If you have a nice system why do you really need room treatments?


Yeah you may need an absorption panel if your room is completely open, ie. No rug or furniture, ie just lonely single chair. But if your system can't cut it in any room then it's a system problem and you should be able to discern a good system regardless of the room.  Unless you put it on the roof of your apartment building but the Beatles seemed to have survived that effort

I think people go nuts with all this absorption acoustical room treatment stuff and it looks kind of awful.  Once in a while you see a really cool looking diffuser panel and I would definitely want one. But to have a system that works really well without any of the acoustical panel distractions is a wonderful thing.

emergingsoul

As many are tired of hearing, I am a resolved fan of speaker’s having level controls.

Speakers leave the factory like a person put on a ship in blinders, no idea where they are going, certainly not going to perform as tested in a foam lined space.

I wouldn’t spend a nickle on room treatments until after I adjusted the speakers in THIS space.

test cd, sound pressure meter on tripod, seated ear height, listening position,

1. test cd with many separate frequency bands, individually selectable, and repeatable, not just sweeps or pink noise.

amazing bytes, $25. (several at historic low prices)

2. sound pressure meter (needs bottom tripod hole)sound pressure meter

ADJUST HOW?

3. I have two L-Pads, simple adjust mid to woofer and tweeter to mid, makes significant difference. Another space, re-do it there.

4. modern, no level controls: I just bought this DBX clone Equalizer in anticipation of results of my upcoming hearing test. Age 75, they will find something!

Amazon, returnable, easy to try, hear how silent it is.

Dual Band 31 1/3 octave frequency adjusters

Zero noise, bypass, ’0’ detents, 3u height sliders have more precision.

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bypass for listening with friends and my presumed hearing aids in

engaged for me, no hearing aids, inverse of what they measure.

Based on my friends experience, simple 3 tone control adjustment from his phone, eq should be a more specific curve

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another use: find better/best positioning and measure results of various toe-in angles as well as slanted back to aim tweeter to seated ear height, and alter initial room reflections

 

I can't really determine if you're making this blanket statement with sincerity or there's a level of trolling. If it's the former, I can't really take your opinion seriously if you think room acoustics have zero effect on the sound quality of a "good" hi-fi setup or that the same system can overcome bad room acoustics. I would suggest you do the following experiment before you stand firm upon the soapbox of certainty.

Take your system and set it up in the various rooms of your living situation. I suspect that the system won't be able to overcome the acoustical drawbacks of each room (bedroom, bathroom, living room, closet, garage) and be able to sound the same in each space. DSP software can only get you so far when it comes to room correction and dealing with reverb, signal delay, and non-ideal room dimensions.

If anything, the more expensive a system setup is, the more important acoustically treating the listening room and room correction becomes to take full advantage of what the system can reveal.  If you're simply listening to music streaming on a portable Bluetooth speaker then yes, the room doesn't matter when it comes to the low sound quality bar you have set for yourself. 

 

Having just experienced this first hand: you need to treat your room.

To be more accurate, you need to know how to determine AND hear HOW your room is coloring altering or outright changing sound, sound stage, frequencies, etc.  This should be a testing process that people go thru when setting up their components and their speakers in their listening area. 

I went thru this with my step father, who has been an audiophile my whole life.  His incredible system and amazing top notch speakers literally sounded AND measured horribly in the room he had set up.  To him though, it sounded amazing and never heard anything better.  To me, it was literally unlistenable....and oddly to him, it was unlistenable as well he just didn't realize it (never listens above 65db, only listened for an hour or two).   
 

ronboco,

actually you're wrong on that one there is a video from the owner of the company showing that when you stamp on concrete you get just as much vibration coming through the floor just at a different frequency then from wood so you would benefit just as much, I was shocked when he stamped on the floor and the little seismographs that were on the speakers started jumping up and down like crazy with the needle I didn't think concrete would transmit anything so I think you should give them a try like I said if you don't like them you can send them back and they give you your money back no one has ever sent a pair back yet.