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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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

"Nowadays I might read or listen them now and then, but strictly for entertainment purposes only."

Yup!  That's why I read these posts every night. ;)

Actually there is a serious point being made here.  I read and see often the listening rooms you All have.  I'm jealous.  My house/cottage is literally 20' x 20'.  So, of course my system is in the living room with the speakers on each side of the TV and no room behind to do any kind of proper cable management.  Small odd shaped room to boot.  Seven foot ceiling.  Not much room for proper speaker/Me placement.  The AC was done in 1960 by non-contractor type people.  Everything is in no way near built to code standards and the AC outlets are two prong.  Nothing was designed(or even remotely thought of) for todays electronics.

Noise Floor?  Mute point in my house. I have a small gas heater in my living room to heat the whole house.  The gas hot water heater is next to it.  The fridge is only 12 feet away.  So, something is always making noise.

But!!  I rent.  I pay $350.00/mo. and that includes the gas and electric bills.  AAHHHH.  Life is good!

Lawrence From MI

 

 

Four years ago when we were house hunting, I’d go into whatever room I was thinking of making the music room and clap and listen. When we bought the house we’re in now, wall to wall pad and carpet went down in the future music room. Then came the furniture and some acoustic panels. It’s by no means perfect, but now it passes the clap test.

Most of the magazine reviewers have terrible rooms, some way too small, others with wood floors and they claim there is no bass, speakers aren’t setup correctly,  and most don’t have any treatments. The more credible reviewers on YouTube and the internet pay more attention to room size, setup, and treatments.

This past year, TAS reviewed a few products that were 6-digits claiming they were the best of the best (what’s new, every product they review is the best). But in this case, multiple rooms at last years axpona sounded terrible with these products in these rooms. Multiple sites on YouTube and the web stated that these rooms sounded terrible, so when TAS came out with their reviews of axpona, they created a new column of terrible sounding rooms which was new. They had to do this because the other reviewers did this before them. 
HiFi+ years ago showed each of their reviewers rooms with a description of what reviewer had along with room dime sound. The other mags attempted to do this but failed