ugly aesthetically. All for the cost of what I was doing anyway: basically, the acoustic insulation is a freebie piggy-backing on the thermal barrier.

I figured that I could always ADD harder surfaces (framed posters, eg) if it was too muddy but that has been unnecessary.

The Mastering Lab shelving on the Altecs is set to neutral on both the midrange and the highs most of the time, and when I do adjust it, it’s at most by 10 to 20%

As for “emotional distress” caused by a dead room: guests feel the opposite. They volunteer that it feels serene, peaceful, meditatively zen-like.