Having a bigger space for listening is brilliant opportunity, I really wasn’t talking about small scale spaces… the best residential listening room I’ve encountered belongs to a friend and I’ve listened in it plenty and would love a room like his as it has plenty more scale than my space and also has great proportions and height to work with.
I regret the artificial reference but it was genuinely not meant as a negative in intention or meant to be judgemental at all. It’s not my nature to be judgemental like that. It would have been better in hindsight to say a less unconventional residential room style instead but the original intention was just to point to the difference in the style being an overtly specialised room rather than a more typical room in spirit. Poor wording definitely mea culpa… I’m used to working in design analysis so the language used to capture the spirit of a style of a room is genuinely intended as non judgemental and respectful of clients preferences and choices on style.
The main weight of the point was just that more obvious room treatment isn’t what I choose for myself and it comes out of a quite conscious strategy to frame an experience in a certain way that is more comfortable for my mindset and that it has psychoacoustic benefits that work better for me feeling at home in listening rooms where treatments are invisible or less overt or less high function acoustic kind of aesthetic. The why of that I’m not exactly sure. It’s also not just about the materiality and features of room acoustic treatments. I could draw up a functional diagram of a listening space that doesn’t aim to be a typical theatre listening layout because for me it allows for a more relaxed framing of seating and standpoints and view lines and aims to create interactivity and at times a shared listening space.
I recognise that my choices do cause constraints and possibly sonic limitations or additional challenge in getting best sound but the case for listening value of a more normalised room style isn’t that often made beyond its a preference for some. That acoustically treated rooms can look a certain way is often discussed and the case of that value is more often made.
Looking back I think of the rooms I’ve had really great experiences in and quite a few of the better rooms I have enjoyed music in mostly did just integrate normal furnishings and not utilised visible or obvious acoustic treatments. If they then could be bettered still with bass traps or acoustic tiles I can’t say Mike but the summative experience in best listening for me was all I was referring to.
Graham ... it is all just a design problem to be solved .. what are the acoustic targets, what is the room use, what are the decor restrictions and what is the budget .
This applies to concert halls, recording studios, dedicated rooms and living rooms and the principles are surprisingly similar as sound doesn't know where it is
Attenuated first reflections , absorbing excess bass and appropriatly damping the space are all thats needed
A good mastering studio should be similar to a good living room, live but clear. Sadly they are rare, most being built based on ideas from the 90's. Sean Olive recently did a study of bass in quite a few studios and the results were appaling .. not saying there arent some great studios but a lot of our music is mastered in poor rooms.
Living rooms are often open to other spaces and are built with lossy frame and sheet construction and dont need bass absorbtion. You can easily build the general absorbtion and relection reduction into the fabric of the building .. the more discreet the more costly or space eating.
Achieving these quite specific items with furniture is unlikely to be optimal but can be quite good .. after all the good performance of older halls is supposed, to some extent, be the results of attached pilasters and all the deep decorative molding reducing first reflections.
So your baroque revival living room might sound great
When use a well sealed room like Mike's it becomes way more difficult to control bass but can achieve amazing clarity through low ambient noise. It is possible to make these very pleasant spaces.. Bobvins and Mikes rooms are good examples.
Speaker radiation pattern can make a difference but easy enough to design for all comers.
One of the polarsing features of the eternal debate is the ugliness of off the shelf devices when placed in a living room. I think the industry needs to step up in this area
Retuurning to the topic of speaker placement I suspect the fine adjustments of speaker set up compensate for small irregularities between left and right.. when you see an acourate sweep of left and right in a perfectly symmetrical space there are all these fine non correlated wobbles.
But a good room is always going to make it dramatically easier you would think
Phil
