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
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Somehow I think if you have a good system in a furnished room somehow you have to validate yourself as a true audio connoisseur by putting stylish acoustical panels throughout the room. Somehow not having them makes a room seem unfinished even though it may sound perfectly fine. I think people are hooked on getting acoustical panels in their furnished rooms and may just live with them after they get them because removing them is something they probably just wouldn’t do. A diffuser panel of 3 x 5 in a furnished room room hardly does much of anything, but it can look really really cool. I would have one but I’ve never found anything that I’ve really want to put up on the wall.

I think everyone’s been conditioned to assume they should pursue acoustical panels even though many can never really discern a difference in a room that’s furnished. . Walking into a room with a nice audio system without acoustical panels and someone will say oh you need acoustical treatment.

Disagree.  If the reason is the pursuit of the best sound the system can create in that space then it has nothing to do with being conditioned to think acoustic treatment equals true audiophile.  What is the definition of sounds fine by the way?  There are plenty of videos online you can watch and hear the massive difference in the before and after.  I don’t want to treat my room using furniture, I want to use acoustic treatment designed specifically to manage issues I have in my room.  I have no idea what piece of furniture I need to add in order to manage a +3db rise at 50hz.  However, I can do some research and find acoustic treatment that can help flatten that out.

The OP has an opinion, is not forthcoming with relevant information, and shows no interest in "better understanding" as claimed.

No reason to continue this circular firing squad.

I hardly think of a room filled with furniture is considered a treated room. Certainly it offers acoustical benefits.

The title of the thread does not suggest the system would be placed inside an empty room. It merely suggests that good systems, or really good systems, may do an excellent job regardless of acoustical panels, or‘treatments’ placed about the room.

Reaching to a textbook to help figure out whether a situation sounds good or not may be helpful to some but I trust my ears to tell me what’s going on. I just feel people go nutty with acoustical treatments sometimes and somehow people are inclined to put a lot of acoustical panels all over the place. And gradually the room changes it may not always be for the better and people may not really recognize this. I’m tempted to remove the corner bass traps to see how things might change but that’s a pain to do, so for now I’m hopeful they benefit things. My curve for the subs seems perfect, I guess you could say this is a helpful confirmation but I really didn’t need to see it based on what I was hearing. I’ve learned to trust what I can hear. I still would like to find a nice diffuser panel but having trouble finding one I like, and I'm not sure how much it will really do.