About Roger's room - I'm glad you guys got to experience it. We built it to demonstrate our ongoing work optimizing Thiel speakers and their partnering systems while minimizing the unknowns of a playback room. Much confusion and mis-direction comes from attributing anomalies, problems and limitations to the speaker when in fact much of those things might come from the room. Our goal was an extraordinarily neutral, linear and pleasant playback environment that also sounded clean, natural and normal - not like a technical apparatus, but like a lovely place to visit. That's a tall order.
I am thrilled with this room. I have done many listening spaces in my career, with various clients, architects, builders contractors. Many of the final short-comings from those projects emanate from the false belief that 'a room is a room - get over it' attitude. Roger's approach was the opposite. He has been open to and an active contributor to the whole design-build process. And he's willing to go the extra mile in creating optimal solutions. I consider this collaboration among the most successful of my life.
In his existing industrial space, constraints and limitations come with the territory. One was a fairly small footprint that would normally require a short-wall speaker placement, with too-early first reflections. We turned it 90° for a nice stage and addressed the back-wall-bounce creatively. Roger had access to an open architecture cellulose tile which I first found in Brazil in the late 80s. It passes most of what hits it while introducing enough resistance to diffuse the hot spots in the propagation field. Behind that full semi-wall there is a 2' deep chamber before a very rigid non-bounce, non-resonant back wall. Access allows tuning of absorption in that chamber. Fiberglass was adjusted to occupy the areas of maximal pressure in the corners and center.
Similarly the ceiling tiles pass some air through them into a 4' chamber under the roof with variable fiberglass, similarly tuned. The front and side walls are bare. Plugs were created to fill two troublesome windows in the front and side walls.
A major element occupies the front-side wall corners, floor to ceiling. I had previously executed elements of this structure, but never the whole thing (due to pushback as alluded to above.) Roger jumped at the chance to go all the way. Imagine two quarter-columns of 2' radius with vertical slats about 1cm / 3/8" apart attached to resistive fabric and held in place by curved ribs. What you see are vertical floor-to-ceiling RedCedar slats with their grain pattern mirror-matched, left to right column. Roger had picked up on the CS5i matching system and tributed it here in his execution of the pair of traps. What a thrill. Those columns hold insulation at their bottom, mid and top, which was experimentally tweaked to 'just right'.
The floor is concrete slab which he covered in thick slab densified and torrified beech panels (the stuff you sometimes find on railroad boxcar floors.) As we worked the variables on my visit last summer, we removed a wool carpet we thought we might need in front of the listening post. Part of it ended up on the center of the back wall, behind the porous scrim.
My visit was limited to a couple of days, and Roger carried on the room tuning on his own. I'm confident it is well optimized, and I suspect that Ron and Bob got an earful. We hope for this room to serve all of us as we continue our Thiel Renaissance upgrade developments.
