What percentage of "audiophile" systems are room acoustics limited?

[Hipper]

Room acoustics is less of an issue than isolation. High in-room noise floor is the killer of good sound. If you have some way of applying EQ, life is considerably easier. But there's only so much you can do about traffic, plumbing, washer/dryer/dishwasher/HVAC, nearby family arguments, without spending a lot of money rebuilding or renovating.

Whether isolation is more important I'm not sure - depends on how bad the ambient noise is - but I certainly agree that dealing with in-room noise, whether coming from in the room or externally such as road traffic is important and not mentioned that often. It's worth investigating for sure. For example I added a third layer of glazing as I live on a busy High Street and it lowered the noise floor enough to seem almost quiet. It certainly made a difference to the detail I could hear in the music and I presume makes listening less fatiguing as your brain needs less effort to decipher what you want to hear.

On room appearance, furniture etc. it of course depends on whether you are lucky enough to have a dedicated listening room or have to make compromises for domestic reasons.

I'm one of the lucky ones and have a dedicated room. This means it's set up only for good listening. I also listen in the semi darkness. The result is it doesn't matter what the room looks like. My only restrictions are the room size and shape etc. and my finance.

I first heard what could happen regardless of equipment, cables etc. when I started experimenting with positioning of speakers. To move people onto the road of room acoustics all it needs is for them to walk around their room whilst listening to some music. They will notice how it changes wherever they are in the room, particularly the bass. This illustrates that moving the speakers and listening chair can change the sound and if done well, can give better sound - lesson one! From there we should encourage the desire to find out what is going on by measuring, simply with test tones and SPL meter, or more sophisticatedly and accurately with software and microphone. After that an introduction to room acoustics (GIK or RealTraps website, or Floyd Toole's book) and we've got them hooked! DSP and EQ to follow to give them a box to play with and they should be in heaven (or hell if they can't stop fidgeting with the stuff )

 

[PierreV]

Arne Jacobson - Dead for 50 years
Poul Kjaerhom - Dead for 40 years
Charles Eames - Dead for 40 years

I guess modern by furniture standards, tube gear by audio standards

Because we are all nit-pickers at heart, @Willem didn't say modern, he said "modernist"

Modernism - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[tuga]

Room acoustics is only the culprit in the modal region. Speakers are the culprit above it.

 

[Everett T]

What percentage of "Audiophiles" are chasing meaningless equipment upgrades (DACs, Amps, "Cables", yes even speakers), when the biggest culprit is room acoustics. We will assume they are not listening pure near-field (which still may be an issue).

Let's not get too hung up on semantics, and assume the following:

• You have somewhat optimized your speaker position within your living space (and within placement restrictions)
• If so inclined, you are using DSP to correct the bass (for at least one position), but are not using multiple subs to even out the bass response

I'd never throw serious money at a room if it didn't give me a huge return. 5 total serious systems in two houses and only one room started without changes.

 

[pozz]

Classy.

 

[alex-z]

100% sounds accurate.

Lets say you take an awesome room, linear decay rate across the whole spectrum, mixing studio quality. There will still be songs which sound too dry, because they were mixed in a worse room and had a lot of reverb sucked out of them to compensate.

There are no hard and fast rules for treating a room, only best practices to deal with the major problems. The only true constant is that bigger rooms are better, because you can spare more space for low frequency management.

 

[aac]

Fodder for the conversation: https://systems.audiogon.com/

A large number of system pictures. Do you see any issues in the vast majority of them?

Parallel walls without any treatment are evil in my experience. And is (relatively) easily treated.

 

[dasdoing]

lol. with that question you knew the result. very rare seeing audiophiles adress the weakest link in the chain

 

[pseudoid]

I was going to click on the top choice (>95%) without even thinking about it.
Then, I got stuck on the title's wording:
Is that like asking "What % of 'audiophile' systems have room correction (or may be capable of room correction/compensation (EQ?)?"
Or would that be a whole other poll/topic?
My 'system' has some but I rarely use them since I have no cloo what the dude that recorded the album had in mind for what he is trying to project into my ears and beyond.

 

[pseudoid]

Because we are all nit-pickers at heart, @Willem didn't say modern, he said "modernist"

I think now the 20th Century is in our rearview mirrors; they are now called "progressive" and in the States they use Ikea furniture for chic-ness!

 

[Galliardist]

Guilty as charged, though I don't hear too many problems they must be there!

I do have "audiophile speakers", but how do they help?

One of the best investments I made was accidental - a bookcase behind the listening seat, presumably acting as a poor but working diffuser. The room is full of furniture and is pretty dead.

And the answer to the question must surely approach 100%, since neither active EQ nor room treatments can completely fix every issue for most rooms. It's a matter of doing your best, isn't it?

 

[Galliardist]

Absolutely! First you work like hell to get everything to the best level of performance that you can. Then you forget about it, and put it out of your mind. Otherwise you'll drive yourself crazy.

Just sit back and enjoy. Jim

I think that's the best piece of advice I've seen for a while!

 

[luft262]

What percentage of "Audiophiles" are chasing meaningless equipment upgrades (DACs, Amps, "Cables", yes even speakers), when the biggest culprit is room acoustics. We will assume they are not listening pure near-field (which still may be an issue).

Let's not get too hung up on semantics, and assume the following:

• You have somewhat optimized your speaker position within your living space (and within placement restrictions)
• If so inclined, you are using DSP to correct the bass (for at least one position), but are not using multiple subs to even out the bass response

*This is my humble opinion and a rough and general explanation to your question.

I agree with you that room response is a huge factor in how any given system will sound, (especially below 500hz as I understand it) but I'm also not a big fan of room treatments as they can be expensive and often don't make much of a difference. Most people should just assemble the best system they can afford with speakers that are the correct size for their listening distance/position and subs that are the correct size for their room and intended purpose (HT vs Music or both).

Then they should make use of DSP and autocorrection (if they have an AVR) and probably get REW and a Umik-1 so they can verify their changes are making a difference.

Once all of that is done just live with the system and enjoy it! If you've picked good speakers and equipment based on reviews with measurements and you've spent about $1,000 or more on your total system cost (assuming purchasing new) then you can be pretty confident that your system is about 90% as good as it's ever going to sound in that room.

1. When I want serious accuracy I use my headphone setup and I think most other people should too.

2. I do have two subs and use DSP via PEQ in the subs themselves, Audessey, and REW with a Umik-1 and I think if you're putting together a system that costs over $1,000 you should be looking into these features too.

3. The room plays a huge factor in how any given system will sound. Look at any frequency response graph of subs or speakers using a Kipple machine or an anechoic chamber and then compare that to an in room response. It will look very different!

Most people are chasing systems because of the following:

1. They just like audio equipment, shopping for it, playing with it, etc. and will never be satisfied with any system.
2. They aren't using multiple subs or even 1 subwoofer.
3. Their speakers aren't positioned correctly. (for example too close to wall, too close together, not toed in, etc.)
4. Their speakers are the wrong size for their listening distance.
5. They don't want to use DSP.
6. Their room has horrible acoustics and that would be difficult to fix.

 

[steve59]

If you ever pick up stereophile to check measurements and we're lucky enough to get one when JA compares 2 speakers in the same room it becomes obvious the room is a huge factor. when compared to the anchoic, outside, nearfield, whichever one he is able to provide it only reinforces the evidence that rooms contour a speakers sound more than a speaker manufacturer does. Now how much that specific in room measurement translates to what we hear is a different argument.

 

[Cote Dazur]

If you do not have a big enough dedicated room where you can put your speaker and your seat where they need to be, you will waste your money trying to get more than very average results when aiming at a spectacular stereo set up, full stop. No equalization, or dsp, will make up for bad position and nearby walls. It needs to be big enough to place speakers and seat far away from boundaries, speaker and seat far way from each other for proper, real size, depth and width imaging, with nothing between the speakers and between speaker and seat to affect image. Big enough for low frequency to exist. Once well positioned in a proper space, it is amazing how good average set up can sound, better set up sound even better still.
I see a lot of post on ASR, with speakers on a desk, I have a set up like that too, but not when seriously listening.
People saying the room does not affect how speakers sound above a certain frequency crack me up or they live on a different planet. Where the speaker go, the dimension of the room and where you sit, will make or break your sound in stereo. Only factor that makes even more difference is how it was recorded.
The rest, speaker, medium and electronic, will be nice to have, but not worth the expense to improve until you have a proper venue to set everything up.
Can you hear differences in a poor set up, crammed up in a living space. Yes, but none will sound really good.
If not able to use a big dedicated space, multichannel is a far better option.

 

[sarumbear]

I guess the only "perfect" listening room is a room that's exactely the same as the room the album was initially produced in. That's gonna take a lot of rooms when your music collection starts to grow...

That’s not true. As Hi-Fi means transparency, room should be as well.

 

[Ralph_Cramden]

My biggest culprit is aging ears - getting way too close to 70!

 

[Hipper]

My biggest culprit is aging ears - getting way too close to 70!

No excuse. I'm 68 so 70 is on the radar - I hope I reach it.

Unless your ears are very bad you can still enjoy music and get the benefits of room treatments, DSP etc.. Indeed DSP/EQ can alter things a bit to enhance your experience. For example I can't hear above 10kHz and I'm not so good at 8 or 6kHz. I boosted 8kHz to get better percussion and I did!

I was told the story once of a local band competition. One of these bands had a reputation for sounding particularly good so the person who told me this story went to meet their sound engineer to see how he achieved this. As he spoke to him he realised this engineer was completely deaf in one ear, and yet.... I suggested that explained why the band's audiences always sat on one side of the room but that's another story!