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

[Somafunk]

I was going to post the two videos that John Darko recently released of the vicoustic treatment in his new apartment in Portugal with before/after but then thought better of it, there’s enough discussion regarding the “Cameron” video without throwing gas on the fire

 

[DJBonoBobo]

There really is no substitute for space and in that same vein, large speakers. I go to audio shows where high-end gear is shown in ballrooms. There, they produce a far superior experience to what I can create even with equipment that is not well designed.

The key to home audio enjoyment is to not have a target of perfection. Such target cannot be achieved due to lack of standards in audio and above factor. We just want to get to 90% and then sit back and enjoy the music. This is what I really dislike about the youtuber video. It will send the person down the path of constantly messing with the room, adding this and that acoustic product, chasing this and that reflection, etc. It will become an obsession eventually and hence, become frustrating.

This is why my rules for good acoustics is simple:
1. Get a good speaker (best you can possibly afford)
2. Measure the room and find the bass response errors
3. Use EQ to reduce the impact of most offensive ones in #2.

Anything beyond this is outside of the scope of what audiophiles should do. You will have great sound to enjoy. I know I do without a single acoustic product in my room.

Thanks for your reply, I appreciate it. Certainly it is good advice to be more satisfied, to try to settle for 90%.

But at the same time, the context here seems a bit funny to me: in countless reviews and threads on this site, people are discussing differences between devices that I would place somewhere between 99.8% and 99.9%.

I don't mean this rhetorically and I don't think your reviews are superfluous, but why are you interested in even the smallest differences in electronic devices, while you are very "generous" in room acoustics and advise not to strive for perfection?
Because it is possible with electronics and not with room acoustics to achieve perfection, or how do you mean it?

 

[restorer-john]

There really is no substitute for space and in that same vein, large speakers. I go to audio shows where high-end gear is shown in ballrooms. There, they produce a far superior experience to what I can create even with equipment that is not well designed.

The key to home audio enjoyment is to not have a target of perfection. Such target cannot be achieved due to lack of standards in audio and above factor. We just want to get to 90% and then sit back and enjoy the music. This is what I really dislike about the youtuber video. It will send the person down the path of constantly messing with the room, adding this and that acoustic product, chasing this and that reflection, etc. It will become an obsession eventually and hence, become frustrating.

This is why my rules for good acoustics is simple:
1. Get a good speaker (best you can possibly afford)
2. Measure the room and find the bass response errors
3. Use EQ to reduce the impact of most offensive ones in #2.

Anything beyond this is outside of the scope of what audiophiles should do. You will have great sound to enjoy. I know I do without a single acoustic product in my room.

This is perfectly true and correct.

All the best sounding gear I ever heard at HiFi shows and expos were demonstrated in large ballrooms (or at least large divided sectioned-off parts of the ballrooms).

Hotel room demos are always horrible, claustrophobic experiences where nothing sounds good to a bunch of standing or sitting people.

I have no acoustic products in my listening rooms, never have had. But it takes a good room to start with and sensible placement of the loudspeakers along with normal things like draw the curtains or not, angle the venetian blinds etc.

The first house I bought based on the lounge/listening room I knew was perfect the minute I walked in and listened to the room. The house was nearing completion and when I heard it after the carpet was down I knew it would be the best room for my gear. It was, and only picking a heavier than normal set of curtains down one side finished off what was an excellent listening space. In the years after, I've never had such a good room. Some terrible spaces, some pretty good. My current space is a compromise, but surprisingly good considering apart from some reflective reverb from adjacent living areas.

Start with a good, large, well dimensioned listening space and put the best loudspeakers you can buy into it.

 

[Somafunk]

Start with a good, large, well dimensioned listening space and put the best loudspeakers you can buy into it.

That’s assuming you have the financial equity to pick and choose whether that be buy/rent. I’d love a room/house larger than my tiny 63 m2 1 bedroom bungalow but I can imagine the response I’d receive from the housing association if I mention I need a larger listening room for my hifi/speakers , I asked for a larger house with 2 rooms a few years ago as back then I needed exercise equipment/spinal tilt tables, table for physio work etc as I broke my spine in multiple places a couple of times 25 years ago and I need it even more so now with the rapid progression of spms but its still a big fat no from them.

So I filled my living room with treatment to make the most of what I’ve got, can’t complain as sounds spot on to my ears.

 

[goat76]

All 3 of you (and others in this thread) are missing one important fact: a stereo system cannot accurately reproduce the reflections of the original venue in the way that you are describing. The reason for this is, again, documented in Toole's book, but it basically comes down to the fact that our auditory system is able to determine where reflections are coming from (using IID/ITD - i.e. the fact that we have two ears). Therefore it cannot be fooled by a pair of front speakers (or at least not in a satisfying way). For this reason, recorded reflections/reverb being played back through a stereo system will not, in general, sound the same as a real reflection in a real room. There are studies (again, cited in Toole's book) that directly tested this and demonstrated that reflections coming from the same point as the direct sound are disliked and harm intelligibility and timbre, but the same reflection coming from the side does not - to the contrary, it has a positive effect. This explains why speech recorded with an omnidirectional microphone sounds bad on playback - the reflections in the recording are harmful because a stereo system cannot properly reproduce their incidence angle of these reflections, they will just mess up the direct sound instead.

Stereo is inherently flawed in this regard, as @Floyd Toole likes to remind us. The whole idea of "we need to kill room reflections so that we can accurately reproduce the acoustics captured in the recording" is based on a faulty premise - it's trying to reach an outcome that a stereo system cannot deliver. It's counter-productive because, as studies have shown, people prefer the presence of side reflections (the real kind, not the kind that stereo fails to reproduce).

You mean that you assume that I'm "missing one important fact".

The thing is that those strong early reflections from the sidewalls will not solve that specific shortcoming of the stereo system either, the only thing those reflections "see" as the generating source are the two speakers in the room. And the early reflections will take everything in the mix no matter if it's a hard-panned dry sound, a phantom-center sound, or a recorded reflection, and that sidewall reflection will smack it all together as just one single sound no matter the complexity of the recorded mix and treat it all as one single reflection.

It will probably work okay with some symphony orchestra music and simple recordings made with just a stereo pair of microphones, recordings that were made at a further distance from the instruments than most other genres of music (99% of the music people are listening to).

 

[amirm]

I don't mean this rhetorically and I don't think your reviews are superfluous, but why are you interested in even the smallest differences in electronic devices, while you are very "generous" in room acoustics and advise not to strive for perfection?

There is a real danger of sidetracking this already contentious discussion with what you ask. But briefly, I am not chasing such. I use RME ADI-2 Pro for my everyday DAC+Amp even though other DACs and headphone amps beat it incrementally in measurements. I love its feature set and functionality and performance is excellent.

I am given products to review and I review them based on engineering excellence. We can objectively measure that and so I produce it. The fact that I do this doesn't mean I am personally chasing this. But that if you are going to buy a new product, you should know how well it performs rather than randomly based on brand reputation/marketing/etc.

With respect to acoustics, the situation is far different. We have no standards for recording or reproduction. So there is no such thing as achieving perfection as we can with electronic products. And even if we could, it could cost a ton of money which better electronics don't demand. If you showed me a room and said give me the perfect sound there without question, I wouldn't be able to answer that. If you asked me for a DAC to give you perfect sound, I can easily in my sleep.

The fact that we can't razor focus on sound reproduction shouldn't mean that we give up on evaluating electronics to high degree. I had a reviewer reach out to me and say that after picking a top measurement class D amp, he could still hear hiss from his speakers. Answer was that even that level of performance wasn't good enough for his sensitive speakers.

Is there inconsistency in my approach here? To some level there is. With electronics I would push you toward measurements. With room acoustics, I would push you away from room measurements for the purposes of frequencies above a few hundred hertz. For electronics I would not trust you saying you heard this and that. For acoustics, I would 100% emphasize listening for any EQ, and for overall target curve. For electronics, you don't need to know much about psychoacoustics because we can arrive at perfect transparency irrespective of that. For room acoustics, it is the other way around and very complicated to boot.

I am a pragmatist and not afraid to change the evaluation method based on topic we are dealing with. I know that if you do otherwise, you can fall in the ditch.

 

[amirm]

The thing is that those strong early reflections from the sidewalls will not solve that specific shortcoming of the stereo system either, the only thing those reflections "see" as the generating source are the two speakers in the room.

It is true that side reflections are a small aid but the impact there is far more than you are acknowledging. Not having to treat those spots with acoustic products saves you a ton of money and avoids uglification of your room. Many also don't have the option to put acoustic products there. It is fortuitous then that we don't have to chase the doctrine of finding reflections and absorbing them. In other words, this doesn't have to solve stereo problem. That problem is so deep that there is no miracle fix of any kind.

 

[amirm]

One of the main problems with the discussion in this thread (and many others) is that a lot of people seem to think in a black-or-a-white manner, but the truth almost always lands somewhere in between in the so-called grey area.

Once more, the youtuber in question made it black and white. If he had said what you said, then we would not be here. Instead a completely black and white criteria was stated with instructions to run certain measurement and go after spikes in there. The resulting room reflected the same. As I have explained, this is "common wisdom" online about room acoustics which has been debunked with proper research for decades now.

 

[amirm]

For those who continue to think this is just something Dr. Toole cooked up and reading his work is all you need to understand it, here are the stats for my Acoustics papers:

When I said it took me to 2 years to get on the other side of research into this area, I was not kidding. Like many of you, I was incredulous when I first got exposed to Dr. Toole's teachings. I didn't believe any of it. It wasn't after I dug deep, very deep, that I realized there is broad support for his conclusions. And that sadly, almost none of it is discussed online. BTW, AES has only a fraction of the papers in this area. You need subscription to ASA (Acoustic Society of America), Acoustica, etc.

 

[thewas]

And last but not least, you may be familiar with the fact that some gurus in their books say
that equalization above 500hz is poor, but well that in the next blind test:

Blind Listening Test 2: Neumann KH 80 vs JBL 305p MkII vs Edifier R1280T vs RCF Arya Pro5

Shortly after completing the first blind listening test, @Inverse_Laplace and I started thinking about all the ways we’d like to improve the rigor and explore other questions. Written summary follows, but here is a video if you prefer that medium: Speakers (calculated preference score in...

www.audiosciencereview.com

the Edlfier r1280t were equalized in several zones of the band, including above 500hz.
They went from being pre-EQ'd with a lousy score to being very close to all of a Neuman KH80.

I think you are confusing some things there, knowledgeable people don't say that equalisation above 500 Hz is necessarily poor, but that it should be based on anechoic measurements and not non-gated measurements at the listeners position (plus that the loudspeaker should have decent directivity as this cannot be changed via EQ), see more information that topic here:

Some comments from Floyd Toole about room curve targets, room EQ and more

Room curve targets Every so often it is good to review what we know about room curves, targets, etc. Almost 50 years of double-blind listening tests have shown persuasively that listeners like loudspeakers with flat, smooth, anechoic on-axis and listening-window frequency responses. Those with...

www.audiosciencereview.com

 

[MattHooper]

All the best sounding gear I ever heard at HiFi shows and expos were demonstrated in large ballrooms (or at least large divided sectioned-off parts of the ballrooms).

I'm not weighing in on the science, but when I read anecdotes my own sort of leap up to mind. For me, to my memory, large speakers in the Big Rooms often seemed to be the most problematic sounding. I would find myself trying to find seats that got me more direct sound, rather than the Big Room acoustics that seemed layered on to the sound. Off hand I'm thinking of the last time I heard some big Focal, Tidal, and other speakers. On the flip side, I do know what you mean as well, since I've heard the occasional big speaker work well in a big room (some flagship Vivid Audio speakers sounded great in a really big room).

But I've heard tons of speaker demos at shows in smaller rooms where they managed to get excellent sound. (On that note, Jeff Joseph is sort of renowned for managing to get "best of show" level sound almost routinely in whatever hotel room he seems to end up. I believe he was one of the earlier manufacturers to, when faced with a challenging room, turn his speakers at a 45 degree angle or so - such that instead of the short or long wall being directly behind the speakers, it was more like a room corner was directly behind the speakers).

Finally, the most impressive sound I ever heard from the big MBL 101D speakers was in a room the size of a closet (or at least that's what it felt like) - a reviewer's tiny room that he'd heavily treated. The speakers totally "disappeared" with surprisingly massive soundscapes and excellent tonality.

This thread will get me paying closer attention to speakers in bigger rooms, at shows, to check things out.

 

[Cote Dazur]

@amirm, thank you for those 4 last post, particularly #866. Thank you for being a beacon, leading us trough the treacherous pass leading to hifi bliss.
As you mention, electronics is easier to grasp, transducer are more challenging and the whole acoustic of rooms concept is the most difficult to understand and overcome with so many hurdles and different possible end goals.
This is possibly where you can help us the most, I hope we will see more coverage of that part of the hobby in the future on this amazing forum.
If we have learn anything from this thread, is that there is disturbance in the force and a lot of interest, appetite and concerns on the subject of best practice for optimum room acoustic.
Thank you for caring and thank you for your irreplaceable guidance.

 

[Axo1989]

It sounds awfully without treatment, but it's fake. A room that size doesn't sound like that. Not to mention you can't really assess the sound of a room via a recording as our brain misses the spacial information.

Ahh it wouldn’t surprise me if that was true. It sounded very bad really.

But we know @amirm (says he) prefers it. That amount of reverb is about taste, not accuracy. I should try it on my laptop speakers too, to be fair, maybe sounds better on them.

Edit: haha, for sure, much less difference in the comparison that way. I could 'prefer' either. Time to sell my stereo gear I reckon.

 

[Axo1989]

I was going to post the two videos that John Darko recently released of the vicoustic treatment in his new apartment in Portugal with before/after but then thought better of it, there’s enough discussion regarding the “Cameron” video without throwing gas on the fire

Perhaps discretion is the better part of valour. Fwiw to my taste, Darko's rooms look pretty ok for apartment living.

 

[Axo1989]

When I said it took me to 2 years to get on the other side of research into this area, I was not kidding.

Only two years? Not a complex subject then.

Like many of you, I was incredulous when I first got exposed to Dr. Toole's teachings. I didn't believe any of it. It wasn't after I dug deep, very deep, that I realized there is broad support for his conclusions.

Perhaps this explains what comes across to me as hyperventilation: the occasional zealousness of the convert. When I first read Toole, I'd already studied some A/V production and acoustics subjects. His material is informative but also pretty straightforward, so I didn't have to dramatically re-assess my beliefs.

 

[amirm]

Perhaps this explains what comes across to me as hyperventilation: the occasional zealousness of the convert. When I first read Toole, I'd already studied some A/V production and acoustics subjects. His material is informative but also pretty straightforward, so I didn't have to dramatically re-assess my beliefs.

There is the confessions of a shallow reader.....

 

[Axo1989]

There is the confessions of a shallow reader.....

That's in lieu of the laughing-till-I-cry emoji, of course.

 

[amirm]

That's in lieu of the laughing-till-I-cry emoji, of course.

Let me test that infinite knowledge of yours that trumps some of our luminaries. Can you tell us how to determine the gauge of speaker cable that would cause an audible difference?

 

[Axo1989]

Let me test that infinite knowledge of yours that trumps some of our luminaries. Can you tell us how to determine the gauge of speaker cable that would cause an audible difference?

Now you're being ridiculous (or just nasty, hard to tell). Reading someone's work (like Toole's) and finding it informative/insightful and broadly consistent with what I've been taught previously has nothing to do with "trumping audio luminaries". And what does an electrical engineering question have to do in a discussion about room acoustics?

 

[Keith_W]

@amirm, thank you for those 4 last post, particularly #866. Thank you for being a beacon, leading us trough the treacherous pass leading to hifi bliss.
As you mention, electronics is easier to grasp, transducer are more challenging and the whole acoustic of rooms concept is the most difficult to understand and overcome with so many hurdles and different possible end goals.
This is possibly where you can help us the most, I hope we will see more coverage of that part of the hobby in the future on this amazing forum.
If we have learn anything from this thread, is that there is disturbance in the force and a lot of interest, appetite and concerns on the subject of best practice for optimum room acoustic.
Thank you for caring and thank you for your irreplaceable guidance.

I should also point out - that room acoustics is the only thing you can really do something about, and it is totally up to you to get it right. With electronics, once the purchase decision has been made, there is nothing you can do about the performance of the component. Except not overdrive it or fry it. So it behooves all of us to learn about room acoustics.