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.
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Showing 1 response by smorey

I'm in the same camp as G_m_c. I listen to music on a 2nd floor (which is the main level) looking out into the trees. Visuals in life are as important to me as listening. Both bring me tremendous joy & peace. The two are not mutually exclusive. There are certain speakers (very good ones) that I would never buy because I couldn't look at them. I listen in a large, open, space in excess of 10,000 cubic feet. The negative is that is that spaces such as this are a bit too reverberant, the positive is that they have a spacious feel & sound. Specifically to the original question: I would want a consultant to tell me where treatments would be effective and let me (a designer / builder) balance the design/sound equation based on the consultant's skills (data, fundamental engineering) in conjunction with visual design.

Architects & engineers, painters & musicians have worked together for centuries. Seems like sometimes we audiophiles may polarize what please our eyes & ears perhaps too much.

It not always the wife who care how it looks :) Thanks for starting this thread.