Acoustic treatment question: do you agree with Dennis Foley that $46k to $65k is required?

I spoke with him once about my room - he basically said the dimensions and layout are both unfixable ("Don’t bother trying to fix it, buy a different house.").

I am not an acoustician...

BUT

if i read this advise coming from an acoustician, i doubt a lot... "This is a Bad room sell your house" or next customer please!

That gives me doubts....

No room is unfixable, some room are very difficult...Yes...

My room is a 2 litlle rectangulars in a square central puzzle piece geometry, 13x 13 feet x 8 1/2 height , one of the speaker is almost glued in a corner the other not... 2 windows, one door...

I succeed to compensate completely for the distortion of the soundstage caused by the very bad location of the speakers...

The bass for a 7 inches drivers touch my stomach with punch....The highs are very good in the 2 positions of listenings...Timbre distinction is very good and vibraphone notes decay with changing colors hues is an experience to live....

All my gear are on my desk between the speakers, i succeed to relatively isolate them...

My imaging is stellar in 2 listening positions, and the timbre natural in the 2 positions...

The reason why some professional say this about "impossible" room to fix is simple: they work with standard regular methods, mostly some specific materials, applicable in most case to some degree and not in all case... They want to spare them the big trouble because it is one trouble... You cannot fix a difficult room with simple passive materials means only , even many simple one....it is not like reconstructing the room, it is a work piece by piece in the frequencies range with many devices to compensate.... It is not an easy job... More hours less money....

I spend 2 years with incremental experiments and UNORTHODOX devices to fix it, ( 3 different sets of Helmholtz resonators among others means ) i succeed, using my ears and remember that i optimized my room for 2 POSITIONS of listening not one.... I am in love with the 2 position, one is more detailed, the other more alive, but the 2 are almost perfect.... Impossible to chose....

I am not an acoustician at all.... I am ignorant in acoustic but less than some.... I just discovered that my ears are better acoustician than me....

I know nothing, i just try one step at a time.... I learn little but little may be big, compared to nothing....Is my room perfect? Hell no... Is it a marvel to listen music here? Hell yess... A relative optimization is not perfection but you can live with it without looking back...

i just post that, because some may think to sell their house after this advice by a pro....Or enter into despair and resignation...

My best to all...






By the way thinking like some that "near listening" spare for them the necessity of an acoustical treatment in a small room, is true to a very small degree only....In a small room the reflected waves comes very swiftly into play.... I know then very well by experience that acoustical treatment will change the near listening timbre perception and imaging and soundstage....
Except for rare case of some miraculously well set room already good acoustically this is the rule for me....



The only question is NOT to know if the room is good or too difficult to use..... The only difficult question is :

Do you have a room ONLY for audio purpose? Anything is acoustically workable...At peanuts cost and i proved it for myself... Is it not good news? The ONLY COSTLY thing will be discount your ears advice from the work to be done... Acoustic in its "basic" form is only learning to hear....Read also the basic about waves....

Then saying to someone "too bad room", next customer, speak less about acoustic science than about simplification of work by business methods....Business management it is called not acoustic at all....

Without a purpose-built listening room it's unlikely most homes have a floating room with very good ratios and built with multi-layer, heavy, damped construction. My current listening room has those qualities and it still required 32 tuned Helmholtz resonators in the corners, broadband membrane traps against the front wall, RPG Diffractal arrays across most of the back wall, and 4" 703 clouds over about 80% of the ceiling and 70% of the side walls. That treatment takes into consideration that the low frequency modes will already be well spaced and the treatment only enhances what is already a very even room.

What is required in a recording studio though is different from a listening room.  A listening room has the benefit of fixed speaker position and listener.

In a listening room as well, and as it suits personal preference, some reflections are a good thing to enhance sense of space that is often preferred over what can be a flat presentation from the recording. To that end, I would expect most people would not find ideal to have 70% of their side walls covered with thick absorption and probably not 80% of the ceiling, though you have not described the floors.  Covering that much ceiling but leaving the floors "live" can create an unnatural presentation depending on the speakers.

Your implementation of the 32 Helmholtz resonators really speaks to the alternate implementation of a bass array for controlling the lowest nodes. For most users and their rooms, when cost, looks, space, etc. is taken into account, a bass array will be a better, more cost effective implementation. 

Dennis Foley runs a business. He has a business model and a target demographic for his clientele.. My entire system, including room treatments, is under 50K. On the whole, my system/room is to my ears the best I have ever personally heard, and I’ve auditioned systems that retailed for over 200K in rooms that were well set up and treated. He has some products that are very intriguing. I don’t discount him as a complete quack. I don’t agree with everything he says, but that doesn’t make him a charlatan. There can be a number of effective solutions to any problem. Some are more efficient and cost effective than others.

GIK has a different model and different target clientele demographic than Foley does. They also have some worthwhile products, and I’ve got over 2K invested in GIK products.

RealTraps falls somewhere in between GIK and Foley models. Their limp membrane traps are very good, and I have about 1.5K invested in them. I wish I had used more of them and fewer of the velocity traps sold by GIK.

This stuff is not so much a buyer beware situation as it is a buyer be informed situation. These guys are going to sell you what they make. GIK won’t tell you when RealTraps makes a better product for your need.  The buyer has to figure that out himself.

Being ill informed and unwilling to learn about room acoustics and treatment designs is costly. As always, stupid is expensive.

I know from experience!

I have watched maybe 10 of his vids.  It was worth the time and provided food for thought.  But he completely lost me when in the last one I watched he went off on the "industry" selling extremely harmful substances like fiberglass and Roksul.  He was claiming that they are as harmful as asbestos.  Went on to say that playing music would shake fibers loose (even if covered) and of course you would breath them.

He stated that he uses granulated charcoal as a sound barrier between walls.  I will admit if you are soundproofing his wall design did look very well thought out and of course uber $$$$.

Regards,
barts

 

Yes it's true. Asbestos miners working ten hour days breathing a gram per cubic meter asbestos dust develop lung disease in as little as 20 years. The microscopically infinitesimally immeasurably few bits of fibers you might inhale listening to music an hour or so a week is dead certain to give you cancer, and probably only in five or ten thousand years. 

The one thing this bozo is right about is no way you can put a panel on the wall for less than a grand. They can't be anyone else's panels, those guys don't even know about all these invisible astronomically non-existent non-risks. We cannot even begin to estimate the cost of room treatment until we know your net worth.  

And I know what you're thinking, but we already know your gullibility and susceptibility to BS is sky high, or you'd never watch these stupid videos. So all we need now is your money.