Your advice to speakers designers

prof, be nice, will you? Especially when visiting my threads. 
To answer your question. Imaging is not everything. The better the sound is the less need you have to sit in front of the speakers. But I am not far from them. I do critical listening too from time to time.

Just a general bit of added gab:

They don’t call them ’inferior desecrators’ for nothing.

Very close to 100% of inferior desecrators and even architects do not take acoustics into account in their designs and finished product. If they do, they do with with a minimal concern or they do it with rubber stamp textbook knowledge applied, which is just as disastrous, maybe more -depends.

I’ve witnessed this form of a disaster many many dozens of times, when I go into a job as an attached extra mind and eyes, when Taras is brought in to deal with their disasters.

Usually it’s a fight to the death to hold onto the appearance of the space to be as original and unperturbed as possible, and to spend zero dollars on an acoustical fix. That zero cost acoustical fixes have to be completely invisible. Two impossible requirements that even on their own are impossible.

The next step is they don’t know what they are dealing with so they think that textbook acoustic formulas can apply to the issue and try to tell the acoustician what they are doing and what it will cost.

The connected problem is that they’ve ~spent all their money~and don’t have any left over to fix the acoustical nightmare. They project this frustration and mess upon the acoustician they’ve brought in. The arguments are fighting about 4 types of ignorant ’city hall’ (declarative people who won’t back down in any way), all at the same time.

Everyone involved is angry about the problem, angry that they don’t understand it, angry about the potential costs and angry that their work is going to be disturbed. The solution person is attacked from multiple directions before they even walk through the door.

Out there, in the architectural and home design world in North America (on the mega to minor install level), this scenario plays out probably a few dozen times per day.

Like Plumbers and dentists, acoustician is one of the most thankless specialized jobs that exist. And notably more obscure.

Regardless, due to the specialty being in-house, so to speak, every time we're involved directly in the set up and implementation the given room at a show, we tend to get best of show either in print, by award, or by word of mouth. I think we missed that..maybe once? if ever?

Right. Solution people are always attacked from multiple directions, that's why we live in such a mess.

ambiguity can hide sarcasm or be an actual unintended ambiguity. which is why the sarcastic use it.

This is going nowhere since great looks and great sound are subjective.  If I ever get a dedicated room again I'll get it to sound how I want it to and then over time I'll try to make it look halfway decent.  I tend to like a room that is pretty well damped so I need quite a bit of absorption. 

Actually, you don’t need a lot of absorption. You need low to mid bass absorption.

the rest is simple. Child’s play.

The first part (the bass) is phenomenally hard.

So difficult... that all known official measurement standards --ignore it. Pretty well -completely ignore it.

That's how bad it is.

inna,

I wasn’t being mean. Notice I was making a joke, and then asking you to explain further how you listen.

I agree imaging isn’t everything (it’s down my list of priorities, though I like it).

But obviously it’s usual for audiophiles - e.g. those who inhabit a forum like this - to sit and listen critically to music. It’s almost the feature that defines people in this hobby.  A careful placement of speakers relative to the room and listening position is also how one realizes the potential of most loudspeakers, timbrally as well.  So when someone says he doesn’t often sit down and listen that suggests you listen to them as background music and that seems rather unusual given the context of a forum like this.

I in no way begrudge your listening habits. After all, I spend plenty of time listening to just the speakers on my iphone and actually enjoy it. But I wouldn’t spend lots of money on a 2 channel system if I weren’t regularly paying real attention to it, which usually involves sitting in the room with the speakers.

I've done it all before.  I built a ton of bass traps and combined with some digital eq I had the bass response +-1 decibel in my concrete basement.  It had been +-15 at least.  I wouldn't go through that again.  Getting the bass to have a perfect frequency response caused more problems than it solved in my opinion.  I had to make big cuts at the worst resonance frequencies and this killed transients and just didn't sound right IMO.  

The ideal amount of absorption is subjective and depends on what you're listening to.  If studio recordings that are very damped you'd want less absorption than if you're listening to live recordings where you want to hear the live atmosphere as it was rather than the sound of your room over top of it.  Unless that's not what you want, it's about personal preference to a great degree.

Michael Green once said that if your system and room were done right you would rarely need to touch volume control. This sounds good to me.
Michael tunes studios and concert halls, at least he used to. 
Another question is do we want to somehow correct the not so good recording or have it as it is? I am much closer to the latter but not fully. 

I'm curious about the room treatments that are all hidden, built in to the structure of the room in a way that no one ever suspects to be room treatment...

can you post more info?

maybe put some pics up in the system area?

Hi randy,

I had an extensive "build thread" on AVS for my home theater/2 channel room reno.  It's still there but unfortunately all my pictures were hosted on a site that moved from free to paid hosting, and since I didn't pay eventually all the pictures disappeared.  There's only one picture (for some reason) at the very beginning of a "room description" thread you can see here:

http://www.avsforum.com/forum/29-what-s-your-system-configuration/1259917-rich-s-variable-image-size...

The sofa is massive and soaks up a lot, but much of the treatment is hidden in the ceiling, which simply looks like a build-down structure to house lighting, add architectural detail etc.  But it's actually using a tensed brown felt fabric treatment stretched across the ceiling of the build-down, which allows a whole lot of absorption to be hidden at strategic areas.  Overhead the speaker area it's like a giant bass trap.
There's also absorption built invisibly into the wall corner area on either side of the screen.   Further, there are various types of curtains, of various thickness, that can be pulled to anywhere on the walls to cut down reflectivity as desired.  (For instance, there is a cover for the reflective fire place area).   So I can go from a more lively or less lively sounding room, depending on what suits the speaker.  The fact that the room is open to the hallway on one side also seems to relieve bass node problems.

You can see just part of the ceiling build down at the top of the photo.

No one ever recognizes it as room treatment because it just looks like architectural or decor detail (and the rest is hidden).   But, to my amazement, one of the most common comments I get, even from non-audio people is "This room sounds good" even when we are just talking in the room.

It was a very tough set of criteria to balance in that room and we did quite well all things considered.

Cheers!

Get out of here, imo.

Over time I've come to better understand what drives this hobby.  Stereophile is a better word than audiophile.  It's mostly about the stereo for most people.  It's similar with watch lovers.  It doesn't much matter how well the watch tells time, although it does need to tell time.  Exclusivity, talking points, luxurious looks?  I'm not sure what it's all about. 

I've always wanted the best performance for the money.  Since I'm like 99.9% of people and don't have infinite funds I have to limit what I'm gonna spend.  If I'm gonna spend 10k on a pair of speakers I'd take the ones that have the best performance because they're painted flat black and all the money was spent on the things that influence performance.  I understand that manufacturers have to spend on looks to stay in business.  I don't criticize them for it. 

Yeah, I have about $1k, perhaps a little more, for the upgrades next year. Self-imposed limit for now. So do I upgrade interconnects, power cord (s) or phono stage? Cannot upgrade anything else for this kind of money except maybe cartridge, that I won’t do without upgrading phono and interconnects first. And I am not going to buy anything new. In fact, I will not ever need anything new except perhaps a dac or whatever else they will come up with and maybe a cartridge, though I could get a used one from a reputable seller.
So, looking at it from this angle, I am not interested in future speakers designs at all unless there is something spectacular and relatively affordable. I see a number of $5k - $7k used speakers that would be good enough for me.
Most people, even very dedicated ones, don’t have a lot of money for this stuff. Not 99.9% but 90% for sure.

Start with the most life-like cone material for the mid-range.

Then choose the least number of drivers you think you need. Try to keep the crossover out of the midrange frequency.

Then go for what you believe is the most hear through cabinet.

Compromises, its all about compromises as we wait for the engineering to improve. All speakers are a compromise on reality, some less so.

And remove those damn crossovers from the cabinet, make them external. Also, don't use any questionable quality parts, including wires. Finally, choose your dealers wisely.

Prof, do you have pictures of your room?