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I had a discussion with a local retailer regarding room tweaks. He described the space his store used to be in that had extensive amounts of carpeting, damping materials on the walls, etcetera, to the point of being over - tweaked. He noted a change in the quality of his voice, and described having to raise his voice in order to have a conversation. This left him hoarse at the end of the day. The treatments required turning the volume on an amplifier in order to hear anything. I got the impression that he was sceptical about room treatments and their benefits.We are purchasing new speakers (proac studio 125) soon and want to maximize the sound in our space, but do not want to do too much. At the least, we plan to add an area rug to cover the hard wood floors. My retailer recommended that we simply listen to the speakers and not do too much with room treatments.
Any thoughts?
Most speakers sound better when broken in. Proper setup is also crucial for the most desirable sound. If they sound good from the start ,then don't get caught up in becoming a tweakaholic.
It's widely accepted that "tweaking too much" will result in blindness! :-)
Jack G is right, you can overdamp a room, but what you're more likely to do is to overdamp it within certain frequency ranges. Carpet and soft furnishings, for example, don't absorb evenly over the whole range.Bass absorption is particularly hard to achievve.
I'd guess from your story that your dealer's room is overdamped in the mids - voice range in particular - but probably not in the bass since bass is a big selling point :-) You wouldn't want to touch that in a showroom, would you?
Speaker placement and listening position can help a lot to minimise room effects, but this really becomes more viable as the room becomes larger. Small rooms don't give you much space to play in and make it more difficult.
I've found Jon Risch's DIY roomlenses really beneficial in my listening area which is on the small side. They don't absorb much but they do diffuse and difract at frequencies starting from around 800 Hz on up. They definitely won't overdamp plus they don't take up much space (important in smaller rooms).
In a larger room I'd have no hesitation in trying some of Jon's other acoustic treatments - panels, bass traps, and diffuser. I think you're much less likely to run into problems with properly designed acoustic treatments than you are with excesses of soft furnishings and carpets, and Jon's treatments are moveable so you can easily remove an item if you put too many in. He gives recommendations about number and placement in his instructions and too many should not be a problem.
Bottom line: good room acoustic treatment can work wonders, bad treatment does guess what?
David Aiken
Yes, you can over damp a room, by adding too much sound absorbers. You generally have to work at it to do this-it isn't easy. You either have to buy alot of sound absorbers, or have the room really filled with real thick drapes, heavily stuffed funtiture etc.
Jack
I've found that, while speaker placement is most benficial to enhance the field developed by the speakers themselves, 3D speaker rotation (ie: toe-in & aim a touch downward & slightly list the unit such that the tweeters are a tad farther away than the woofers' centers) dramaticly reduces room acoustics. Granted this has a large level of inherent difficulty associated with it, whilest maintaining a certain required level of rigidity. These 2 are indeed at odds, but success lands you a liveable sound space.
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