I listen to music in a beautiful space, and my view is as important as my music. I sit in a glass and concrete study 3 floors up, in the trees, with a small grass court outside the space. I am looking at beautiful fall color right now, listening to Blood Sweat & Tears. Dispite the hard materials of the room, it is not too hot acoustically. The seasons and time of day affect what I listen to. It is nice to connect the music to nature.
the Listening Room
Many of you may know us, we design listening rooms. While we offer fixed prices for different levels of consultation, no two listening rooms are the same and some vary wildly. I am interested in hearing what you all want to get out of your listening room. I have my own biased opinion, that the listening room is often the most important component of any system (and unfortunately frequently ignored to a large degree). Let's suppose that you could get an acoustical engineering group like ours for free, but you still had all other constraints. You could a great deal on materials to impliment the design but you still had whatever other considerations you have in your life (I don't have space for a dedicated listening room, I can't have ugly acoustical treatement in the room, I can't move walls in my house). Try to be qualitative rather than quantitative. I'm not really that interested in hearing about the specifics of rooms--I'm more interested in hearing about end result goals, such as: I need sound isolation (I like to listen loudly at night and don't want to wake up my wife), or my room sounds dead--I feel like I have a head cold when I walk into it. The other aspect that would be very helpful, at the end of the post, please put a percentage of 2 channel vs HT or multi-channel you listen to. You may even be in the camp: "the room doesn't matter much, I like buying new pieces of equipment instead" That okay too--I'd like to hear from you as well. Some people may not understand the importance of room interaction on the sound, that's okay too--if you had free consultation what would you do or ask in order to get a better listening room.