Sublime Sound

[PeterA]

two


understand i'm not suggesting (1) that Peter's room needs ceiling treatment, or (2) that even if it could benefit from ceiling treatment that Peter should choose to do it. i celebrate that Peter is feeling positive about the changes he has made and where his sound is at.

but, that said; i would suggest that unless you test treating ceiling reflections, you really cannot know whether it can make a positive difference. nothing wrong with hand clapping as a quick test for gross obvious issues, but fine tuning a room goes way beyond that method as proof of concept.

you don't know what you don't know.

for me; it took hearing my same speakers and electronics in a different room for the lights to come on realizing what should be happening. up to that point i figured the effects of treatment would be negligible. i was very wrong. some understanding of what i did not know was the key event.

I appreciate that Mike. I am sure my room is not perfect. It is probably far from it. It is a compromise with which I choose to live. It sounds better now than it did before, and better than I could have imagined a year ago. I am now fine with it. Others take this hobby more seriously, have different resources and more options. My room is what it is, and I fully acknowledge that. I make no claims otherwise.

EDIT: I just noticed that this is post number 2001 of my system thread. A space Odyssey indeed.

 

[PeterA]

Peter,

This is a picture I have shown sometime ago. Add some Ekorne Reno chairs, a work wood office table and an office chair , many shelves with CDs and books, several big amplifiers and paintings on the wall. The turntable and Metronomes stay on the right, usually a cumulative length of more than two tens of meters of cables spray on the floor ...

The second picture shows my future listening space - it was completely emptied, every wall was put down, being rebuilt now. The ceiling is tilted, perhaps I will put much less toe-in in the speakers!

Thank you Fransisco. I now have a better idea of what you mean. It will help the conversation. I appreciate it.

 

[bonzo75]

The second pic looks like Ron's place in progress

 

[Lagonda]

Peter,

This is a picture I have shown sometime ago. Add some Ekorne Reno chairs, a work wood office table and an office chair , many shelves with CDs and books, several big amplifiers and paintings on the wall. The turntable and Metronomes stay on the right, usually a cumulative length of more than two tens of meters of cables spray on the floor ...

The second picture shows my future listening space - it was completely emptied, every wall was put down, being rebuilt now. The ceiling is tilted, perhaps I will put much less toe-in in the speakers!
View attachment 70530

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That’s why you like digital so much, you can’t get to your turntables !

 

[Mike Lavigne]

I appreciate that Mike. I am sure my room is not perfect.

ahh, but it is. it's perfectly Peter.

EDIT: I just noticed that this is post number 2001 of my system thread. A space Odyssey indeed.

 

[microstrip]

That’s why you like digital so much, you can’t get to your turntables !

No, in fact the turntable (now just the TechDas AF1P) is closer to me. The Vivaldi stack is currently further away as most of my listening is carried using the Taiko Extreme server. The A80's were behind the curtains.

 

[bazelio]

My bedroom is laminated wood flooring and concrete wall. My bathroom is marble wall and flooring. When I speak, the tone is very different in bathroom from bedroom. Obviously, the sound in bathroom is more reverberated because of harder reflections from marble. But which is more natural? To be honest, I found the sounds in both bedroom and bathroom is natural but which is more correct? So is it a question of preference?
If one builds a room from scratch, how does one decide to choose the materials for wall and floor? It can’t be just decided by the word “natural”.

When I sing in the shower, I sound like Luciano Pavarotti. So, I think my listening room should sound more like my bathroom. Natural or not.

 

[the sound of Tao]

When I sing in the shower, I sound like Luciano Pavarotti. So, I think my listening room should sound more like my bathroom. Natural or not.

... was that back when he was still singing at the live end of the bathroom

 

[Ron Resnick]

The second pic looks like Ron's place in progress

I wish my room were that big!

 

[Tango]

When I sing in the shower, I sound like Luciano Pavarotti. So, I think my listening room should sound more like my bathroom. Natural or not.

No reason why it not natural. It came out of your vocal cord and go directly to your ear drum with no processing. I don't know what to think when Ked said his voice by his ears sound unnatural in an empty room. If so, we should not listen to what he has to say in audio any more. Can't trust his hearing. I once went to a Steinway showroom. The place was so echo but for sure the piano sounded natural no stereo could reproduce like it. Could it sound better? Yes it could sound better but does not mean it did not sound natural in that showroom. Two different things.

 

[bonzo75]

No reason why it not natural. It came out of your vocal cord and go directly to your ear drum with no processing. I don't know what to think when Ked said his voice by his ears sound unnatural in an empty room. If so, we should not listen to what he has to say in audio any more. Can't trust his hearing. I once went to a Steinway showroom. The place was so echo but for sure the piano sounded natural no stereo could reproduce like it. Could it sound better? Yes it could sound better but does not mean it did not sound natural in that showroom. Two different things.

I don't know about you, but on daily basis we don't get echoes with each word we speak. And at concerts you don't get echoes either but if you want to reproduce the Steinway show room that's fine. Ron can add it to the list of objectives as the 5th

 

[PeterA]

I just did an extreme experiment. I went into my shower closed the glass door and spoke a few words snapped my fingers and clapped my hands.

I then went into my clothes closet, closed the door, spoke some words, snapped my fingers and clapped my hands.

Both sounded quite different from my living room but there was a key difference: the information in the shower stall seemed to all be there while the sound from my closet was lacking information and that made it sound much less natural.

The problem with rooms with wall tampons and too much absorption, is that information goes missing. Energy at some frequencies and aspects of the sound embedded on the recordings never reach your ears. This can accentuate other information and make bass stand out or seem really tight. Images can be stark. The sound can be full of contrasts, and seem enhanced and exciting, but this is not natural because the full spectrum is not there. Our minds search for what is missing.

The sound in the shower is simply echoey and our mind can deal with that just as it does when we shout in a church or across the Grand Canyon.

Of course I’m not advocating that our listing rooms should be echoey. I’m just suggesting that an overly damped listening room does damage to the music because we lose information that should be there and that is why we think of it as not natural.

I am not suggesting that we should want our listening rooms to sound like either a shower stall or a close closet, this is my thinking on the subject based on what’s been happening in my listening room and how the sound has changed with the removal of acoustic treatments and speaker set up.

 

[bonzo75]

No one said opposite of echoey is extremely damped. You used that example to suit your argument, like tang did of an echoey Steinway showroom

 

[adyc]

The problem with rooms with wall tampons and too much absorption, is that information goes missing. Energy at some frequencies and aspects of the sound embedded on the recordings never reach your ears. This can accentuate other information and make bass stand out or seem really tight. Images can be stark. The sound can be full of contrasts, and seem enhanced and exciting, but this is not natural because the full spectrum is not there. Our minds search for what is missing.

I do not agree that too much absorption means information goes missing. Otherwise, all the frequency response tests of loudspeakers in anechoic chamber are wrong.

There is no argument human prefer to have direct sound as well as reflected sound. Different people may prefer different ratio of direct and reflected sound. But one thing for sure no one likes to live in anechoic chamber. One can go crazy, panic attack or loss of sensation of time if one spend one hour in anechoic chamber.

 

[bonzo75]

Exactly. No one wants a dead anechoic chamber nor an echoey chamber. The trick is getting the right balance. People get it wrong on both fronts because it is not an easy task to get the right balance

 

[PeterA]

I do not agree that too much absorption means information goes missing. Otherwise, all the frequency response tests of loudspeakers in anechoic chamber are wrong.

There is no argument human prefer to have direct sound as well as reflected sound. Different people may prefer different ratio of direct and reflected sound. But one thing for sure no one likes to live in anechoic chamber. One can go crazy, panic attack or loss of sensation of time if one spend one hour in anechoic chamber.

I don't think the frequency response tests of loudspeakers in anechoic chambers are wrong. Those measurements are useful, they just don't tell us everything about what the speakers sound like, or how they will respond in a particular room. My point was that an overdamped room sounds unnatural, and an anechoic chamber is an extreme example of just such a room. We feel strange in such rooms because our ears/brain do not sense the information that we need to recognize we are in normal space. Something is missing or strange to us.

 

[bonzo75]

You are arguing against the strawman.

I think a more useful discussion is how to get the right balance. Unfortunately it is too room specific to generalize except by trial and error

 

[PeterA]

Exactly. No one wants a dead anechoic chamber nor an echoey chamber. The trick is getting the right balance. People get it wrong on both fronts because it is not an easy task to get the right balance

I agree, both extremes are not good, and a balance is better. It is not easy to get. You post many system videos of other people's systems. Rarely have I seen one of your videos of a system in a dedicated, well treated, professionally designed room. You post the videos as examples of sound you like. I agree, most sound very good. I am always struck at how haphazard and normal the rooms look. I never see lots of absorption treatment.

Tang's room improved, as did the sound on his videos, when he added those wooden diffusers to the front wall covering all of glass. Surely the reflective nature of that glass did not help his room to sound natural. He did not install large heavy acoustic curtains to cover the glass.

I am trying to describe the subtle stuff, the small stuff on the recordings that can get lost in too damped a space. I heard it in my own room, so this experience is the basis of my views on the matter. Removing all of that acoustic treatment from the room, but also the glass from my paintings, helped to reveal more of the information on the recording. That information did come out of the system as direct sound, but it got lost in the room, absorbed never to be heard again. The life got sucked out of the music.

Though I have never been inside an anechoic chamber listening to the direct sound of speakers, I imagine the effect is similar, just not as pronounced in the home setting. The energy is released from the speakers, heard as direct sound, but then it vanishes rather than lingering in the room, the same way it does in a concert hall or normal chamber setting. Hearing this result in my familiar room while listening to familiar recordings was really quite a learning experience.

 

[PeterA]

You are arguing against the strawman.

I think a more useful discussion is how to get the right balance. Unfortunately it is too room specific to generalize except by trial and error

I am simply relaying my own experience from what I have heard with my room changes. I did describe what I did to get a better balance. Of course it is not useful information for every condition or context. I did not bring up the anechoic chamber, adyc did. Did you ever spend enough time with one system in one room, or witness a room voicing project, to hear for yourself the change in sound from the same space with such adjustments? It can be quite educational. Of course, the balance can change too, as the owner's preferences change over time from more exposure to live music or something else.

Kedar, you have been to perhaps more rooms than anyone on this forum. You have heard good and bad sound. Can you reach any conclusions about the rooms that you think of as sounding the best? If so, please share your thoughts. Perhaps I am missing something obvious.

 

[adyc]

Peter, my point is that there is no loss of information listening in a room with too much absorption. I argue the opposite. Take my anechoic chamber example again. It is well documented that after certain time in anechoic chamber, one can listen one’s own blood rushing in the blood vessels. You can listen to more information.

It is a mix of direct and reflected sound people find pleasing. It is not about more information in a lively room.