Which Golden Ratio??? .......Help

Slappy's right. This formula will ALWAYS make your system sound better (until you nod off in the listening chair).

The golden ratio is 1.3 12oz beers for each hour of work done during the day.

Cardas/Fibonacci ratio is fine, but recognize that the perfect room doesn't exist. The RT60 of all that makes up a "dimensionally perfect room" could make a perfect room terrible. RT60 measures reflection and absorbtion of different materials. It is the absorbtion and reflection that makes your room yours. Like dressing yourself in the morning is your taste, so too is the constructing of the room to give it its own personality.

Imagine two identical dimensional rooms:
1 has no furniture except a chair for listening $987,654 of the finest audio gear delivered to hard flooring and nothing to absorb sound other than the ceramic tile covered walls and ceiling...likely this room is live and harsh with to much reverberation
Now imagine the same dimensioned room with a comfortable sofa, plush carpet, beautiful drapes, paintings on the walls and wall treatments to absorb unwanted first reflections and diffusers behind your listening postion to help develop sound staging and imaging...likely this room will be tolerable with $1,000 worth of gear.

Bottom line dimensions can help make a room good but until it is dressed to suit your sound preferences the bazilllion dollars in gear will never stand up to expectation.

Dean, I think those are YOUR measurements. If the graphic stuff pans out, you can go on Ultimate Fighting.

I pick the women I date according to how their proportions coincide with Mr. Fibonacci's numbers.

My last girlfriend had measurements of 55 34 55. She was quite a looker and could protect me in any situation as well.

There is a link to the Rives Forum located on the home page of audioasylum.com. You might also check out Audio Asylum's FAQ section which contains additional links that should be of interest.

Hope your room turns out to be different, but the only symmetrically shaped octagon room I've spent time in (this one had plaster walls, suspended wood floors and a high domed ceiling) made a good echo chamber.

Whoa, you must be single, right?
You have an interesting room, so even if you do not have a wife to smack you down on this issue, control the urge to turn your room into a boring cubicle!
Find your magic formulas and apply them, but they won't work in every room for every type of furnishing, etc. The important part will be sitting down, listening, then bouncing-up again to make small changes in the speaker positions many times until you have it right. Use pieces of tape on the floor/carpet so that you can see/measure the differences as you move the speakers.

For those of you who may be wondering what this discussion is all about, there is a fascinating new book out called "The Golden Ratio", written by Mario Livio, Ph.D., the head of the Science Divison at the Space Telescope Science Institute. It is "The story of PHI, the world's most astonishing number". PHI is an irrational number 1.6180339887... that was first defined by Euclid who was studying construction of the pentagon (the five sided figure in geometry).

Livio traces the evolution of understanding of PHI over 2000 years of history and its real and imagined application to everything from mollusk shells, sunflower florets, crystals in materials, the shape of galaxies, the pyramids, art, and the stock market.

PHI can be derived in many ways and is closely related to the Fibonacci sequence (0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21, etc). Every next number being the sum of the previous two.

Cardas has adopted PHI in the design of cables and the placement of speakers. His ideal room design also follows the Fibonacci sequence. (For example: 8Hx13Wx21L)

Whether you have a strong math background or not, this book is very easy and intersting reading. You can just skip the proofs in the appendices.

Audio Asylum has a room acoustics forum moderated by Rives. I would suggest searching there and/or asking the same question. The Rives web site also has a demo version of the CARA software where you can input room dimensions and see the theoretical room response of various speakers. I did this but didn't see much improvement from going from my not so good dimensions to "golden ratio" dimensions (don't recall exactly what the ratio was, though).

Go to the Cardas website you can find info there or in the reference accoustics books
Luis

Hi:

I think "Perfect room" is an oxymoron. One reason i suppose Rives developed the "parc" electronics and why drivers in a box inevitably need corrective circuits and close attention to baffles etc...

There are other versions of the ratio too. Bolt, Sepmeyer,Volkmann....I don't think it's the absolute supremacy of one over the other so much as using one, measuring it's weekness in your particular application, and then making adjustments for it.

Cheers
I remain,

Greg:

Yes, either Rives or a Templer.

The golden ratio is 1:1,618. It was used, it seems, in ancient Greece and Egypt.

I don't know about its applicability to room dimensions (assuming that's what you want it for). If that's the case, why not ask Rives about the text-book dimensions of the "perfect" room? Cheers