How NOT to set up speakers and room treatment ( Goldensound)

[Nkam]

Does Toole have a preference for reflected sound?
That room looks terrible, no symmetry and the listening chairs look far too close to the rear wall.
I can't see how that can be considered a good example...

well it’s seems like now you are just trying to be argumentative to @amirm for posting that.

you REALLY think Dr Tooles room won’t sound good??

wow.
ok


oh and Asymmetry helps most of the time with room modes.
read at least. The research has been done. You don’t even need to do that

 

[tuga]

Also, Flloyd wrote this article in 2019;


In 2015 I published a 30-page paper in the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, "The Measurement and Calibration of Sound Reproducing Systems" in the July/Aug issue. It is "open access" so it is free for all to download. In it you will find an extensive discussion of bass buildup and the consequences it has to what we hear in homes and cinemas. Most people talk of high-frequency rolloff in rooms when it really is a bass buildup. They sound similar. A certain amount of it is unavoidable, and absolutely natural – it happens with all “live” sounds, including conversational speech. It is part of the sound of a room, something the ears expect if the eyes see a room. Too much is not good, and too little is equally undesirable: listening in an anechoic chamber is not pleasant. The key is to have the right amount of broadband absorption, and find ways to tame frequency-specific resonances without making the room overly dead.

There's a rather long distance between an anechoic chamber and an adequately treated listening room.
I see this as an area where Toole is merely trying to sell his own preference as the 'correct' approach.

Also, his use of speech intelligibility to justify the need for reflection in music reproduction is nonsensical because recordings, even studio mixes, already have spatial cues embedded which will overlap with the listening room's and make a mash of it.

 

[tuga]

well it’s seems like now you are just trying to be argumentative to @amirm for posting that.

you REALLY think Dr Tooles room won’t sound good??

wow.
ok

It won't sound good TO ME; same with @amirm 's upstairs room.

Which is my point: Toole has his personal preferences but they're far from universal, in spite of all the (flawed) research trying to prove it.

 

[Nkam]

I followed more or less the same steps he did and I think his approach is spot on. Even the tip about the moveable bass trap was really good.

Not sure why the OP has hurt feelings about a 24 y.o. guy setting up a very nice dedicated room following the best practices. Jealous maybe?

oh brother.
nah I’m too old to get jealous of trying to be the ‘ cool kid on the block ‘ and peddling nonsense to kid who will lap it up and spend silly money.

hurt feelings aren’t my generation.

I would be embarrassed making a video on room acoustics after making ONE room and he got the layout from GIK. ‍

gee like the dont want you to over treat. Maybe they are in the panel selling business?


My generation wanted experts in their field to do things. We didn’t have the internet to pretend we were anything we wanted to be.
we actually had to publish research papers.

I personally would be embarrassed to make a video on acoustic treatment if I wasn’t a pro and had some audio education or training.

So yeah, I laugh and shake my head when I see a 24 year old act like he is an expert at room acoustics.
shoot he is a prodigy. By 35 he will be making a rocket to Mars!

lol

come on. A bit of humility.


I did like some of his DAC vids and measurements. It did seem like he spent some time learning that. he has me on that big time. I commend him for that
It’s good work.

The acoustics thing? Laughable and shameless

 

[Nkam]

It won't sound good TO ME; same with @amirm 's upstairs room.

Which is my point: Toole has his personal preferences but they're far from universal, in spite of all the (flawed) research trying to prove it.

um Toole has actually published.
have you published?
and he used sample groups in his research.

you may have. Legit question.

 

[Rja4000]

Finally GoldenSound has the proper environment to listen to the sound differences in DACs...

And in headphones amps ;-)

 

[Nkam]

Here are some other people who do this for a living.



https://www.youtube.com/live/G0ekssXX7rE?feature=share

 

[tuga]

Also, if one doesn't have coaxial speakers, wouldn't a couple of ceiling panels about halfway between the speakers and the listening position help even out the off-axis response?

Of course they would. As mentioned in te bible chapter 7.6.5.1 (although with a tiny sample of 3) and also in this piece from AudioXpress: "an interesting group of papers by Jorma Salmi and Anders Weckstrom, starting with their 1982 Audio Engineering Society (AES) paper “Listening Room Influence On Loudspeaker Sound Quality And Ways Of Minimizing It” isolated and explored, by way of a number of experiments—including straight wire bypass and anechoic vs. echoic rooms—the notion that correlated, vertical reflections were a primary source of perceived coloration from loudspeakers in rooms."

It perhaps not given enough significance because Revels and JBLs perform poorly in this parameter.

 

[tuga]

um Toole has actually published.
have you published?
and he used sample groups in his research.

you may have. Legit question.

He did publish, there's no doubt about that. But you take his writings as the holy gospel.

 

[Rja4000]

To speak more about this very guy's motivation:

He seems to be constantly trying to mimic science to, at the end, try to justify his "final" subjective statements.

He tries to please high-end lovers (typical target of the hardware he's reviewing) by making them more confident that their believes are supported by some "science".

He even got himself an Audio Precision.

I don't say nothing he's doing is worth of interest (some measurements, like this one, are quite interesting).
But the way he's pretending to use measurements to support his conclusions (even if measurements contradict them) is boring.
I end up thinking this is his only purpose.

 

[Geert]

In theory resistive absorbers placed against a wall don't work (or are inefficient). That's what you'll find in Toole's book. However, in the last 20 years there's a growing concensus that they work better than expected. Especially large corner bass traps can be very effective. (For really low frequencies larger than the ones shown in Goldensound's video). In a small room there's the additional benefit that they can also help with early reflections. And yes, putting a membrane in front of them increases low end absorption efficiency.

 

[Nkam]

He did publish, there's no doubt about that. But you take his writings as the holy gospel.

um no.

im just not taking some 24 year olds nothingness as gospel.

that’s the big difference.

it’s not age. But shoot. 24? A prodigy!
he made one room and made it badly and now he makes a video of how to do it

I just made my first Souredough bread yesterday. I think I’ll make a YouTube video on how to make sourdough bread. as a tutorial of course.
yup.


like I said. He did some good stuff with DACs, I will totally give him credit for that. And it fizzled out.
guess there is no money in that.

 

[Nkam]

In theory resistive absorbers placed against a wall don't work (or are inefficient). That's what you'll find in Toole's book. However, in the last 20 years there's a growing concensus that they work better than expected. Especially large corner bass traps can be very effective. (For really low frequencies larger than the ones shown in Goldensound's video). In a small room there's the additional benefit that they can also help with early reflections. And yes, putting a membrane in front of them increases low end absorption efficiency.

yes those are freq specific traps. And they do work.

but he bought all that sh$t on the ’ consultation’ of GIK and then made a video.


a touch of humility wouldn’t be a bad idea

 

[tuga]

um no.

im just not taking some 24 year olds nothingness as gospel.

that’s the big difference.

it’s not age. But shoot. 24? A prodigy!
he made one room and made it badly and now he makes a video of how to do it

I just made my first Souredough bread yesterday. I think I’ll make a YouTube video on how to make sourdough bread. as a tutorial of course.
yup.

Toole's bible is not the only source, or the true source. It's not perfect either.

 

[abdo123]

a touch of humility wouldn’t be a bad idea

I can say the same thing about you to be honest.

 

[tuga]

2. He is optimizing for his eyes, not ears. Two ears and a brain don't work like a single microphone and a graph as Dr. Toole would again say. The notion that reflections are "bad" is folklore as comprehensive peer reviewed has repeatedly shown. Yet, it has become one of the "internet rules" to chase them using measurements. Doing so will lead to a completely dead room when you are done. Ask any high-end acoustician what the #1 problem with DIY acoustic is and they tell you people creating dead rooms because of this mistake.

2A. Use speakers with proper directivity and you will not need to fear reflections. Indeed, this is your #1 tool for good sound in a room.

This is merely a matter of preference.
Early reflections can produce linear changes (FR) and will affect image sharpness and mask recorded spatial cues.

In spite of his attempts to prove it, Toole's preference is not universal.
He is also a proponent of upmixing which is also not universally preferred:

"upmixing" is a swear word. It consists of trying to extract 5 independent variables from two. Simply put, algebra is still right, you can't get 5 independent variables from two.

 

[Axo1989]

he changed the RT60 decay time because I told him personally that 250ms was way to [sic] low.

Ok. Interested to hear more about that exchange.

But 250 ms isn't too low, that's simply a preference, and likely depends on the listener's musical tastes and genre preferences.

I have Toole's book. I imagine many here do as well.

 

[Nkam]

Toole's bible is not the only source, or the true source. It's not perfect either.

did you see me post a video with others who do it as work?

no. And you still aren’t seeing what I wrote.

Toole isn’t gospel.
I didn’t point that out.
I pointed out that a 24 year old kid with one room is DEFINITELY not gospel.

 

[Mart68]

there's not much going on below 50Hz in the response anyway, are those Focals that bass shy?

I have the same speakers but an older model, the response drops off a cliff below 40hz, it's the only thing about them that bothers me.

Seems to me that since he wants an empty room (which is the style of the times) he doesn't have much choice but to put all that stuff on the walls to kill the HF reflection

Buy some furniture! Dedicated treatments are expensive, furniture these days they are practically giving away.

Room looks big enough that he's not going to have much issues with low frequencies especially since the speakers don't go low anyway.

Worst thing about this video is those shorts he's wearing.

 

[Nkam]

This is merely a matter of preference.
Early reflections can produce linear changes (FR) and will affect image sharpness and mask recorded spatial cues.

In spite of his attempts to prove it, Toole's preference is not universal.
He is also a proponent of upmixing which is also not universally preferred:

Tooles method is based on evolution.
our brains need spatial cues to locate sound.
its called Evolutionary science.

he is not saying anything more or less

killing or treating all early reflections is counterintuitive to how our brains and ears evolved.