How important is the room?

[DaveyF]

That's a big room. My guess would be that the way the system is set up in that room, there is a lot of space for the direct sound to travel, beyond your ears, before it hits anything. So you're hearing mostly direct sound from the speakers, and the first reflection are coming late enough not to interfere much with your perceptions. You can accomplish this with smaller systems in smaller rooms, listening closer. You can get it with room treatment. Or, if you're lucky, you can get really close with a lot of soft stuff in a cluttered space . I use a combination of a near field set-up and the soft clutter in a small room principles. Sadly, the wall directly behind my listening position was covered with my wife's shelves, which were filled with all kinds of stuff of various textures, angles, density, etc...a clutter storage system, if you will. She cleaned it up last week and now I have a slight glare in the upper midrange when I turn up past a certain point. I could treat that wall, but it's much easier to just turn down a bit and wait for her to fill the space up again, which is inevitable.

Tim

I too use a very small room and listen in near-field. Since my room is treated I am getting a very good sound....BUT, and here's the interesting thing, the room I heard yesterday was contributing so much to that system that I am now of the opinion that perhaps the room makes up more than 80% of the total. In this instance, I would say closer to 95+%
The room wasn't treated at all and the system was placed haphazardly in it
I do think that the size of this room has something to do with it, but I have heard large rooms before that don't hold a candle to this one. True of well treated rooms as well!

The other question to ponder is this: since this room may have had almost perfect acoustics, so much so that a mid-fi system can scale heights of greatness How many of us have heard such a room so that we know what to aim our re-creations at? Additionally, does the size of the room become so paramount that anything less than say 30'X25' with a 20' ceiling become a compromise???

Tim, without having a frame of reference like this room, it has to be almost impossible to truly hear what your system can accomplish. That's the amazing thing.....how many of us have any idea as to the capability of our gear, or lack thereof?

Lots of thoughts and as you can see, plenty of confusion...

 

[NorthStar]

The Room is everything! It's the central soundstage, the foundation, the equilibrium,
the atmosphere of the space, the dimensional resource, the essence ...
Where the emotions are taking place ... Where the Music is doing its multiples tricks ...

The Room is the Refuge, the protected shelter.

 

[fas42]

Tim, without having a frame of reference like this room, it has to be almost impossible to truly hear what your system can accomplish. That's the amazing thing.....how many of us have any idea as to the capability of our gear, or lack thereof?

Lots of thoughts and as you can see, plenty of confusion...

Davey, to repeat myself, that combination of gear will acquit itself extremely well. For a start, it won't have any trouble doing realistic dynamics, which for me, is 80% of the picture. I would suggest you could take that very same setup to a very conventional listening space, and it would still impress ...

Frank

 

[NorthStar]

...That's How Important The Room Is (see post #22, just above). :b

P.S. Hi Frank! :b

 

[fas42]

P.S. Hi Frank! :b

Cheers, Roger, woops, Bob!. (guess it "proves", by virtue of an extensive, scientifically conducted DBT that I'm as big a nutter as Tim reckons I am ...)

Though where I'm coming from, Bob, the room I'm in is irrelevant. For me, when the system is in its stride the listening space is completely taken out of the picture, the ambience, acoustic, space, whatever, of the recording completely takes over; it dominates totally. So, my room becomes a huge cathedral, or an intimate jazz club, purely generated by the acoustic clues projected by the recording. Another way, of course, to get there is with one of the multi-channel devices, or extra DSP processing, but 2 channel, if working properly, will do it fine all by itself ..

Frank

 

[NorthStar]

I see you. And I totally agree with your viewpoint Frank. :b

 

[DaveyF]

Frank, not to put a dampener on things, BUT I have heard this same gear in a less perfect room and it ain't nothing to shout home about.
IMHO, if you put great gear in a less than great room, you just don't get a great sound, OTOH like I heard yesterday...you put mediocre gear in a great room and the rest is history.
So to say that the room is irrelevant is again IMO not a true statement, unless of course you have a more vivid imagination than I do and rely more on imagination than reality

 

[NorthStar]

Dave (DaveyF), I much prefer your viewpoint than Frank's one. :b

 

[fas42]

Frank, not to put a dampener on things, BUT I have heard this same gear in a less perfect room and it ain't nothing to shout home about.
IMHO, if you put great gear in a less than great room, you just don't get a great sound, OTOH like I heard yesterday...you put mediocre gear in a great room and the rest is history.
So to say that the room is irrelevant is again IMO not a true statement, unless of course you have a more vivid imagination than I do and rely more on imagination than reality

I wonder whether it was "exactly" the same units ...

As I pointed out, this gear hits the right spot in getting realistic volume, which for me would the starting point. Where it will go off the rails is to sound shrill, overbearing, if not tuned or tweaked to some degree and if the room is also helping to amplify or accentuate the inadequacies. There is a very fine line for audio systems: if not tuned to an inch of their lives, they will sound too dull or too bright, all depending on the recording.

The great gear will work, but it has to be absolutely right: the better the intrinsic quality is, the more obvious it will be that something doesn't gell when not quite set up correctly. Good recordings will be fine, but "difficult" recordings will sound terrible.

As I've mentioned other times there are at least two ways to get good sound: make sure the system itself works properly in every aspect and then the room environment is not important; or, have the room compensate for problem areas in the sound by either treating it, or having a "brilliant" room in the first place. For people who aren't able to fully resolve system issues, then going down the "good" room method is a perfectly reasonable and sensible thing to do.

So in that sense the room is irrelevant, OR relevant ...

Frank

 

[NorthStar]

Frank, we are always referring to GOOD QUALITY music recordings here
(the bad ones we simply don't play them, well at least I don't).

:b

* You probably played some music while you were young outside in your backyard right?
How important was that outside space Frank? Irrelevant? ...I thought so too. :b

P.S. Did you just add up "OR relevant ..." to your above post Frank?
Or I might just have missed it; not that relevant anyway. ...Or is it?

 

[ironmine]

Today, I had the pleasure of listening to a mid-fi system in a VERY large room that was absolutely amazing acoustically. The room had a 20'+ ceiling and was probably 30'X25' with a fireplace at the end spanning the full height of the room. The fireplace was finished in copper and the hearth was made of brick. The system was a Denon system feeding Klipsch speakers and a Klipsch subwoofer...Most impressive, so much so that I thought the bass and the mids were almost lifelike

Oddly, I had heard this same room with a superb high-end system about 25 years ago and it impressed the heck out of me even then. What struck me today was how immensely important the room is to the overall sound, naturally I had known this before, BUT when you hear a system like this being able to produce a sound that many of us cannot get with mega buck gear in a lesser room...it's an eye-opener.

YES! YES! YES!

It's such a pity that so many people in audiophilia do not understand the importance of a room.

I had the same experience as you. I went to a friend who has a room 2-3 times larger than mine (he lives in a two-family detached house, while I live in a typical apartmetn in the usual Soviet-era bearing-wall high-rise building). He has a modest system consisting of a budget NAD AVR, some Quad entry-level speakers and a sub. He's source is a media-player (!). The system sounds great, just great! It's a pure joy to listen to it.

Like someone said: "It's better to listen to a mid-fi system in a hi-end room, than to a hi-end system in a mid-fi room"

If I suddenly win $50,000 in a lottery, I will spend it on room treatments rather than buy some expensive components.

 

[DaveyF]

As I've mentioned other times there are at least two ways to get good sound: make sure the system itself works properly in every aspect and then the room environment is not important;

Frank

Frank, what you are saying really seems illogical to me.. For two reasons: 1) Because, IF you are able to make the system "perfect" and said system resides in a terrible acoustic room and you are happy with it then that's ok, BUT- think how much happier you would be if said same system resided in a great room, like I described!
and 2) because what you are saying is that a compromised set up is ok, so long as you believe that the system components are working to their fullest...room be damned -- No??

 

[fas42]

Yes, a "perfect" system in a "perfect" room would be the best of all possible worlds, but my "druthers" would be for something approaching the first option. Take this as an example: a live, top notch Spanish guitarist playing in perfect acoustics, bliss! The same guitarist playing in a really nothing environment, echoing badly say: you would still enjoy the quality of his playing and the tone of the instrument, you would be able to listen past the bad acoustic and still enjoy the musical message.

Then, take a rather lethargic and somewhat inept player, on a far less harmonious instrument, in a magnificent acoustic: the sense of the live instrument would still be something worth experiencing and pleasurable. But put that player in a poor acoustic, and it could be musical hell!!

Does that make sense?

Frank

 

[DaveyF]

Interesting analogy, Frank. Only problem is we are listening to a reproduction of a musical event in our systems and NOT to a 'Live' instrument or instrumentalist. Therefore, when I listen to say- Pink Floyd Dark Side of the moon, the effects and the overall sound will be far better reproduced in the great room than in the terrible room....even IF the system is completely optimized that is playing in the terrible room and the system in the great room is not optimized at all.

Otherwise, i accept your analogy.

Sorry, BUT I really do have to put more value on the room and its accompanying acoustic than in the gear. Perhaps we agree, the best of all worlds is the great system in the great room.

 

[fas42]

Frank, we are always referring to GOOD QUALITY music recordings here
(the bad ones we simply don't play them, well at least I don't).

:b

* You probably played some music while you were young outside in your backyard right?
How important was that outside space Frank? Irrelevant? ...I thought so too. :b

P.S. Did you just add up "OR relevant ..." to your above post Frank?
Or I might just have missed it; not that relevant anyway. ...Or is it?

The angle I'm coming from, Bob, is to make ALL the music I listen to sound good -- some people will say, and have said, this is a silly thing to do -- but there is an important reason for this "madness". And that is, if you do it the right way, in other words not "dumbing" the sound quality down, then EVERY recording you put on sounds good, is pleasurable to listen to.

I'll give you an example. The friend I'm helping put on an LP last time of an Australian group from the early 80's. Very high energy, fascinating playing around with the knobs in the studio, all sorts of effects, echo, etc -- I wasn't familiar with it, but it was tremendous to listen to! Turned out that it had been produced by one of the most notorious new wave gurus of that era; in other words it was an album that Jack, for example, wouldn't have tolerated listening to.

So, by the standards of a lot of people here that was a "bad" recording, but it didn't sound such. No work has been done to fix room acoustics; all energy has been put into making the system reproduce more cleanly.

It was irrelevant (if system worked well), OR relevant (if system needed a helping hand) ..

Frank

 

[treitz3]

To me, the room is THE single most detrimental part of the equation for realistic playback of reproduced audio.

 

[DaveyF]

To me, the room is THE single most detrimental part of the equation for realistic playback of reproduced audio.

Yes it can be, BUT it can also be the most advantageous part.Just IMHO.
Again, IMHO, we need to make it ( or at least try to make it) the most advantageous.

 

[fas42]

Interesting analogy, Frank. Only problem is we are listening to a reproduction of a musical event in our systems and NOT to a 'Live' instrument or instrumentalist. Therefore, when I listen to say- Pink Floyd Dark Side of the moon, the effects and the overall sound will be far better reproduced in the great room than in the terrible room....even IF the system is completely optimized that is playing in the terrible room and the system in the great room is not optimized at all.

Otherwise, i accept your analogy.

Sorry, BUT I really do have to put more value on the room and its accompanying acoustic than in the gear. Perhaps we agree, the best of all worlds is the great system in the great room.

In the case of a recording that deliberately makes use of acoustic effects that makes perfect sense: that's why I used the analogy of a simple guitarist, all you have to "play with" in that instance is a very straightfoward and "naked" sound.

Let's call it quits -- we're in agreement!!

Frank

 

[DaveyF]

In the case of a recording that deliberately makes use of acoustic effects that makes perfect sense: that's why I used the analogy of a simple guitarist, all you have to "play with" in that instance is a very straightfoward and "naked" sound.

Let's call it quits -- we're in agreement!!

Frank

 

[treitz3]

Yes it can be, BUT it can also be the most advantageous part.Just IMHO.
Again, IMHO, we need to make it ( or at least try to make it) the most advantageous.

Hello, you are 100% correct IME. I have heard my rig in many rooms and it can be advantageous or detrimental. Grrr. A post will be made soon on what folks think is the best custom built room/dimensions/substrate, blah, blah, blah.....

This is just too important an aspect of what it is I'm looking for. Unfortunately, the other spaces I have had the absolute pleasure of listening to my own rig in sound better than where it is currently located. Dag Nabbit *bangs head*. I do know what it is capable of and I am looking forward to the day my worst deficiency becomes my attribute.

Until then, I will still enjoy the music. I hope all of you will as well.