I find that my hearing immediately responds to the sort of ambience (esp. bass ambience) discussed here. But my background (growing up) was as a performing musician--with non-amplified instrumentation. Up until age 8, I always got hauled to the big organs for my mother to practice (she was a master's organ performance student at TCU).
If you've ever spent time inside an anechoic chamber, I would say that even rooms with good damping down to bass frequencies--aren't my preference. When the music stops, it's very disorienting. In fact, I find that it tends to affect balance and digestive equilibrium. YMMV.
I've been through that experience of adjusting back and forth between lively and more damped rooms. Or speakers with lower or higher directivity listened to up close or at more of a distance. With just two speakers I'm convinced that some properly controlled ambience in the space is better than not having it. With more channels I'm told it's less important. I don't have enough experience to have my own opinion. It would seem to me that we should expect to hear some of our own self-noise bouncing back at us from the virtual space we are hearing in the recording. Otherwise there is an obvious psychoacoustic mismatch. Maybe we need microphones in the room that play our self noise back through the speakers, with convolution to match the acoustics of the space we are listening to on the recording.
How loud are you when listening to music? Unless I am crashing into something in a concert hall, I am not hearing myself.
You laugh, Lexicon actually did some of this in what they called LIVE. You set it up in your room and it used their ambiance generation/reverb to make the room sound much larger like a concert hall. It was a sort of a home version of their LARES system. For most people it wasn't very useful but it was very fun to play with.
Dr. Toole has mentioned his experiences with this a few times on this forum. Here's an older post, and a more recent one. Apparently it worked quite well.
Absolutely, I do the same. With the light out my room is completely blacked out and I love listening to music that way.
That is cool, I hadn't seen those posts.
Yes, people coming into a room like that notice it and in my experience it just reinforces the theater feel. Most times they ever talk quieter.
Definitely. I swapped a bunch of equipment out and have been resetting up my bi-amped mains so using REW a lot. Interesting to see the measurements for clarity and such in there.
That's a very good sign that the room is not overly damped. It's a nice bonus that rooms that work well for stereo playback are generally nice places to talk, or sing, or play an instrument. One of the first big acoustic installs I was involved with was in a mansion up in Portland. The basement theater was heavily (but smartly) treated. After a month or so I called him up and asked him how it was. He said his wife loved to go down there to talk with him because it was so easy to hear each other.
If there's the sound of an audience shuffling about and talking before the show you won't hear your own self noise over that din. But if it's supposed to be quiet in there you can definitely hear your own foot scuff or voice returning to you in very large spaces. So between movements or songs when there's not a cheering audience the effect could be compelling.
