Magico Q7:" most impressive product in 23 years of TAS reviews" (R. Harley)

[microstrip]

I really don't think that one can determine whether a listening room is "good" or not just by looking at it.
(...)
Many of the programmed surrounds in my Yamaha receiver made from famous halls are not symmetric, some clearly have a slightly lopsided character either at front or on the sides. The need for symmetry may be more a psychological need than an actual acoustic requirement.

Although I accept that symmetry in a listening room is desirable, and a must for professionals who must master recordings, must be considered with good sense in consumers listening rooms. I have listened to great sounds in asymmetrical rooms, and was not aware that the room was asymmetrical at all. However, sometimes even a small piece of furniture or a small change of the lateral listening conditions can change a lot the whole balance of a recording, compromising its lifelike verisimilitude.

It is sad that we have the reviews of the Q7 but we miss the detailed measurements of this speaker off-axis response, that perhaps could explain why it sounded so good in Robert Harley room.

 

[NorthStar]

Lee,

I understand and respect your point, but although here in WBF we love debating the best speaker in the world, consumers - the people who read and should be the target of the reviews - do not want the best speaker in the world. They want the best sound in the world in their rooms. If you read Wilson Audio advice about room treatment you immediately understand he is not aiming to sell 400 XLF's to professionals or people having the ultimate listening room.

I enjoyed a lot the great series of articles of Jeff on the Music Vault and appreciate a lot his reviews in this room, learning a lot from them. But if I was picking a speaker based mainly on reviews I would prefer to choose something tested in Harley listening room. Unhappily it has more resemblance with my space than Jeff's fantastic room.

Every reviewer - and even a few people whom I am seriously jealous - who listened to classic, opera or acoustical music in SME fantastic listening room agreed that it was the best reproduced sound of their life. Does this make the modified Quad ESL63 the best speaker in the world for this type of music, the ones who should own?

Just wanting to show the other side of the moon ...

---- That's a great post Micro; it 'rings' absolutely true.

 

[NorthStar]

He's a hoax , no true audiophile would move to a lesser room ...

---- His previous home was nothing to compare to his gorgeous new one; just ask Robert. :b
...We ain't seen nothing yet, just be patient ....

 

[jap]

I really don't think that one can determine whether a listening room is "good" or not just by looking at it.

+1

 

[stereo]

I agree- it is impossible to know from a few pics if Harley room is good or not. But there are still some basic rules you can follow to "go in the right directions": Symmetry, right balance of reflective surfaces and absorption, treatment of corners for room nodes, no 18 feet high ceiling which will generate cathedral effect.... You can never know if a room will sound good, but there are rooms which are so badly designed you know they cannot sound good...
I agree with Jeff that symmetry is very important. But even in an unsymmetrical room, like Harley's room with a big opening on one side, you may end up very well losing on imaging precision (because of lack of symmetry), but gain on bass reproduction, if the connection with the other room plays a bass trap role at the right frequency.... Impossible to know before measuring it.

Specifically on the Q7, I have heard it in great rooms and in poor rooms. It always sounded from very good to amazing, but of course the better the room (and the upstream components), the better the sound! But a room will not transform a donkey in a racing horse... it just pushes back the limit of what is possible with a specific system.
I doubt that Alon Wolf will answer Lee email on "how the Q7 sounded in Harley's room", because 1) like all audio companies, he must be busy organizing for CES, 2) what he has heard depends a lot on specific equipment Robert was using. If the set up was done in one day, I don't think that there was enough time to really play with different amps, cables, sources and get the best out of the Q7. As I said already before, Q7 are so transparent to the source that they get much more impacted by change of upstream components than any other speakers I heard so far.

Being in the process of building an extensively treated room, I know that there is no guarantee of result. I have been in one Rives room and one other dedicated "dead end-live end" room custom designed by a famous acoustician, which both sounded and measured terrible. And I have been in a Rives room which was very nice. Luck is part of the equation. I have SMT's acoustician arriving at my home on Monday to take measurements, tune my 24 Helmholtz resonators and the big bass traps I have in ceiling and in the back wall... Let's see where we will end up... crossing fingers!
Here is where I stand today... 2 more weeks until I get a finished room!:

 

[A.wayne]

Stereo , this is one of those rare moments where "extensive " is an understatement ...

I agree- it is impossible to know from a few pics if Harley room is good or not. But there are still some basic rules you can follow to "go in the right directions": Symmetry, right balance of reflective surfaces and absorption, treatment of corners for room nodes, no 18 feet high ceiling which will generate cathedral effect.... You can never know if a room will sound good, but there are rooms which are so badly designed you know they cannot sound good...
I agree with Jeff that symmetry is very important. But even in an unsymmetrical room, like Harley's room with a big opening on one side, you may end up very well losing on imaging precision (because of lack of symmetry), but gain on bass reproduction, if the connection with the other room plays a bass trap role at the right frequency.... Impossible to know before measuring it.

Specifically on the Q7, I have heard it in great rooms and in poor rooms. It always sounded from very good to amazing, but of course the better the room (and the upstream components), the better the sound! But a room will not transform a donkey in a racing horse... it just pushes back the limit of what is possible with a specific system.
I doubt that Alon Wolf will answer Lee email on "how the Q7 sounded in Harley's room", because 1) like all audio companies, he must be busy organizing for CES, 2) what he has heard depends a lot on specific equipment Robert was using. If the set up was done in one day, I don't think that there was enough time to really play with different amps, cables, sources and get the best out of the Q7. As I said already before, Q7 are so transparent to the source that they get much more impacted by change of upstream components than any other speakers I heard so far.

Being in the process of building an extensively treated room, I know that there is no guarantee of result. I have been in one Rives room and one other dedicated "dead end-live end" room custom designed by a famous acoustician, which both sounded and measured terrible. And I have been in a Rives room which was very nice. Luck is part of the equation. I have SMT's acoustician arriving at my home on Monday to take measurements, tune my 24 Helmholtz resonators and the big bass traps I have in ceiling and in the back wall... Let's see where we will end up... crossing fingers!
Here is where I stand today... 2 more weeks until I get a finished room!:
View attachment 7333

 

[stereo]

Yes... I know, but I bought my flat because of the potential to build such a room. Was tired to be in rented places where it is very difficult to do optimal treatment.
I have a total of 88 diffusers or bass traps, a full container... Had to rent a crane to be able to bring them up to my roof top, and spent the last 2 weeks building up everything with 4 carpenters! Now the room seems much smaller: between the "box in box" construction and the diffusers, I have probably lost 4 feet in width, but not much of a problem as with this type of diffusers you can position speakers 50cm from the wall. I have not heard it yet with music, but played a bit of saxophone in it yesterday night, sounds much better than in any other room of my flat, and nobody can hear me playing thanks to the box in box
Now I am impatient to hear a pair of Magico in it!

 

[MylesBAstor]

I agree- it is impossible to know from a few pics if Harley room is good or not. But there are still some basic rules you can follow to "go in the right directions": Symmetry, right balance of reflective surfaces and absorption, treatment of corners for room nodes, no 18 feet high ceiling which will generate cathedral effect.... You can never know if a room will sound good, but there are rooms which are so badly designed you know they cannot sound good...
I agree with Jeff that symmetry is very important. But even in an unsymmetrical room, like Harley's room with a big opening on one side, you may end up very well losing on imaging precision (because of lack of symmetry), but gain on bass reproduction, if the connection with the other room plays a bass trap role at the right frequency.... Impossible to know before measuring it.

Specifically on the Q7, I have heard it in great rooms and in poor rooms. It always sounded from very good to amazing, but of course the better the room (and the upstream components), the better the sound! But a room will not transform a donkey in a racing horse... it just pushes back the limit of what is possible with a specific system.
I doubt that Alon Wolf will answer Lee email on "how the Q7 sounded in Harley's room", because 1) like all audio companies, he must be busy organizing for CES, 2) what he has heard depends a lot on specific equipment Robert was using. If the set up was done in one day, I don't think that there was enough time to really play with different amps, cables, sources and get the best out of the Q7. As I said already before, Q7 are so transparent to the source that they get much more impacted by change of upstream components than any other speakers I heard so far.

Being in the process of building an extensively treated room, I know that there is no guarantee of result. I have been in one Rives room and one other dedicated "dead end-live end" room custom designed by a famous acoustician, which both sounded and measured terrible. And I have been in a Rives room which was very nice. Luck is part of the equation. I have SMT's acoustician arriving at my home on Monday to take measurements, tune my 24 Helmholtz resonators and the big bass traps I have in ceiling and in the back wall... Let's see where we will end up... crossing fingers!
Here is where I stand today... 2 more weeks until I get a finished room!:
View attachment 7333

Have you ever heard a LEDE room sound good? I haven't and I don't get it. I remember when they were the rage back in the early '90s.

 

[stereo]

I am also not a big fan of LEDE... but go on a forum like gearslutz and you will see that all studio guys still rave about it.

 

[NorthStar]

-- What does 'LEDE' stand for?

 

[RBFC]

Live End Dead End. It's an older acoustic room template that has somewhat fallen from favor.

Lee

 

[NorthStar]

-- Thx Lee.

 

[stereo]

The principle of live end- dead end approach was to have the reflections nearest the speaker absorbed into a material with a large absorption coefficient (the "Dead End"), therefore forcing the sound waves to travel to the back of the room to reverberate off of a material chosen to reflect and diffuse the sound waves back to the listener (the "Live End"). The idea behind was to postpone reflections by minimum 20ms for the brain to be able to dissociate the direct sound and the room acoustics. I personally follow a VERY different acoustic school... we should open a different thread in the acoustic section to go further in details, this thread is about Q7

 

[andromedaaudio]

Keep the pics coming stereo, i like to see the end result .
what do you drive them with???

 

[A.wayne]

LEDE, was necessary when soffet mounting speakers , the studios i worked with started moving away from soffet mounting back in the early 90's and as such had started to work heavily with diffusing as oppose to absorbing with stand mounted speakers .

I'm sure most of the guys who still favor LEDE rooms are using soffet mounted speakers ....

The principle of live end- dead end approach was to have the reflections nearest the speaker absorbed into a material with a large absorption coefficient (the "Dead End"), therefore forcing the sound waves to travel to the back of the room to reverberate off of a material chosen to reflect and diffuse the sound waves back to the listener (the "Live End"). The idea behind was to postpone reflections by minimum 20ms for the brain to be able to dissociate the direct sound and the room acoustics. I personally follow a VERY different acoustic school... we should open a different thread in the acoustic section to go further in details, this thread is about Q7

 

[microstrip]

(...)
I doubt that Alon Wolf will answer Lee email on "how the Q7 sounded in Harley's room", because 1) like all audio companies, he must be busy organizing for CES, 2) what he has heard depends a lot on specific equipment Robert was using. If the set up was done in one day, I don't think that there was enough time to really play with different amps, cables, sources and get the best out of the Q7. As I said already before, Q7 are so transparent to the source that they get much more impacted by change of upstream components than any other speakers I heard so far.

Being in the process of building an extensively treated room, I know that there is no guarantee of result. I have been in one Rives room and one other dedicated "dead end-live end" room custom designed by a famous acoustician, which both sounded and measured terrible. And I have been in a Rives room which was very nice. Luck is part of the equation. I have SMT's acoustician arriving at my home on Monday to take measurements, tune my 24 Helmholtz resonators and the big bass traps I have in ceiling and in the back wall... Let's see where we will end up... crossing fingers!
Here is where I stand today... 2 more weeks until I get a finished room!:
View attachment 7333

Stereo,

I fully agree with you one the one day setup - fully optimizing a system takes a long time. Small details can make a large difference.

Your room looks really promising, even if the sentence Luck is part of the equation. is very true. The art of designing a listening room is still too hazardous - we have measurements that can find faults in rooms, but no measurements can tell you if a room sounds great in stereo. I think techniques to analyze multichannel performance are currently much more reliable, but stereo is still too dependent on the expertise of the designer. Most of the treated listening rooms where I have been sounded poor in my opinion, but since you have the support of people known for their previous good work, your probability of success is much higher.

It would be great if you could post taken measurements before and after the fine tuning of the SMT people.

 

[Peter Breuninger]

We had a Philly Phile with a self built LEDE room with 801s, he loved it. I didn't have enough time in to fully appreciate it.. it sounded somewhat bland, but I thought that was due to the 801s. I also agree that Luck is a (large) part of the equation.

 

[FrantzM]

We had a Philly Phile with a self built LEDE room with 801s, he loved it. I didn't have enough time in to fully appreciate it.. it sounded somewhat bland, but I thought that was due to the 801s. I also agree that Luck is a (large) part of the equation.

The Luck notion is so often repeated as to become the orthodoxy .. Question: Why is it that designing a room for listening purposes is a guessing game? This is not my opinion personally and I would have liked the people with more experience than I to chime in.

We can always open a thread on the subject. Making of designing a room from scratch something of dice roll is to me one of those myths building up to become audiophile orthodoxy.

 

[Mike Lavigne]

The Luck notion is so often repeated as to become the orthodoxy .. Question: Why is it that designing a room for listening purposes is a guessing game? This is not my opinion personally and I would have liked the people with more experience than I to chime in.

We can always open a thread on the subject. Making of designing a room from scratch something of dice roll is to me one of those myths building up to become audiophile orthodoxy.

i think that building a room is not that much risk if you realize that it's not the last step. this is not a plug and play kinda thing. too many variables. i was told by my room designer that the amount of bass trapping i started with might be too much. but until i lived in the room i would not know for sure, but that adding it later would be hard to do. removing some of it turned out to be what was needed. i would call it tuning the room. it cost me about 10% of the original cost of the room itself to make the adjustments and add a few surface treatments. not unreasonable.

if you approach building a room as a one shot perfect deal, then i'd say that would be not realistic.

 

[RBFC]

It makes absolutely no sense that luck is a majority factor in designing a listening room. Sound reflection, refraction, and absorption are not nebulous unknowns. If the "luck" theory is true, then all custom room designer services are scams. As to some designers who've turned out bad rooms or concert halls, not everyone graduates at the top of their class.

Lee