I was responsible for the launch of Remicade outside the U.S. please, teach me.
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How NOT to set up speakers and room treatment ( Goldensound)
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Yes, some are missing (or misunderstanding) this in the discussion.
I have a standard apartment living room here in Sweden with concrete walls. With normal furniture, a thick rug, thick curtains, a large sofa, two thin absorption panels and corner bass traps, and a bunch of other things in the room, the decay times from 100 Hz and up were in the region of 500 to 600 ms. By looking at the RT60 Decay graph in REW it was clear that the decay times were a bit high from the upper bass region and throughout the midrange. So I bought 3 more panels that are effective for that range, and the decay times are now down to around 400 ms over that frequency range, and overall more even as can be seen in the "before and after" gif below.
Great visual comparison. Your description of the apartment acoustics also lines up with what I've experienced in similar spaces, Isn't also great when you do a thing, then measure a thing, and it works out nicely?
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It does make sense. But speaking of regional differences, most of my immediate family live in or around Manly, one part of Sydney where ice cream (and most anything else) is most certainly offered without milk or sugar.
To expand your point, Chopin died at 39 years old, below are his compositions. He was born on 1810, so just subtract 10 from the dates below and we can check how old he was when they were published.
List of compositions by Frédéric Chopin by opus number - Wikipedia
(not that I think that Golden Sound is likewise a genius, only that age is not a factor here at all)
I was amazed at how effective it was just adding 3 more panels to the room. It's not that hard to bring down the decay times to more acceptable levels in a regular living room, at least not for the upper bass and midrange frequencies. Low bass region is a completely different beast to tackle.
HarmonicTHD
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Plus afik Olive/Toole conducted preference studies going into several hundreds over the years. So I don’t even know what sympara is talking about with the 20 he is going on about.
Keith_W
Major Contributor
In an age where Greta Thunberg can lecture the UN as a teenager barely out of childhood, anything goes.
It is very easy with wadding (polyester wadding).I was amazed at how effective it was just adding 3 more panels to the room. It's not that hard to bring down the decay times to more acceptable levels in a regular living room, at least not for the upper bass and midrange frequencies. Low bass region is a completely different beast to tackle.
For panels from 25 cm thick it is the best product for low frequencies in wide band porous absorbing panels, let alone for much thicker panels, for use as soffit traps for example.
to use them as soffit traps for example or to put a whole roll of polyester wadding as a bass trap.
Written with translator
Greetings
How dare you
Zensō
Major Contributor
In an age when the only sensible voice in the room is a teenager barely out of childhood, we're in big trouble.
DSJR
Major Contributor
I got to page 15 and almost lost the will to live - sorry fellas, but sheesh!!!
Weren't most if not all of you a bit 'full of it' in your early-ish twenties? I'm not an arrogant type, but I bloody knew it all at that age, was a real 'audio consultant' type and became a 'legend in my dem room' for a good few years I can tell you (I cringe now, but there ya go). It wasn't until my early thirties that I had a couple of audio-epiphanies (and later, a couple of life changing ones too but that's another topic) that began a humbling change (I like to feel) when I increasingly realised how LITTLE I actually knew and how much I appreciated real graduate qualified and long experienced experts who were willing to sit down and talk to me, explaining in simple English a relevant part of their knowledge and experience. I value those times so much and miss them deeply!
Back to topic. I remember being told by both a manufacturer (well, Rega's Roy Gandy actually) and a qualified acoustics engineer that the LAST thing you want to do in a room is kill the acoustics stone dead. One room I saw treated had the speakers set up at a more 'live' end and the listener sat in a more 'dead' end to mimic being in an audience (maybe the room owner specified this, I can't remember). Slightly strange at first, but my Gawd I'd never heard Heybrook HB1 speakers sound as good as they did in that room (lively tizzers usually but once hugely popular in the UK market). A central London dem room was treated by another acoustic engineer, the ideal not to 'kill it' but to insulate with rock wool a tiled wall behind the speakers, some shiny/waxed paper over said wool (to put some hf life back) and then a decorative hessian to disguise it. The worst of the reflections were certainly tamed but there was still some nice 'life' remaining, making it possible to demonstrate expensive lavish speaker confections well...
So, has GS totally killed his room? I suspect he needs a partner in his life to show him how to make the room a nice place to 'live in' let alone listen to music in (I'm too darned old to want a single-man's man cave now - been there and done it and it was too lonely for me!)
Anyway, envy for GS for oviously having the money to treat such a room and then stuff it with audiophile-bling (get rid of the amps and bling box speakers and replace with some sensible Neumann 420's at least for some proper dynamics beyond the ability of those Focals (runs fast for cover)
Weren't most if not all of you a bit 'full of it' in your early-ish twenties? I'm not an arrogant type, but I bloody knew it all at that age, was a real 'audio consultant' type and became a 'legend in my dem room' for a good few years I can tell you (I cringe now, but there ya go). It wasn't until my early thirties that I had a couple of audio-epiphanies (and later, a couple of life changing ones too but that's another topic) that began a humbling change (I like to feel) when I increasingly realised how LITTLE I actually knew and how much I appreciated real graduate qualified and long experienced experts who were willing to sit down and talk to me, explaining in simple English a relevant part of their knowledge and experience. I value those times so much and miss them deeply!
Back to topic. I remember being told by both a manufacturer (well, Rega's Roy Gandy actually) and a qualified acoustics engineer that the LAST thing you want to do in a room is kill the acoustics stone dead. One room I saw treated had the speakers set up at a more 'live' end and the listener sat in a more 'dead' end to mimic being in an audience (maybe the room owner specified this, I can't remember). Slightly strange at first, but my Gawd I'd never heard Heybrook HB1 speakers sound as good as they did in that room (lively tizzers usually but once hugely popular in the UK market). A central London dem room was treated by another acoustic engineer, the ideal not to 'kill it' but to insulate with rock wool a tiled wall behind the speakers, some shiny/waxed paper over said wool (to put some hf life back) and then a decorative hessian to disguise it. The worst of the reflections were certainly tamed but there was still some nice 'life' remaining, making it possible to demonstrate expensive lavish speaker confections well...
So, has GS totally killed his room? I suspect he needs a partner in his life to show him how to make the room a nice place to 'live in' let alone listen to music in (I'm too darned old to want a single-man's man cave now - been there and done it and it was too lonely for me!)
Anyway, envy for GS for oviously having the money to treat such a room and then stuff it with audiophile-bling (get rid of the amps and bling box speakers and replace with some sensible Neumann 420's at least for some proper dynamics beyond the ability of those Focals (runs fast for cover)
Zensō
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Oh for sure. Fortunately, YouTube was not a thing back then so I was saved from making a fool of myself in public. Not that I don't do that here on a regular basis...
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Very good post, and I agree with most of it. I would change your last bullet point to:In the end it looks as if Goldensound was wrong about a couple of points, but I think most people outside of ASR (and many people within ASR it seems) have no problem with his approach. But it resulted in 3 suspensions and 20 pages of some of the worst drivel I have seen on this forum. Well done to @AdamG247 for putting the thread back on topic. I hope never to see that on ASR again and if those members don't learn their lesson I would strongly support permanent bans being handed out. I was thinking of starting a debate as to whether his Eames chair is a real Herman Miller or a replica but I don't want to poke the bear when he's in a bad mood
Still, after some of our more knowledgeable members chimed in, it became really educational. I hope that if Goldensound reads this, he ignores all that crap about his age, etc. and only takes away the learning points, which are:
- ordinary room furnishings usually provide enough treatment for most living rooms
- there is a Goldilocks range of room reverb - not too wet, not too dry
- anechoic chambers are not anechoic <80Hz, and attempting to treat bass modes with bass traps is futile, expensive, and intrusive
- DSP is a powerful option for treating below Schroder
- go read Toole (I will go read Toole, again!)
- go read F. Alton Everest's "Master Handbook of Acoustics", then go read Toole
Everest covers the theory and mathematical detail that Toole omits.
You can start with this Journal of AES paper by Dr. Toole: https://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=13686
Loudspeakers and Rooms for Sound Reproduction—A Scientific Review* FLOYD E. TOOLE
There are 75 references in there. I haven't counted but good number of them are on this topic. Summary of each reference is quoted and summarized in above paper. A bit from the summary of the paper:
You do not. Harman was once challenged (by a major automotive company) that their sound tuning only worked for Americans and not Asians. They setup duplicate study in China/Japan and showed the preferences were the same. They won that OEM business after this study. These are fundamental characteristics of what being human is. Adaptation to reflections for example is the same no matter who you are. We live in a world with walls and those reflections are filtered by our brain because they are constant in nature. So unless folks only live outdoors, many of these psychoacoustic characteristics remain the same. Here is a one of the key studies (peer reviewed J. AES) with respect to audibility of reflections: The Detection of Reflections in Typical Rooms* SEAN E. OLIVE AND FLOYD E. TOOLE
Remember, in the context of acoustics, we are not chasing things to five decimal places. We are hoping to go from random assumptions to orderly guidelines. This has been the key development in the last few decades. That this is not wild west. That patterns exist and what you want to optimize around unless you know for sure otherwise.
Cool. Here though, we are not discussing this. We are discussing a person who has clearly not read a line of research into the field of room reflections, creating a video with bling saying there is only one preference: get rid of all reflections. As a minimum, any such presentation should say preferences differ here. And point to research and follow up reading. Instead, folks are sent down the same trap of chasing reflection after reflection.
This reminds me the paper, Vision and Technique behind the New Studios and Listening Rooms of the Fraunhofer IIS Audio Laboratory (inventors of MP3 codec) where they find a floor reflection, put a thick absorber there, only to find it sound wrong and taking it out:
"Regarding the floor reflection, the audible influence by removing this with absorbers around the listener is negative – unnatural sounding. No normal room has an absorbent floor. The human brain seems to be used to this. Future investigation will cover the usefulness of this part of the ITU recommendation. The typical listening situation is presented in Figure 12."
What led to them doing this was precisely what our youtuber prescribed:
See what you have to go through to properly learn this topic? Folks still want to insist that you can wake up one morning after reading internet posts and create a video telling people how it is done???
tuga
Major Contributor
Multiple reflections improve the audibility of timbrak cues in the structure of LIVE musical and vocal sounds.
Early reflections improve LIVE speech intelligibility, maybe also close-mic'ed recorded speech but once you create depth/space in a stereophonic recording that is no longer true.
As for preference, well the testing methodology and interpretation of the data is flawed.
It's time to redo the research properly.
BTW, a few waterfalls have been posted. That is one misleading measurement. I wrote a tutorial on why that is once. See: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...urements-understanding-time-and-frequency.25/
In there, I show real room measurements and effect of applying parametric EQ filters:
See how I both got rid of a peak in frequency response (back of the curve in brown) and ringing (floor of the same measurement). And here it is with multiple filters to flatten broader area:
Notice how all the ringing is almost gone. The amplifier is now working a lot less hard because we are using the room resonance to our advantage. Recall pushing a child on a swing in the park. Once you synchronize with the natural resonance of the swing, it takes a lot less energy to drive it. Acoustic products on the other hand, simply waste power by converting to heat. Here are my subjective remarks for above filters:
"Subjectively the bass response became all that I said at the start. I played a string track with I could now hear every one plucked even though all I was listening to was the sub! Before one pick would result in a lot of boom and the strings would all run into each other as they were played. So clearly we had made improvements in time domain. Overall bass level however seemed low. This was fixed by a boost of the entire sub by a few db. "
In there, I show real room measurements and effect of applying parametric EQ filters:
See how I both got rid of a peak in frequency response (back of the curve in brown) and ringing (floor of the same measurement). And here it is with multiple filters to flatten broader area:
Notice how all the ringing is almost gone. The amplifier is now working a lot less hard because we are using the room resonance to our advantage. Recall pushing a child on a swing in the park. Once you synchronize with the natural resonance of the swing, it takes a lot less energy to drive it. Acoustic products on the other hand, simply waste power by converting to heat. Here are my subjective remarks for above filters:
"Subjectively the bass response became all that I said at the start. I played a string track with I could now hear every one plucked even though all I was listening to was the sub! Before one pick would result in a lot of boom and the strings would all run into each other as they were played. So clearly we had made improvements in time domain. Overall bass level however seemed low. This was fixed by a boost of the entire sub by a few db. "
I think that list of attributes for reflections 'reflects
' .........a vantage from a particular type of preference.Granted it may be the majority preference...and rightly so....but that still seems like a big so what.
Must also say * Early reflections improve speech intelligibility * runs completely opposite to anything I've ever heard or measured, or seen recommended..
I think proaudio install for speech reinforcement, would roll their eyes on this one.
tuga
Major Contributor
BTW, a few waterfalls have been posted. That is one misleading measurement. I wrote a tutorial on why that is once. See: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...urements-understanding-time-and-frequency.25/
In there, I show real room measurements and effect of applying parametric EQ filters:
See how I both got rid of a peak in frequency response (back of the curve in brown) and ringing (floor of the same measurement). And here it is with multiple filters to flatten broader area:
Notice how all the ringing is almost gone. The amplifier is now working a lot less hard because we are using the room resonance to our advantage. Recall pushing a child on a swing in the park. Once you synchronize with the natural resonance of the swing, it takes a lot less energy to drive it. Acoustic products on the other hand, simply waste power by converting to heat. Here are my subjective remarks for above filters:
"Subjectively the bass response became all that I said at the start. I played a string track with I could now hear every one plucked even though all I was listening to was the sub! Before one pick would result in a lot of boom and the strings would all run into each other as they were played. So clearly we had made improvements in time domain. Overall bass level however seemed low. This was fixed by a boost of the entire sub by a few db. "
Can you change the vertical scale to 5 - 85dB?
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