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What makes the most impact in sound quality

ron-c said:
Room treatments control reverb time. Electronic room correction can address the shape of the room and open up better speaker placement. I know this is a big claim for many but once you use this you will appreciate it.
The sad fact is most well designed speakers will have room induced frequency response swings of 10 to 20 dB in most rooms. These room aberrations swamp all other sound quality factors in a system.

Thanks,
Ron-C
Click to expand...

It is true that rooms have a huge impact on the quality of sound.

Sometimes when people show pictures of their very expensive (and maybe even well chosen and well matched) set-up in a huge room with no furniture, nothing hanging on the walls made of concrete, high up ceiling, huge glass areas and maybe even some musical instrument playing along when the stereo is trying to deliver it leaves me puzzled.
I even come by pictures on AK with TT's placed on top of a subwoofer.
How smart is that?

However, the electronic compensation will not address this properly.
It will be like fitting F1 slicks tyres on a Russian Lada car from the mid 70's and fooling yourself to believe this will make it fast and well handling.

Digital room treatment is even making it worse because then all your fine articulation on the purely analog chain is chopped in pieces and put together again as if mincemeat ever will fool people to take it as a Rib-Eye Steak.

Adressing the room issues is to choose the room with steady floor, choose the room where it's possible to avoid playing into huge glass/window areas or at least blindfold the glass areas with curtains, avoid concrete walls, hang art or family pictures on the wall, have some soft sofas and chairs, carpets on the floor, stucco in the cieling, standing lamps in the corners, get your piano, drums, and guitars out of there and rehearse your own music in another room etc. etc.

Then speaker placement comes along.
Some speakers (most that is) need to be placed in distance from back and side walls. That includes distance to rack and furniture.
Other speakers (the few) are build for corner or backwall placement.

Room has to be fit for playing music. Stereo has to be fit as well.
It's not working well to match some gear that you later on have to compensate or correct to deal with issues.
I'd say that getting it right from the very start is a better cure.

"dolph"
 
I agree also with Ron! If you are stuck with a room problem, that persist after carefully worked to the best physical solution, then electronic room correction may be better than no correction at all. Also, sometimes like for example in a studio, the speakers are placed where they fit not thus ignoring the best spot. In this case electronic correction is used.

The problem with electronic room correction is that it should not be the principal correction.
 
AngelRa said:
The fact that you did not got an improvement when using room acoustic products only shows that you did not studied your room acoustic issues. To start, you may not even need them.

Do you know the frequency of your room modes? What about the severity?

Most people think that room treatment is like buying the stereo itself, simple and easy, but it is not. Also, there is no way to take the room out of the equation no matter how close you sit.
Click to expand...

Your right I may not need them. It may be possible to just use kick ass gear on the long wall of the room and have it blow your mind. My point was and is the nearfield reduces the rooms effect on sound quality while a cheap turntable destroys it, at any distance.

A friend of mine owns one of the best listening rooms imaginable. He designed and tested speakers in there for years. I own several of the speakers he made and have heard them at his place and mine and they sound good in both places.

I understand the room plays a roll. You think it's the most important role? great! I on the other hand live in my house and use the space I have the best I can. Until I have a room that I can turn into a dedicated sound room I will have to assume that the room is a constant and the gear is a variable. And my variables are sounding pretty good. :thmbsp:

In other words I don't know or care what the frequency of my room modes are or their severity in my room. In fact none of my buddies know or care either. But I can tell you when a TT sounds like a POS anywhere and everytime. Which brings me back to a statement I made earlier in this thread. I truly believe the source first guys hear upstream in their systems and the speaker guys hear the speakers and the room. I use the speakers to hear the source. The TT and the Preamp are what gets my attention. I can hear a cheap TT and a claustrophobic pre a mile away. If the speakers are capable of letting the source breath I'm more than happy. That is why I've said many times that I could live with my little Dayton-Wright LCM1's on my main systems forever and be happy. The reason I use the XG-8 Mk 3's is because I can.
marc mc
 
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Go ahead and get good speakers first. That way as you upgrade your source, your speakers will also improve. Their great sound has always been there. You just move yourself up to as good as they can get.
 
I was speaking of using Room Perfect in the new McIntosh MEN220. I have now used it on enough speakers in over ten rooms to understand the increase in sound quality possible. From my experience it is both powerful, natural sounding and allows you to get much closer to the music.
I had one very well regarded speaker manufacturer say to me, 'boy are you guys going to sell a lot of those boxes and make people very happy!'

Thanks,
Ron-C
 
ron-c said:
I was speaking of using Room Perfect in the new McIntosh MEN220. I have now used it on enough speakers in over ten rooms to understand the increase in sound quality possible. From my experience it is both powerful, natural sounding and allows you to get much closer to the music.
I had one very well regarded speaker manufacturer say to me, 'boy are you guys going to sell a lot of those boxes and make people very happy!'

Thanks,
Ron-C
Click to expand...

McIntosh MEN220 room-correction system ($4500 USD)

Cripes Ron it's hard enough to get the TT forum guys to spend more than $100 on a cartridge. lol

marc mc
 
the best example of how having good gear comes together....
A few years ago i was at a sickly hi end audio shop..(ie..$200 for a 4 foot pair of speaker wires!) anywho...they had a fully set up theater style room. in the front, good hi end speakers spread out nicely, all hi end gear, amp,cd player and that's it. He played Tracy chapmans "gimme one reason" song , i had my eyes closed and listened....and my god! it sounded like the band was playing right in front of me, no joke!
that's when it's all put together nicely!
fabs
 
marc mc said:
Your right I may not need them. It may be possible to just use kick ass gear on the long wall of the room and have it blow your mind. My point was and is the nearfield reduces the rooms effect on sound quality while a cheap turntable destroys it, at any distance.

A friend of mine owns one of the best listening rooms imaginable. He designed and tested speakers in there for years. I own several of the speakers he made and have heard them at his place and mine and they sound good in both places.

I understand the room plays a roll. You think it's the most important role? great! I on the other hand live in my house and use the space I have the best I can. Until I have a room that I can turn into a dedicated sound room I will have to assume that the room is a constant and the gear is a variable. And my variables are sounding pretty good. :thmbsp:

In other words I don't know or care what the frequency of my room modes are or their severity in my room. In fact none of my buddies know or care either. But I can tell you when a TT sounds like a POS anywhere and everytime. Which brings me back to a statement I made earlier in this thread. I truly believe the source first guys hear upstream in their systems and the speaker guys hear the speakers and the room. I use the speakers to hear the source. The TT and the Preamp are what gets my attention. I can hear a cheap TT and a claustrophobic pre a mile away. If the speakers are capable of letting the source breath I'm more than happy. That is why I've said many times that I could live with my little Dayton-Wright LCM1's on my main systems forever and be happy. The reason I use the XG-8 Mk 3's is because I can.
marc mc
Click to expand...

You have good valid point. In your case, you tweak your stereo since your room is fixed.

I have a friend that did nothing to his room and it sounded better than any room I have ever tried! It was a small studio with a lot of stuff on it. Even a computer speaker sang in that room. In his case, like yours, the room dimensions, furniture, wall materials, etc. just happen to be perfect. He used to believe that his great sound was because of a good system. But, he moved to a new house and the great sound was gone. Now he is scratching his head. He is replacing component by component to find that sound again. He knows it is a room problem but he is stuck with the new room and is unwilling to try to work out the problem at the source.

We are at the mercy of the room acoustics we liked or not. People that got good sound and did nothing but get a good stereo are lucky (like you and your friend). But that luck can turn by something as simple as rearranging furniture, or cleaning up a mess. There is another thread about a member that removed 1 piece of furniture from his room and the sound was ruin.

If by any chance you have to move to a new house and you get a room with a very strong dominant mode (which is very common in bedrooms) you will be so disappointed because no matter what you do to your stereo it will always sound bad.

I am sure there is a lot of people that buy expensive systems an get frustrated, never realizing that it was the room. Lots of people that try the hobby and walk away, because the only advice they get is to spend more money on equipment in a loosing battle with bad room acoustics. How many times you hear "This sounded so good in the show room, but not in my home". I am sure there are more people with room acoustic problems than the fewer lucky ones here.
 
So how does one go about figuring what room treatment will or will not work for their room? How do they know where to place it? How do you figure it all out? Do you need tools to analyze the room?

The only thing I know for sure I need to do is get rid of my CRT TV between the speakers and place a panel TV on the wall. (I don't even want to get a new TV for TV entertainment, but I will in order to get better audio sound) Now my system sounds better when I stand up, because the TV will be lower than my ears (my speakers are 6' tall)
 
Peter_Klim said:
So how does one go about figuring what room treatment will or will not work for their room? How do they know where to place it? How do you figure it all out? Do you need tools to analyze the room?
Click to expand...
You can do a lot with your ears if you know what to listen for.
Here are a few of the sites i have bookmarked from the time i was looking into the subject. Educating myself required a lot of reading.

http://www.silcom.com/~aludwig/Room_acoustics.html
http://paws.kettering.edu/~drussell/demos.html
http://www.ultimateavmag.com/news/10388/index.html
http://geekwithfamily.com/2006/09/13/audiophile/why-you-must-acoustically-treat-your-hi-fi-room/
 
Peter_Klim said:
So how does one go about figuring what room treatment will or will not work for their room? How do they know where to place it? How do you figure it all out? Do you need tools to analyze the room?

The only thing I know for sure I need to do is get rid of my CRT TV between the speakers and place a panel TV on the wall. (I don't even want to get a new TV for TV entertainment, but I will in order to get better audio sound) Now my system sounds better when I stand up, because the TV will be lower than my ears (my speakers are 6' tall)
Click to expand...

The TV, either flat panel or crt is not good, but in most cases it will stay.

The links given by me and other members are good reading. Give them a serious read.

Now to give you a little jump start:

Room acoustics can be divided into 2 main problem areas: RESONANCE and REFLECTION

RESONANCE
In practical terms is the tendency of the room to like some frequencies and hate others. Resonance can create havoc with bass fidelity. All rooms have it and it is solely dependent on room dimensions. The effect of resonance is embedded on the sound at any listening distance from very close to far away. Room resonance is called ROOM MODES. Now having room modes that are nicely spaced is a very good thing. Having room modes piled up on the same frequency is a very bad thing. Some people are lucky and get a room with nice dimensions some are not. If your room is one of the unlucky ones you are going to need to either change it or remedy it. Now how do you know your room modes? For that you will need a calculator, or a room mode calculator program, or a spreadsheet made for it.

Use this: http://www.mcsquared.com/metricmodes.htm (remember dimensions are in meters)

The most important room modes are the AXIAL ones. Take note of all the modes below 100Hz and organize them from lower frequency to highest. Observe how many are close (or piled up) (for example 34.5, 35.2, 36.9 are very close and will create a problem)

If you get 2 or more piled up then you may need to do some work. If you get a triple pile then you got a problem. The lower the frequency of the mode the more relevant it is. A pile up at 100Hz is not as important as a pile up at 30Hz.

Once you determine your room modes and you have a problem then you have some choices for correction or remedy. Correction will be to re-shape or change room. Remedy is to apply bass traps to the corners of the room and to locate the speakers so the bass phase of one speaker works with the phase of the other speaker to cancel or reduce the highest peak of the worst room mode pile up. This is quite complicated and in many cases impossible to achieve without computer help. For that use CARA. CARA is a computer program that figure out the position of the speakers and listening spot. The program models the room and computes millions of combinations in a search for optimal placement. It takes days running to find solution to a difficult room.

REFLECTION
Like light in the mirror, sound reflects on the walls and objects including TV screens and speaker baffles. Reflections are the easiest of the problems to correct. From all the reflections the ones that need attention are the FIRST REFLECTIONS. These are the ones that bounced only once before reaching the listener. For a stereo setup there are 2 reflection spots in each surface of a room. 2 on the left wall, 2 on the right wall, 2 on the floor, on the ceiling, and 2 on the back wall. First you need to locate them. To do so you will need help or an assistant. Sit in the listening spot and have the assistant glide a mirror on the surfaces until you see the tweeter of a speaker. Mark the spots with a pencil.

Place any sound absorbing material covering the reflection spots. I recommend to use Sonex or Auralex but almost anything will do. Hanging fluffy carpet, canvas paintings (no glass), pillows, teddy bears... The coverings should be no smaller than 4 to 6 sq ft. Do not cover anything else, unless needed.

Keep the room full and busy it helps a lot.

Good Luck!
 
Brett a said:
You can do a lot with your ears if you know what to listen for.
Here are a few of the sites i have bookmarked from the time i was looking into the subject. Educating myself required a lot of reading.

http://www.silcom.com/~aludwig/Room_acoustics.html
http://paws.kettering.edu/~drussell/demos.html
http://www.ultimateavmag.com/news/10388/index.html
http://geekwithfamily.com/2006/09/13/audiophile/why-you-must-acoustically-treat-your-hi-fi-room/
Click to expand...

I have a good feeling I will be spending another 2 weeks straight of not getting any sleep due to reading all these website learning about sound treatment the way I did last month before buying my TT. Thanks!! :)
 
AngelRa said:
The TV, either flat panel or crt is not good, but in most cases it will stay.

The links given by me and other members are good reading. Give them a serious read.

Now to give you a little jump start:

Room acoustics can be divided into 2 main problem areas: RESONANCE and REFLECTION

RESONANCE
In practical terms is the tendency of the room to like some frequencies and hate others. Resonance can create havoc with bass fidelity. All rooms have it and it is solely dependent on room dimensions. The effect of resonance is embedded on the sound at any listening distance from very close to far away. Room resonance is called ROOM MODES. Now having room modes that are nicely spaced is a very good thing. Having room modes piled up on the same frequency is a very bad thing. Some people are lucky and get a room with nice dimensions some are not. If your room is one of the unlucky ones you are going to need to either change it or remedy it. Now how do you know your room modes? For that you will need a calculator, or a room mode calculator program, or a spreadsheet made for it.

Use this: http://www.mcsquared.com/metricmodes.htm (remember dimensions are in meters)

The most important room modes are the AXIAL ones. Take note of all the modes below 100Hz and organize them from lower frequency to highest. Observe how many are close (or piled up) (for example 34.5, 35.2, 36.9 are very close and will create a problem)

If you get 2 or more piled up then you may need to do some work. If you get a triple pile then you got a problem. The lower the frequency of the mode the more relevant it is. A pile up at 100Hz is not as important as a pile up at 30Hz.

Once you determine your room modes and you have a problem then you have some choices for correction or remedy. Correction will be to re-shape or change room. Remedy is to apply bass traps to the corners of the room and to locate the speakers so the bass phase of one speaker works with the phase of the other speaker to cancel or reduce the highest peak of the worst room mode pile up. This is quite complicated and in many cases impossible to achieve without computer help. For that use CARA. CARA is a computer program that figure out the position of the speakers and listening spot. The program models the room and computes millions of combinations in a search for optimal placement. It takes days running to find solution to a difficult room.

REFLECTION
Like light in the mirror, sound reflects on the walls and objects including TV screens and speaker baffles. Reflections are the easiest of the problems to correct. From all the reflections the ones that need attention are the FIRST REFLECTIONS. These are the ones that bounced only once before reaching the listener. For a stereo setup there are 2 reflection spots in each surface of a room. 2 on the left wall, 2 on the right wall, 2 on the floor, on the ceiling, and 2 on the back wall. First you need to locate them. To do so you will need help or an assistant. Sit in the listening spot and have the assistant glide a mirror on the surfaces until you see the tweeter of a speaker. Mark the spots with a pencil.

Place any sound absorbing material covering the reflection spots. I recommend to use Sonex or Auralex but almost anything will do. Hanging fluffy carpet, canvas paintings (no glass), pillows, teddy bears... The coverings should be no smaller than 4 to 6 sq ft. Do not cover anything else, unless needed.

Keep the room full and busy it helps a lot.

Good Luck!
Click to expand...

Very cool read! Thanks for the heads start ;) Lucky me that I'm divorced so no one can tell me: "Honey, what the heck are you doing to MY living room!!" :)

Btw, what did you mean by this: "...the tv...is not good, but in most cases it will stay." Are you saying most people will keep their TV between their speakers? Mine is currently in a straight line between the speakers, which are with their backs about 4' away from the front wall. The new TV will be placed on that wall...or when I do critical listening, I will place temporarily place it on the floor - if i get a light small 30ish screen - I have a projector in the other room so I really don't care/need a large tv.

Oh, thanks for the tip on entering the measurements in meters. It made me realize there was a link option to enter it in english too.

I'll keep you posted!
 
Yes, most people (me included) will trade some sound quality for movies and TV. Also, consider that the primary reflection in the wall behind the speakers and on the TV may be the weakest and least important since most speakers are front firing only. This is a concern mainly for dipoles, electrostatics, and other rear firing speakers.

Forgot to give you probably the most important link: http://www.cara.de/

I am glad to help, keep me posted.
 
The CARA 2.2 Plus Power Pack is 69 euros. I do not know how much is that in dollars. It is a pain to buy it because is a company in Germany. I know it is all worth it, but if you cannot get a copy then let me know, I can do the room analysis for you in my PC.
 
I thought I would add an example to this thread. I recently came into the possesion of Dayton-Wright XG-8's. Mine are the final and best version that Michael Wright made. These speakers are a revelation to me and are clearly better than all my other speakers and the others are not bad. I run the XG's with the gear listed in my sig and that is the only gear that I have used them with. When I unhooked the RT-7's which I love the XG's beat them in every area except deep bass.

I made another rack for this system and while I was doing the change around I thought it was a good oportunity to try the gear that I was bringing in from my garage. So I ran my Rega/Origin Live/DL103 - Bryston 1B- Acurus A250 through the XG's. Guess what? The magic of these speakers was gone. And by that I mean the speakers at that level could be beat by others I have with my main gear. So starting at the amp, first I hooked the VAC's up instead of the Acurus, it was a bit better. Then I added the Joule in place of the Bryston, better again. Then I added the VPI instead of the Rega, and all the magic was back.

marc mc
 
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