There is no need to convince me of the importance of room in the hierarchy of 2 channel stereo sound quality. I’ve been pondering this room mode problem for several weeks now reading authors like Floyd Toole, Todd Welti, S. Linkwitz, and Nyal Mellor in addition to reviewing various forum discussions. I have also talked briefly with one acoustic consultant. My take away is as follows:
- In a mixed use room environment, acoustic treatment is a very limited option. Changing/ replacing furniture and adding baffles/ diffusors to the walls is a non-starter with my wife and I would guess that I’m not alone in this constraint.
- Multiple subwoofers looks to be the most promising solution for dealing with room modes although integrating these subwoofers is a legitimate challenge. My concern is that I’ll spend $2.5K and have a very fussy system that needs to be tweaked with every CD played.
- Equilization. A simple and relatively inexpensive way to go (depending on equalizer) but the results are limited to a very small listening area. Moreover, I’m concerned about potential degradation in sound quality with an additional A/D - D/A conversion. Many have said that the improvement in room modes outweighs the small to negligible degradation in signal quality.
In other on-line forums, a few contributors questioned the sonic benefits of a very flat bass response claiming the sound to be anemic. Likewise, Floyd Toole’s experiments at Harman showed trained listeners preferred a modest rise in bass response compared to ruler flat. My quandary is whether to give up a very simple system for the promise of better bass at the cost of complexity and $ without knowing if I’ll like the result (enough).
