OP
CleanSound
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Post 13. That's how I play around with room acoustics. The sliding barn rail makes it easy to do it.Hookay....
I've gone in to some detail spread across other threads but since I can't be arsed to find them I'll just give you the quick version.
You can see some details of my room in this post. Pictured are my Thiel 2.7 speakers, but right now I'm using Joseph Audio speakers in their place.
How big is your listening room?
When we did a large gut remodel of our house one of the requirements was a dedicated listening room. But even when you can essentially start with a blank sheet, if you are on a budget, you still have restrictions like the overall foundation footprint or the requirement of an egress window. So I...
It was retro-fitting a home theater system in to an older home, which also allowed for a separate 2 channel system, represented by the Thiel speakers pulled out near the sofa. The home theater speakers are covered in black velvet, to blend in with the black velvet screen surroundings. The room was designed with an architect and the input of an acoustician. If you look at the last image in that post you can see part of the built down ceiling structure. Instead of hard material, it's actually a frame covered in taught, dark brown velvet. This material is excellent for absorbing light so it doesn't reflect back on the projection screen. And it also provides some "ceiling cloud" effect for controlling the highs. Plus there are large sections of absorption/bass trapping built in the front and back, as well as some hidden in the corners of the room. I like it all out of sight.
As to tweaking acoustics 'n such. First, since I have some limitations in how far back I can move the speakers, because the right speaker would block the entranceway, I have the sofa on big sliders, so it's really easy to slide back and forth to dial in a desired seating distance.
I had a custom, thick, brown velvet cover made that hooks on to the fireplace beside the Left speaker, to kill the higher frequency reflections from the tiles. It works perfectly for this. As well, I have a slection of big, thick, brown velvet curtains that can be pulled across any part of the side (and back) walls. You can see one curtain partially pulled out by the fireplace here:
View attachment 336462
Then from inside the room facing the entrance, you can see the same type of curtains on the side and back wall corner (pictured with Joseph Audio speaker):
View attachment 336463
So I can modulate the sidewall reflectivity depending on where I place, or how thin I bunch up the curtains, and there's a curtain I can pull across the entranceway which also affects the sound. With that corner curtain pulled back leaving the room open to the hallway, the sound is more spacious and lively, the more I pull it to close the entrance, the more precise and intimate the sound, and the fine details of the recorded acoustic tend to predominate. Same with modulating the other curtains.
Then as I said I use the curved diffusor sometimes between the speakers. And I can adjust the reflectivity of the wall behind the speakers with the masking system.
It's really quite amazing how precisely one can dial in the sound character with these options. My ideal is to be enveloped, and to hear as much as the recorded acoustic as possible, rather than overwhelm it with room reflections. So I'm often cutting off some side wall reflection. But if I add the curved diffusor in the middle of the speakers, then I get this "best of both worlds" effect - I maintain the audibility of the finest recorded reverb/acoustics, but it also sounds more open and airy and lively - so it's like seeing right in to the recording space to live players kind of thing.
Works for me, anyway.
