Tom Martin's Listening Room

This is a minor room treatment, most serious audiophiles have this setup or more. I’ve had this kind of setup for 20 years, but I’ve had friends with setups from Rives where they have many floating panel on the ceiling, their rooms had no 90 degree corners, their rooms were wider as they went back from the front walls, reflection devices in front of each speaker, and more. The room is the most important piece of the puzzle

@rbstehno +1

The room doesn’t look over damped to me either. Just well controlled 

The issue is not the way the room looks nor how many panels are up, but rather whether there is an appropriate mix of absorption and diffusion. Because there's no evidence of a diffusion device, I'm assuming they have them and just covered them with fabric so it was more uniform aesthetically.

I would not call this a "minor" setup.

Minor might not be the right word, maybe 'appropriate' is the better word to use. Like I said, I have friends that have rooms that do make Tom's room look like a minor setup. For example, I have friends that hired Rive's to build out their room, the floating cloud panels, the walls that fan out like an amphitheater. remember the hundreds of dots you put on the walls and floors, the cup and saucer pieces, where each 1 was made out of a different mineral, the big half round diffusor in the middle front wall, the argent diffusers, now the wood spindle diffusors in front of the speakers, back of the speakers,,super bass traps, on and on. Tom's room looks clean but I don't see any diffusors either.

Well, this all looks very expensive. 

As some of you know, I took an alternative and far less expensive route. For the rest:

My wife and I bought an 1865 4.5 story brick townhouse in Newburgh, NY. It had been abandoned for 21 years and was extremely distressed. 

We restored it and did so to near passive house standards. 

My architect - who I was friends with from my Cooper Union days - got his Masters in construction management at Harvard and while there he became friends with an acoustic engineer and scientist who now holds a number of patents. When my architect told him about our restoration project and the dedication of the 390 sq ft attic room to my audio system, he advised us to not cover with drywall the 6” of rockwool in the walls, nor the 14” in the attic, to simply cover it with fire resistant burlap. So we did.

And the sound was superb. I added Moroccan rugs on the floor, and then pictures on the walls (of blown up album covers of course) as needed to brighten up the otherwise very dead, semi-anechoic room. 

Cost? $0.00, because I was already insulating the room for thermal reasons anyway. 

I would post a picture but I STILL haven’t figured out how to upload a photo on audiogon.