Carlos, with all the different setups and changes two questions come to mind.
1. Room acoustics and placement, how much attention does it gather?
2. Scratches, dents and connector fatigue, how do you avoid it?
Good questions; I have five or seven areas throughout my house where I have equipment installations. These all have varied room acoustics. My 35 plus years in the high-end audio hobby, which includes a 12 year exploration into the world of high-end mastering studios, combined with my professional career and academic background in physics and electrical engineering have taught me that every listening environment is not only different but most importantly dynamic. Without getting into the technical details, I will just give you a little nibble to ponder upon:
Sound travels at different speeds depending on the density of the surrounding air it is traveling through. Cold air is denser than warm air thus, travels slower than it would if the air was warmer. Temperature can have a major influence. Temperatures might vary wildly between listening environments and as the listening session progresses and the room warms up.
The speed of sound at room temperature is 346 meters per second. At freezing temperatures sound travels at 331 meters per second. In warmer rooms with solid state Class A equipment or tube equipment the temperature of the air is warmer and the speed of sound faster.
V = 331m/s + (0.6m/s/C) * T
Where V is the speed of sound and T is the temperature of the air. This formula finds the average speed of sound for any given temperature (Celsius).
The speed of sound is also affected by other factors such as humidity and air pressure.
As you can see there is much more to room acoustics besides golden ratio dimensions, diffraction, absorption, reflective surfaces, bass traps and ceiling heights.
To get to the punch line, what I’m getting at is that I’m not a subscriber into the need or requirement for purpose built dedicated rooms or extreme acoustical tweaking or make overs. While I do have dedicated areas through my house to install and listen to my systems, including a very large dedicated listening room that houses my reference system and seven other systems, I am less concerned about controlling the number of parameters that I cannot practically control. What matters is the end result, the convolution of the resultant vector of the acoustical conditions, as a step function, and the sound of the playback reproduction system, in other words how it sounds in the room in the listening environment. I think that many in this hobby lack technical acumen and simply follow trends such as these elaborate purpose built rooms that you so often see on this and other forums. There are better ways to achieve better sound if you simply better understand what is technically going on and all the factors involved.
For your second question, how to avoid scratches, dents and connector fatigue: in my world, I avoid this by having all aspects of the equipment handling, set-up, use and maintenance be under my control. While the equipment is under my control, no one else gets to touch it or use it. I have dedicated microfiber fabrics, which I also use on my Porsches and Moto-Guzzi’s, so I never handle the equipment with my bare hands to avoid tarnish. I also have dedicated specialty cleaners and polishers to maintain their good luster and appearance.
As you can gather, I’m not only OCD but an extremist in my exploration and dedication to the music and my musical reproduction playback equipment.
Getting back to your first question, a couple takeaways from the videos that I have posted on this thread, and the ones to follow as there are a number of my systems that I have yet to video, is that 1) I can achieve great sound from a variety of equipment, in different acoustical environments, to achieve quality systems 2) I like to own equipment that no one else has and would hate being a member of the flavor of the month club.
With respect to the videos, while these are not representative of the absolute sound being reproduced and heard in the room, they are sourced from the same music file and captured with the same recording device, which allows for a relative comparison and analysis of the reproduction and playback quality between my systems, in the snapshot of the listening conditions.
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