the Listening Room


Many of you may know us, we design listening rooms. While we offer fixed prices for different levels of consultation, no two listening rooms are the same and some vary wildly. I am interested in hearing what you all want to get out of your listening room. I have my own biased opinion, that the listening room is often the most important component of any system (and unfortunately frequently ignored to a large degree). Let's suppose that you could get an acoustical engineering group like ours for free, but you still had all other constraints. You could a great deal on materials to impliment the design but you still had whatever other considerations you have in your life (I don't have space for a dedicated listening room, I can't have ugly acoustical treatement in the room, I can't move walls in my house). Try to be qualitative rather than quantitative. I'm not really that interested in hearing about the specifics of rooms--I'm more interested in hearing about end result goals, such as: I need sound isolation (I like to listen loudly at night and don't want to wake up my wife), or my room sounds dead--I feel like I have a head cold when I walk into it. The other aspect that would be very helpful, at the end of the post, please put a percentage of 2 channel vs HT or multi-channel you listen to. You may even be in the camp: "the room doesn't matter much, I like buying new pieces of equipment instead" That okay too--I'd like to hear from you as well. Some people may not understand the importance of room interaction on the sound, that's okay too--if you had free consultation what would you do or ask in order to get a better listening room.
rives

Showing 1 response by mburns92

I have a similar situation to Flex above, regarding the layout of my house (WA, not CA). Since I am at a point in my career where I move every few years, I can't afford to do anything to lower the resale potential of my house.

Therefor, I will tell you what I would like in the future, not my current listening space, which doesn't leave much flexibility.

I would look for a room design where I could listen to relatively loud music without sounding strained, and without interfering with my wife watching TV elsewhere in the house. Asthetics would be secondary, but I wouldn't want to feel like I was in a laboratory either. Additionally, I have no problem living with the same speakers for a long time, so I would not hesitate to have a room optimized for a particular pair of speakers.

My current listening is 100% 2-channel music, and if I could change my entire system today, it would still be optimized for 2-channel music, but I would add surround for watching movies.

BTW, thanks for all the excellent information that you provide in this forum.

Mike