Room acoustics

And here for tips from the AV Nirvana forum: https://www.avnirvana.com/forums/official-rew-room-eq-wizard-support-forum.10/

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).

A quote from Franco Serblin, Sonus Faber founder and speaker designer -

He found the search for perfect bass futile. "When you want more bass, you miss it; when you have it, it disturbs you."
Read more at https://www.stereophile.com/content/sonus-faber-minima-fm2-loudspeaker-franco-serblin-interview#qJX2...

I bit of bass lift is not quite the same as a bass peak. These peaks generate one note bass.
As a practical solution in real life where you want to maintain an elegant decor, I think the combination of two smallish subwoofers plus an automatic equalization system like the Antimode 8033 is quite realistic. It does not involve ugly bass traps or huge subwoofers, is not a great hassle to set up at all, and is relatively affordable. Depending on room size and desired levels of bass extension and loudness, two small subs and an Antimode 8033 would cost from about $1300 (more if you want the subs to go lower and louder to fill a bigger room). Push the subs into two adjacent corners of the room, do the Antimode measurement ritual (half an hour’s work, including reading the manual), set the level and crossover (that is the hardest bit), perhaps with a measurement microphone, and you are done. With my B&W PV1d you get precise instructions for slope, phase and crossover settings for the specifications of your main speakers. They turned out to be spot on.
In my case I am still using only one sub, and even then the equalization is a big improvement. The Antimode allows you to optimize for a wider area, and that has worked pretty well. Even so, a second PV1d sub is the first item on my shopping list.
As for the additional analogue to digital to analogue conversion, with the Antimode 8033 this only happens in the bass region reproduced by the sub(s). The main speakers receive the same signal as before.

a larger number of subs can give xlnt results

Great topic and posts willemj - room equalization is an important issue, much more so than most of the threads on here

... mre tidbits follow