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RE: If you could design a listening room...

Posted by josh358 (P) on August 27, 2012 at 14:35:14

In Reply to: If you could design a listening room... posted by troutbum on August 27, 2012 at 11:14:34:

At least 25' x 30', larger if possible. 8' ceiling (better for line sources). Rectangular walls unless I decided to make a control-room style reflection-free zone with facets. Lots of diffusion alternating with panel surrounds (both for low inter-aural cross correlation), then absorption added to get the Rt where I want it, but I'd make that changeable in case I wanted to use a different strategy (e.g., surround requires a deader surface than two channel).

Provisions for bass traps in the walls. I wouldn't make the walls more rigid or any more soundproof than they had to be for the location, you don't want to trap bass energy if you can avoid it. Better to surround the room with dead space, e.g., closets, halls, sex toy storage. That could also facilitate infinite baffle subs around the periphery, or even a rotary woofer. You could easily build double bass arrays and other fun stuff.

Wood floors, wood studs, both made with old wood to get that warm old hall/old room sound. Plaster (I know, that kind of interferes with the built-in bass traps). Lots of load bearing in case you wanted to put your speakers on granite bases. Grounded chicken wire Faraday cage but only if a site survey found significant RF. Dedicated heavy gauge isoground power lines around the room, each receptacle configurable via home runs to the basement, since you never know where you'll end up putting stuff. Maybe run the equipment at 240 V to take advantage of the lower voltage drop and the balanced power from the transformer the power company has so obligingly provided. Air conditioned equipment/computer closet to eliminate fan noise and of course removable baseboards everywhere for signal cables. Low velocity A/C with sound traps to minimize noise. Variacs rather than dimmers to minimize RFI. A studio sound door, but no airlock required.

Variations, I might experiment with making a Fresnel reflector reflection-free zone -- basically sawtooth wedges with absorption on the orthogonal edge. Or I might try heavy absorption on the walls and go entirely with low IACC synthetic surround.

Angle of speakers depends largely on the design of the speaker, usually (although not always) you get the best response on axis. I would go with the Blumlein equilateral triangle, which always sounds best to me, although many prefer a different spread; with two channel, it's a compromise. Beyond that I'd probably use the standard arrangements for multichannel. A listening distance of about 3 meters seems to be preferred, perhaps because speakers are designed to work best at a typical distance. In any case, some of the esoteric designs apart, you want to keep the left and right speakers as far from room surfaces as possible, to maximize the initial time delay of the first reflections.

However, dipole bass works best parallel to the wall, if this can be adjusted independently. In a rectangular room, you can also effectively cancel all room modes below a certain frequency by sitting the same distance from the rear as a dipole woofer is from the front. It works like a passive single bass array. One disadvantage of a large room is the effective frequency would be pretty low.

Edits: 08/27/12

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