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

[thewas]

those speakers were given to him by Focal for a review.

So much about the Focal fanboys then...

 

[FrankW]

This thread is really saddening.

The majority of forum posters are room treatments believers. Some actually sell. Yeah, threads like this are going to be contentious, because next to zero scientific evidence supports their beliefs. That really angers and frustrates them. Subsequent lash outs are normal.

 

[FrankW]

those speakers were given to him by Focal for a review.

Thanks, don't watch any of those nonsense YouTube videos, including this one.
Hopefully he buys better speakers.

 

[Geert]

Pillows everywhere, including on the reproduction room sidewalls, where even the studio guys, when tested blind seldom prefer. Heck, there's even evidence in their own "critical" mixing rooms, they still don't always prefer. Blind.

Evidence: At 16:00 GS explains the side wall absorbers are there because "reflections are detrimental for sound quality" and "you want to start with placing absorbers at the primary reflection points". That's his believe, so those absorbers were going to be there whatever speakers he would be using.

Talking about studio's, you should join the ATC thread to discuss the use of tweeters without waveguides on wide baffles ;-)

 

[AdamG]

Stop with the personal insults and attacks. Thread Bans handed out. Warnings and full forum bans are next. Argue the science and data and leave out making it personal.

Please and thank you for your cooperation and support.

 

[Mart68]

That's not what I said. I said that if you have an empty dedicated listening room like his, you are more than welcome to use acoustic products. The problem with his approach there was not that he used acoustic products. But that he was teaching people to chase all reflections seen in a measurement with one microphone (instead of two ears and a brain) and stomp them out using absorbers. This is just wrong. Yes, you need absorption but start with the carpet, put in the chair and rest of bits in the room and see where you stand. If you need some absorption, put them behind the speakers/listening spot. He instead chased the usual first reflections on the left and right which is just bad idea as I and Dr. Toole have explained thousands of times.

Put another way, do NOT focus on measurements above transition band of a few hundred hertz. It will mislead you and big time. Your ears do not hear what the instrument shows.

For bass frequencies, yes, you measure. And once you measure, your weapon of choice will be DSP/Equalization. Just pulling down a couple of peaks gets you most of the way there if not where you want to stop. Then use the target curve to create a slop from bass to highs that is to your liking. Do not waste space and money on "bass traps."

For all of the above, you need to know what you are doing as far as setting up the smoothing in REW. The measurements he showed tells me he is applying way too much smoothing for bass. In addition, he may also be using the wrong vertical axis for proper assessment of flatness of the response.

Thank you for clarifying.

 

[Scgorg]

At the risk of throwing myself into this fray of mud slinging and very little actual discussion: I don't see how what Golden has done in this video particularly runs counter to what Toole has stated on the subject.

1. Toole himself has treatment in his room, on both the front wall and back wall. Toole's room is more thoroughly furnished than Golden's listening room, which reduces the necessity of treatment somewhat. Golden is coming from the headphone part of the hobby, so him preferring a room that is on the drier side would not be a surprise. Some people like that. 250ms RT60 is not in any way what I would consider a "dead" room (definitely quite dry, yes, but not dead). It's within suggested EBU/ITU tolerances for listening rooms, for example.

2. Toole does not disparage the use of treatment in his book. In fact he suggests that treating the front wall is actually a decent rule of thumb. Logically this makes sense as it can aid in both reducing SBIR from the front wall, and because the early reflections from the front wall have a high IACC, which doesn't contribute strongly to listener envelopment (LEV) or apparent source width (ASW). This same argument can readily be applied to the back wall and ceiling. The ceiling in particular will contain reflections that are timbrally dissimilar to the direct sound in the case of most non-coincident source loudspeakers (which are overwhelmingly the most popular kind of speaker).

3. While Toole suggests that most people prefer the sound of side wall reflections, you have to realize that the term most people is doing some heavy lifting. If, say, 70% of people prefer side wall reflections (which is a sizable majority) that still leaves a solid 30% preferring to modify those side wall reflections in some way. That is not a small amount of people, and I would contend that such an approach is equally legitimate in that case. I am not aware of the actual figures here, so these percentage numbers are made up for illustrative effect, please bear with me.

4. Toole also suggests that the ideal room is music-dependent. More lively rooms are preferred a larger amount of the time for classical music than for pop-rock music. If my memory is not failing me, Toole has even suggested that having treatment which can easily be put into use or out of use (such as heavy drapes) can be a good thing, depending on the listener's choice of music and mood.

The only "sins" Golden has committed here, from my point of view, are small ones, such as not specifying that the velocity-based "bass traps" he is using are very ineffective at lower bass frequencies (though they are likely still decently effective above 100hz). The video takes an overall sensible and evidence-driven approach with methods that are hard to argue against, such as the 38% rule to minimize the effect of the lowest axial modes and the use of MMM to find a sensible loudspeaker position. This thread, to me, screams "much ado about nothing", which is unfortunately becoming more and more common on this forum. I hope the discussion can be more respectful from here on out - mind your fellow man.

 

[dfuller]

Stop with the personal insults and attacks. Thread Bans handed out. Warnings and full forum bans are next. Argue the science and data and leave out making it personal.

Please and thank you for your cooperation and support.

Appreciate you, Adam.

 

[amirm]

When I read his article, I felt that his feelings towards DSP were lukewarm, at best. Winer still thinks that bass traps should be installed in home sized listening rooms though. You said earlier in this thread that bass traps are a waste of money. What do you think of Winer's argument, that DSP does not improve ringing or improve nulls without adding even more ringing?

He and I have discussed that many times online. He thinks that lowering the peaks to also lowering the ringing is cheating as the level is now lower. Well, you do want the level to be lower as you had too much gain due to that mode. He will also show a picture of his own room as an example of how to do it right. But that is huge number of traps and he still doesn't get rid of the modal response:

And that is the back. The front is also stuffed with traps. I don't think there is an inch of that space that he hasn't covered with these!

Lets remember that most anechoic chambers stop being anechoic below 80 Hz or so. And this is with giant wedges in them. No way you can get there with products like this. At best you are going to get half-way there. EQ however, can stomp on peaks to absolute certainty. On dips, you can leave them be because they won't cause ringing and boominess. They can also be partially repaired by trading headroom. Pull the entire level down to the bottom of the dip or somewhere in between.

 

[amirm]

But doesn't this mean 15 people (8+7) preferred some kind of treatment and 11 no treatment?

Well "some kind" wouldn't help you figure out what to do as picking either would put you in minority. The fact that majority wanted no treatment should guide you especially since prior to this study, everyone assumed they would absolutely loathe naked wall.

 

[amirm]

Whether side wall absorption be something to have or not, that is a question.

But it should be easy to test blindly if some hifi, sound-interested people get together. Do they get the same results as in the test you referenced? I know that it is not possible to compare directly due to acoustic differences in listening rooms where the tests are carried out, but still.

Such a test should also be performed with different types of music. It would be interesting to read about the results of that test.

Those are the tests that Dr. Toole ran. In one test he used a simple curtain in front of the wall that was pulled resulting in less preference (with the curtain). So yes, these tests are not hard to do.

 

[amirm]

It seems to me the guy making the video is doing a lot of things right. I am recording studio oriented and the things he suggests are exactly what one would want in a mixing environment: remove room 'colorations' in FR and IR to make the speaker-room system as transparent as possible.

That's not by accident. When challenged on why people are doing these things, e.g. getting rid of every reflection, they point to studios doing that. If it is good for them they say, they must definitely be good for listening. And that is where the problem is. Even if studios were better in this regard -- and there is little research that indicates this is so -- creating content is not the same as using it. Much of the practices in studios comes from using speakers with lousy off-axis response. Not what we advocate people to get today.

See this reply I wrote on this front a while back:

------------------------

Sorry no. Leaving the side walls with bare makes no spectral change. You are arguing for acoustic products there which do change the response of an excellent speaker.

Comb filtering is not remotely an audible effect. See Dr. Toole's book or my article: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...ds/perceptual-effects-of-room-reflections.13/

There is both psychoacoustic theory there and controlled listening test such as:

Comb filtering is more of a problem for our eyes than ears.

Really, what you state is the old understanding of acoustics. Much has changed in our understanding today. You reference RPG products. Here is what Dr. D'Antonio has to say about history of room acoustics:

This is more or less what you are still advocating.

Start of real research, controlled testing and inclusion of psychoacoustics.

And then we had key findings:

And:

His final slide is actually a graph based on research paper by Dr. Toole and Olive:

At typical levels of reflections we get "spaciousness and richness of timbre." It is not at all a bad thing.

So please don't keep repeating this stuff with "image shift" and such. What one imagines with sound travelling is not the same as what happens with the sound arrives individually and differently in each ear with the brain interpreting it. Ask someone if they like to sing in a shower or outside. The answer will be the former.

 

[amirm]

3. While Toole suggests that most people prefer the sound of side wall reflections, you have to realize that the term most people is doing some heavy lifting. If, say, 70% of people prefer side wall reflections (which is a sizable majority) that still leaves a solid 30% preferring to modify those side wall reflections in some way. That is not a small amount of people, and I would contend that such an approach is equally legitimate in that case. I am not aware of the actual figures here, so these percentage numbers are made up for illustrative effect, please bear with me.

This entire statement is missing from the video. Instead, he goes hard to one end doing the "ETC graph and stomp the spikes" thing. That is totally wrong. It is based on misconceptions which raise the blood pressure of both Dr. Toole and I. If you ever attended one of Dr. Toole's excellent two-day seminars, you would have seen how much time he dedicates to this topic and how wrong this technique is. As I have explained before, chasing those reflections will eventually lead to people putting absorbers everywhere. I know people who put thin fabric on all the walls by the time they are done! Then they sit back and realize how they have screwed up and take it all done, and report how much better the sound is.

One of the issues with ETC is also the fact that it the spectrum of reflection is hidden in the spikes. Dr. Toole demonstrates this in a set of graphs in his books. The spikes are sensitive to high frequencies and report higher amplitude than reality. This again creates misleading situation where you chase the wrong thing.

Really, this is extremely fundamental stuff that has to be gotten right. The sin therefore is quite large. I must have spent half of my online lift arguing about this with people who just chase what they read online and their intuition ("reflections must be bad.").

 

[olegtern]

I can't catch it. If most people prefer something (and this is confirmed by a meta-analysis of double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trials with a huge sample), does that "something" become, like, a law of physics? Or at least a legal law?

I thought it was good data for the marketing or R&D department (make something that most people would prefer; or what would work fine in most normal living rooms). Or for blind buying (buy something that's likely to please if you don't deviate from the majority). And "this is a bad speaker" or "this is a bad room" exists in that context, not as some dogma.

 

[Bjorn]

This is very important. Listening to classical music (recorded in a big room that had probably longer decay time than most domestic rooms) vs listening electronic music with for example 40 Hz 1/16th bass notes above 120 bpm would clearly lead to different conclusions to the annoyance or not of masking from side reflections.

Edit : another thing to note is also the kind of audio material. In a typical untreated domestic room, a full mix will probably not bother you. Now take that mix and solo just the snare drum or just the kick drum, and you will be amazed by how much you can be bothered by the acoustics.

Sure. And there isn't a clear preference for side wall reflections in this study with classical music either. A score of 11 vs 8 and 7 isn't statistically large enough to draw a conclusion.

The best to do is testing in one's own environment with the music one listens to. We know the difference between the options is perceivable. So why should a blind test in a specific acoustic environment with some specific speakers and specific music material give the answer to everybody who have very different rooms, acoustics, speakers and may play a different genre of music?

 

[Thomas_A]

That's not by accident. When challenged on why people are doing these things, e.g. getting rid of every reflection, they point to studios doing that. If it is good for them they say, they must definitely be good for listening. And that is where the problem is. Even if studios were better in this regard -- and there is little research that indicates this is so -- creating content is not the same as using it. Much of the practices in studios comes from using speakers with lousy off-axis response. Not what we advocate people to get today.

See this reply I wrote on this front a while back:

------------------------

Sorry no. Leaving the side walls with bare makes no spectral change. You are arguing for acoustic products there which do change the response of an excellent speaker.

Comb filtering is not remotely an audible effect. See Dr. Toole's book or my article: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...ds/perceptual-effects-of-room-reflections.13/

There is both psychoacoustic theory there and controlled listening test such as:

Comb filtering is more of a problem for our eyes than ears.

Really, what you state is the old understanding of acoustics. Much has changed in our understanding today. You reference RPG products. Here is what Dr. D'Antonio has to say about history of room acoustics:

This is more or less what you are still advocating.

Start of real research, controlled testing and inclusion of psychoacoustics.

And then we had key findings:

And:

His final slide is actually a graph based on research paper by Dr. Toole and Olive:

At typical levels of reflections we get "spaciousness and richness of timbre." It is not at all a bad thing.

So please don't keep repeating this stuff with "image shift" and such. What one imagines with sound travelling is not the same as what happens with the sound arrives individually and differently in each ear with the brain interpreting it. Ask someone if they like to sing in a shower or outside. The answer will be the former.

The last slide summaries it well. So how do we solve all near-field setups? Should such speakers be of wider directivity to get the benefits of spacioness and timbre?

 

[SIY]

Empirical observation:

I just moved my system to a different room, similar dimensions to my lab. It sounds significantly better in here. Why?

Here's why there's some advantage to my age compared to you kids- I have books. Not Kindle or eBooks, actual books. Thousands of them. The new room has eight or nine bookcases in it. Maybe there's some magic to the mix of absorption and diffuse reflectance that large bookcases provide.

 

[pkane]

I can't catch it. If most people prefer something (and this is confirmed by a meta-analysis of double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trials with a huge sample), does that "something" become, like, a law of physics? Or at least a legal law?

If some prefer a fully padded room with a straight jacket, who am I to argue?

 

[Doodski]

Empirical observation:

I just moved my system to a different room, similar dimensions to my lab. It sounds significantly better in here. Why?

Here's why there's some advantage to my age compared to you kids- I have books. Not Kindle or eBooks, actual books. Thousands of them. The new room has eight or nine bookcases in it. Maybe there's some magic to the mix of absorption and diffuse reflectance that large bookcases provide.

If concrete walls can reflect bass then maybe that dense book stuff does something beneficial too... Was the other room/lab silent and without fan noises etc?

 

[SIY]

If concrete walls can reflect bass then maybe that dense book stuff does something beneficial too... Was the other room/lab silent and without fan noises etc?

No central heat or A/C in this house so no fans. Original room (my lab) was a basement room having concrete walls with paneling, some furniture (chairs, desks, worktables), and an "acoustic tile" ceiling.