Michael your attitude is counter to most of the industry and what most real audiophiles can actually do.
Most people don’t have the luxury of having a room totally devoted to audio in a way that you would espouse.
Most people’s listening room is their Living Room, or spare bedroom, sometimes with a few modifications in terms of room tuning, lucky are the few audiophiles with rooms devoted strictly to their music systems.
We are not disagreeing with you that it is nice to be able to pull off such a room.
We have heard purpose built rooms which were mediocre at best some were over damped, vs some real rooms that sounded excellent. There is a lot you can do with a some carefully placed furniture, rugs, bookcases, and a few room tuning accessories, yours included.
The point of a show is to get a gauge of what products may sound like in a way that product X will intrigue you to move to take the next logical step of wanting to check that product out in a controlled environment, or not, and in that way regional or national shows are a valuable tool. The reality today is that there are large parts of the country where there are no audio dealers or the dealers selection is very sparse or the dealer sells good speakers but doesn't have complimentary electronics.
We are not saying that the room isn’t important it is however, many audiophiles face room constraints that their rooms are too big, too live, too small, and they don’t have the luxury of being able to employ tons of tube traps, or acoustic panels because their wives or girlfriends would object to their Living Rooms looking like recording studios.
So yes you can have a mutually exclusive dedicated music room where you can hide away from the world and listen or you can choose to tweak up a Family Room or Living Room and still get excellent sound in the light of day without excluding others from listening with you.
One of the reasons for the explosion of Sonos is that music everywhere brings the joy of music to a much wider audience.
We are not saying that because we endorse Sonos but higher quality streaming products encourage others to join in on the fun hence we recommend Naim who makes excellent streaming loudspeakers and amplifiers.
Another trend is electronic room correction which we feel will still not obviate the need for room tuning but goes a long way into making shitty rooms sound better without having to employ panels everywhere.
The demo at AXPONA with the Anthem STR integrated and a pair of the Persona 3F was done in an untreated room and the sound quality of this little system was tremendous because of the advantages of room tuning done in the digital domain.
The demo with Legacy at the New York audio show also demonstrated that power of electronic room correction. The system of the Legacy Aeris combined with a $10k Raven integrated amplifier and a $5k Wavelet room correction processor/dac was roughly a $35k-40k package.
This system was pure magic and they had 0 acoustical treatments in a regular sized Hotel Room and the sound was thrilling, a huge soundstage, all frequencies were balanced, the system sounded better than many $100k setups we have heard.
So Michael you should welcome any and all audiophiles into this hobby with the understanding of what works for some doesn’t work for all us included.
Dave and Troy
Audio Doctor NJ
