Does the first reflection point actually matter??

Hi Erik, there is a lot of well meaning advice being offered but most of it ill informed. This whole thing is a science with specific goals. Some posters claim that they adjust the toe-in of their speakers and everything sounds fine. Useless info this.

Correct treatment is truly transformative and if you are not prepared, for less than the cost of a mid-priced interconnect, to buy a suitable microphone and download for free, REW or HolmImpulse (as used by Geddes) then add bass traps and treat first reflection points. Just this will amaze you.

Unless you have your system set up on the long wall where sidewall reflections arrive much later you will need to absorb some of that energy to reduce smearing and congestion. The average room requires about 400ms for the sound to decay evenly across the frequency range by 60dB, known as T60. Tables are available online for different enclosed volumes.

Someone mentioned floor and ceiling reflections which of course is as important as the others. Here though a ceiling 'cloud' works extremely well and a small rug or no rug is fine. The cloud frame needs to be preferably 4" x 6ft x 8ft and hung with a 4" gap below the ceiling. This will act as a broad-band absorber, unlike wall to wall carpet which is narrow-band and harmful to the sound. Consider that your ears are a known, to your brain, fixed distance from the floor so these reflections are not as problematic. We have evolved to allow for this.

Diffusion is good in larger rooms, not so much in small ones. From experience I can confidently state that treating the modal region below the Schroeder frequency is the most effective if you wish to limit the amount of treatment. I'm talking about bass traps, real bass traps and not the silly little scraps of foam that cannot absorb anywhere near bass. They are physically just too small.

GIK do not make 'proper' broad-band absorbers because they will not sell well and would be a nightmare to ship, so they tend to oversell lesser units. I know somebody who returned a few because the room was too dead!

My best advice is to educate yourself as much as possible on this fascinating and immensely rewarding process by reading articles from the right source. Leo Beranek is tough going but the true authority, Foley from acoustic fields not so much.

I like Toole, but let’s be clear that this is his personal opinion about what he likes. For some of us, the acoustics of live spaces can take a toll on our brain power. As others have written, filtering out a room all the time can be exhausting, including academic settings.

I personally want my room a little less present. I like my stereo to be the acoustic equivalent of looking across a mountain range. That feeling of relaxation you get when suddenly you feel like you can see forever, but with my ears.

We ALWAYS listen to our room when we listen music, except that if the controls of the room is right we are not conscious of the room but better aware of the musical flow....

There is no "stereo equivalent of looking across a mointain range", it is not the audio stystem alone that create the sounds impressions, but the room.... It is an unseparable unity, this unity can be horrible or celestial with all the level between the 2....




The subjective impressions caused by the impact of a specific room are subjective and vary for each imdividual, but the recreation of the sound impressions by the brain/ears WITH the recording space cues and the actual cues of the room space are informations absolutely necessary to the experience....This recreation is based on the INFORMATION linked to the recording event and the room event for all of us, even if we are not conscious of the room because we are used to it...To be conscious of the room is simple, go to your basement et compare that sound with your kitchen, and the sound of the next church....

What Toole speak about are not only opinions, but serious trends in acoustical science, and we cannot answer to that:" i prefer the sound of my music coming from my stereo system", forgetting the room....We all want to forget the room... But to do so we MUST control the room....This is precisely the point i made and negating it reveal only that you are not conscious of what is the problem at all... :)

If you have the impression that your room dont exist already without any workings of it it is probably a self ingrained conditionment of your perception.... When the boat takes water anybody can negate reality and say all is well i prefer the infinite view from the soaking boat...

And we must realize that we are not conscious of the impact of our room on the sound except when we experiment with it.... I myself became conscious of the extraordinary contribution of the room by experiments... WITHOUT experiments we cannot be aware of this contributions at all...We can suspect it yes, but being aware of the enormous size of the impact, no, not at all... This is the point of acoustic treatment and controls in audio, where people invest big money in electronics and little or nothing in treatment and controls...This blinders were mine BEFORE my experiments in listenings....

The recording experiment you propose is only to reveal the presence of the room, but will not reveal the constructive/destructive impact of the room... When we lived in a room we became used to it, we are not conscious at all often of his destructive side....And anyway most people dont even believe their own ears.... Suffice to read audio forum to know that....Listening experiments is the ONLY way to create a room... Even computerized solutions has limits....

How much you are taxed by the space, how much you are willing to filter out is very individualized.

I’m sorry @mahgister but I feel that you misread my points in too many ways to count, so I'm going to let that drop there.  It's too hard to answer all that.



Best,

E

i get your point and i apologize if i was insisting...

What you say makes more sense in a vast room, in a small one we are captive of reflections and using it is the best way.... Erasing then partially is not the only and not the better way....Most people listen music in small room like me....And not in a ideal acoustically designed big room...

Anechoic chamber are unbearable by the way....And we cannot have an anechoic chamber impression from a normal room....We can record something in an anechoic chamber, not living in it..... In an anechoic chamber we are missing all information cues that comes from our normal room.... And what Toole or any acoustican know is that the brain NEEDS the recording cues of the lived recording original musical event and the cues from the room where the audio system plays to recreate the music on the best scale possible...The final information comes from the mixing by the brain of the cues coming from the direct waves and the reflected one in a room....There is no normal room who mimic an anechoic one.... It is a delusion or a metaphor to convey a peculiar opinion like: i taste my wine but i prefer that the wine dont come from any glass at all.... And this saying says all.... :)

My best to you....

I was only talking in relative terms, on a scale.

Anechoic room  <================> Drywall and concrete

If tool is in the middle I'm a little to the left of him.  The rest, the importance of reflections is important, too many overuse absorption and don't use enough diffusion.

That is all.

Erik