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It's the room, stoopid. (long with pics)

Thanks to my previous amp going "DC" and talking my speakers with it, I had the opportunity to assemble an entirely new system over the past three years. Of all the things I've done, treating my room has been the most effective (AND cost-effective). The net effect was to raise the performance of my sytem by an anount at least equal to a major component upgrade. I'm convinced now that many folks who are constantly changing components may be doing so in an unrecognized attempt to fix problems that are actually rooted in their room acoustics. You've not truely heard your system until you've heard it in a treated room. I vowed not to change any components until I had fully explored room treatments. I was surprised to learn that the more I got the room right, the better what I had sounded.

The net effect of the wall treatments is to remove some of the sounds which reflect off the walls and reach your ears a few miiliseconds after the direct sound from the speaker. The net effect is to make your speakers more of a point source and it is perceived, at least in my room, as an increase in the localization of the intruments along with a deepening and widening of the sound stage. Female voices sound so much more beleivable too. There's also a phenomenal increase in the amount of information about the ambiance of the recording venue that reaches your ears in a treated room. I have one recording where, in the millisecond before the conductor drops the baton, I can hear the collective movement of the ensemble as the string players draw their bows and the wind players take a breath in!

If you want to know what bass traps do, put on a recording with lots of bass information and put your ear next to one of the corners in your room. You can actually hear how the bass modes all "pile up" in the corners of the room. The traps will attenuate this and make the bass sound more realistic and less muddy. I haven't done this yet becasue the tongue and groove paneling in my room exerts some bass trap effect by itself.

I looked briefly at some of the commercial room treatments out there but because I'm a DIY kind of guy, building my own just seems so much more fun. I also learned a lot along the way since I built several prototypes before arriving at the final design. Playing around with these taught me an awful lot about how these things work AND ALSO about what room anomalies SOUND LIKE. I actually prefer the sound of my room to that of my dealer and his room was designed by a well-known "acoustician" and features bolts in the wall too permit "tuning" of the room.

Of course, I'm fotunate in having a dedicated listening room so I don't have to fight the WAF wars. Having to do room treatment in a shared living room or den would of necessity require some compromises. But even in a shared room a single pair of panels at the first reflection point makes such a huge difference that they would be worth it even if that's all you were able to do. One last thing, treating the romm does NOT change the requirement that you have your speakers placed properly with respect to the room's boundaries. room treatments work synergistically with proper speaker placement.

Above is a pic of my room with panels placed similarly to what Jon Risch recommends in his excellent web site. The second pic is a closeup of the panels I made for the first reflection point. Putting them on legs enabled me to place them away from the walls for best effect. If one had a room where the panels couldn't stay in place all the time, units such as this are easily stored away bewteen listening sessions.



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  Kimber Kable  


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