listening room

This hasn't been a very useful thread so far.

As I am about to move house, the topic is of interest. Naturally I would like to choose a house with a room that will be good for music reproduction.

If there is one lesson I have learned, it is that lounge/diners are useless for hifi. So I will be looking for a house with a lounge and separate diner or kitchen/diner.

This leaves the question of dimensions. Non-parallel walls would be ideal but very few houses have non-rectangular living rooms (although I have come across one nearly triangular one in my house searches - sadly the house lacked other features that I need).

So, if we must have some room modes, how to minimise them. As Thorsten has said, one can use speakers that minimise room mode interaction and I am looking into this. Otherwise, one needs to choose dimensions that place the room modes at relatively benign frequencies.

My current experience is that room modes at 45 - 50 Hz are bad. There are sustained notes at 45 - 50 Hz in much of my music collection. Higher harmonics of these modes seem to be less of an issue so long as one sits in a suitable position relative to them. The front-back room mode is the most annoying, at least if you have suspended floors and ceilings.

My current thinking is that a room mode at 35 Hz with a higher harmonic at 70 Hz would be less troublesome than what I have. This leads to a front-back dimension of 4.9 m (~16 ft). A width of ~10 ft would give a golden ratio room.

 

Hi,

Sorry, I didn't realise it was meant to be?

Very simple and basic rules that allways apply.

1) Choose the room either as large as they get or rather small, be aware that large rooms need larger speakers and possibly amplifiers to produce the neccesary SPL, small rooms need little SPL and due to room gain setting in fairly high can work well with small speakers.

On the other hand fairly large rooms with wide speaker placement, long listening distance and some minimal but strategically placed diffusion (combined with strongly directional speakers) can give a much greater degree of "live" illusion than a smaller room can, the simple problem is that the degree of effort required goes up more or less exponentially.

2) Look for rooms that allow you to create an acoustical envoironment as symmetrical as possible. So, if yur room is small and you would liek to use speaker placement along the wider dimension, make sure that both of the shorter walls can be made to reflect/diffuse/pass sound by the same degree and that fllor arrangements are or can be made symmetrical (eg not concrete on ground slab for the left halve the room and floorboards above a large cellar for the right halve, back/front), however back/front asymetry is not only not damaging but can be of use.

3) Ideally the room ceiling is fairly high and not flat, but symmetrical, vaulted ceilings, cathedral ceilings etc.

4) If you want to minimise room modes listen outdoors.

The best you can do indoors is to select dimensions for the room who divided by each other give non integer results and ideally ones that are not near 2; 1 1/2; 1; 1/2; 1/3, which becomes difficult. Certain esotheric systems suggest specific ratios# relating to the general way nature is organised and it is easily found that they also work best for rooms (they are also found in the C37 sound patterns Dieter Ennemoser is working on/with).

(#Note - these are my favouritly quoted esotheric numbers - you may find some included in the Fama Fraternitas and Confessio Fraternitas of the RC, though they are not spelled out there clearly, but you need to work backwards)

However, no matter what you do, at beats you can spread out room modes so that non of them re-nforce each other or harmonics, but even then the LF response remains very uneven.

The upshot of the above is that ideally we simply select a room that pleases us in any aspect we wish for but acoustics and the utilise speakers that are designed to maximally room independent and/or are "designed into" the room you selected.

These speakers may have to be homebuild or commissioned from a suitable outfit (like serious studio installations), not much is readily available for purchase.

Ciao T

 

Ditto.

 

Chris,

Why not try to get a dedicated listening room? I would then go for heavy absorbtion. Carpet, curtains - including behing the speakers hiding all the wiring garbage. You are then free to experiment. A spare bed or a sofa bean bag will take some out. Hang lots of thin fabric from the ceiling to floor [I havent worked out how btw..] radiating from the speakers to damp modes/air movement. Buy £300 of toilet paper packs and arrange in piles to discover where it works - start with the outer speaker radiation that bounces from the side wall. IME nearly square rooms are preferable to rectangles. Obviously, we would all like a pentagon with a vaulted roof etc.

I have to agree with your experience - the medium sized rectangle is the most confusing stereo room of all

 

Easier said than done on my budget. It's hard enough finding houses with adequately large living rooms (at least 15ft x 11ft) and separate diner or kitchen/diner. Extra reception rooms are fairly rare. Plus I have other requirements like being able to get the bike off the road and preferably out of sight and I need a third bedroom that is big enough to be my gym so absolute minimum width 6ft 6" - amazing how many are narrower than that. And then there's central heating and double glazing. And parking for the car. I've seen several good houses that were ringfenced by yellow lines. I have a shortlist of about 9 so far but that may reduce on actual inspection - that's from a cast of at least 200!

I hung a duvet up behind the speakers yesterday and it did improve the midrange and treble.

I think loft insulation packs would be cheaper - the pink ones that expand in size when you open them up.

 

There is a series of articles on 6moons which contains some useful information.

 

There are also books available.

Quite a few books have been written on building an ideal studio control room. They go beyond what you are after, but they contain a lot of the info you want. Although you will get better results if you hire an acoustician (Nick Whitaker is the best I know), you can do the basic calculations and even measurements yourself, and build your own basic room treatments.

Cheers

Dave

 

"So you want the perfect room? Would Pavarotti sound right in a Jazz club? Would a symphony sound good in a basement? What do you want your room to do? Since I know you will ask, mine will seat 3 people. It will not be terribly large and be optimized for jazz and vocals. My symphony will be smaller than a real symphony - but that's okay for me. What's more important is what is important to you. What do you want your room to do?" 6moons article as above URL

thought that made a lot of sense, and also touched on the thread about us liking different things. I like small scale stuff - folk, jazz, chamber music, vocals - and they sound good in my room, at 15x15 I can pretend the presence. However, I find it difficult to pretend the presence of a full piece orchestra, and dont feel that my set-up gives me such a large soundstage as I would get in the stalls.

 

I like my listening room to be scattered with cushions, a selection of canapes, friends and a bottle crisp chablis. Music always sounds nice then.

 

OK, I mean dedicated from the living dining room. It could be a spare/main bedroom

Our house has no 'main' system in the living room [similar to your main room]. When I did get to try the layouts that I wanted [married!] results were poor. Also no good FM reception. So I bought a 300CD changer and wall mounted diddy speakers downstairs.

The main system is now in the main bedroom - about 4metres x 4 metres. 2 footstools for facing the speakers either side of the bed, or lie on the bed for the worlds biggest [non-artificial] headphone sound!
Clothes hanging in alcoves behind the speakers do a sterling job of damping. Bass is a little tubby [I would prefer a larger room to propagate very low bass], but no room flutter or muddy overhang. Best result of the last 3 houses.

Good luck househunting in the SW. We lived in a shoebox in Bristol for 3 years...

 

I'm looking in the old part of Torquay where shoeboxes are thin on the ground. It's mostly Victorian terraces and semis. They are quite spacious. I have only found one modern house that would suit my needs but it wasn't in the right part of town.

Unless you have lots of money to spend, modern houses are rubbish.