Some famous reviewers have atrocious listening rooms!


It’s almost sad, really.  Some reviewers I’ve been reading for decades, when showing their rigs on YouTube, have absolutely horrible rooms.  Weird shaped; too small w/o acoustic treatment; crap all over the place within the room or around the speakers; and on and on.  
 

Had I known about the listening rooms they use to review gear in the past, I would not have placed such a value on what they were writing.  I think reviewers should not just list the equipment they used in a given review, but be required to show their listening rooms, as well.
 

Turns out my listening room isn’t so bad, after all.  

 

 

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Darko always seems to have a nice listening space IMO. It's never cluttered. His new apartment in Portugal is getting a nice room treatment.

I suspect many listening rooms full of crap and that look messy may actually be reasonably good audio environments. With little repeated dimensions and/or room treatment there's less likelihood of strong resonances in a room.

Several people here seem uneducated on what actually makes a room good for music reproduction. 

 

a big part of being experienced in this hobby is understanding room interactions and how gear setup (most importantly the listening triangle and proximate room boundaries) affects how the sound is heard by the listener

with a good understanding of this, once seeing a room and the system set up within it (or some good pictures of it), one has a decent idea of how the rig will likely sound... not 100%, but i would say at the 60-70% level, assessed by experienced hands... of course, some difficult rooms can sound quite good if the owner knows how to configure the system within it, manage the deficiencies ...

all this said, this doesn’t make any reviewer’s work worthless... as in all situations where advice is being sought and given, the recipient is wise to understand where the advisor is coming from, the operating context and experiences that may shape the views and assessments given... a cancer surgeon will often advise resection as the best course of action, whereas the leading oncologist may lean towards chemotherapies... it's just human nature, predictive of how human experience is gained over time and how views are shaped