I've had a dedicated basement listening room designed by Rives and voiced by Jim Smith that worked very well. I'm looking for a house with a sufficiently large, closable room for my Rockport Altairs (Let me know if you are selling a fitted out home...), but mostly find open floor plans that look like they will have echos and lack of bass. Besides building a dedicated room (a possible option), what can I do?
Can open floor plans work? I'm moving to Phoenix and few homes have closable rooms or basements for mostly/dedicated listening rooms
- Thread starter DRPye
- Start date
I don't imagine you like the idea of putting acoustic treatment on stands around your desired listening area as an option, but that seems like the only workaround I have seen to enclose and open floor plan space
Also want to add that the good news about open floor plans is that a lot of bass escapes into the rest of the house, so you don't have to worry about a lot of the muddiness and "dead room" issues guys with poorly-treated rooms and over-treated-with-absorption rooms suffer.
I hope you'll consider membership in the Arizona Audio Video Club.. We meet monthly (except in December) at local rooms, hi-end retailers, etc. You could e-mail me at jeffreybehr(at)cox(dot)net after you arrive.
In terms of hearing the room an open floor plan tends to always be a better fit conceptually. I say conceptually because most closed rooms are smaller and you have to deal with more room modes and fix those. However, they tend to be symmetrical so you can treat equally and get it dialed in more methodically.
Open rooms usually extend into other rooms ie non symmetrical, and depending on the floor plan may have other non desirables like windows etc. If you have a floor plan in mind share it and we can do our best to give feedback when appropriate to help you make a good choice
I prefer open floor plans. But it's true you might want to augment bass more...
Is bass actually better in an open plan as it avoids the build up of room modes? When Rives designed my last room he said I couldn't use an open floor plan area as the room could not be pressurized for effective bass (and was asymmetrical as noted). I prefer a dedicated room and I'm assuming I would need to at least treat/design a sealable room to preclude room modes and manage reflections.
The larger the room the farther down modes and nodes move in frequency.
I call this an advantage. But if your speaker is designed for lots of room gain it might sound slightly lean. The more expensive the speaker, the less it seems like they compensate for room gain because they expect people to have larger rooms.
I call this an advantage. But if your speaker is designed for lots of room gain it might sound slightly lean. The more expensive the speaker, the less it seems like they compensate for room gain because they expect people to have larger rooms.