I have spent the past year and a half going to town. I have mindfully and exuberantly engaged with every aspect of my system, with one exception… acoustics and room treatments.
I have a 14’x18’ x8’ high living room that is also my current listening room. I live in New York City, queens, and am an architectural designer with some fabrication ability. I am just beginning to get privy to how to approach acoustics and room treatments and find it fascinating. I would very much like to do the following:
-maximize the room acoustics in my living room, while maintaining or enhancing its visual appeal
-begin learning about acoustics as a whole, so that I may lean into designing architectural spaces intertwined with hifi listening..,, ie: large volume chamber woofers and open baffles incorporated into the architecture, even speakers partially or entirely cast into the floor walls or ceiling.
how to begin?
thanks for your insight and inspirations, fellow obsessives…!
For first reflections,the hybrid Alpha panels needed to be at least 3’ from my tweeters to work. I tried regular (GIK 244)full panel there and it was too much for my Vandersteens. Was pretty lifeless and the imaging was not good. Was a cheap experiment to try.
@brownsfan Are you saying that once you determine the speaker and listening positions, you should not consider moving them when you place your sub(s)? The subs move relative to them?
The short answer is that ideally once you establish the speaker and listening positions, those will not be subsequently be changed. Optimizing acoustics in a particular room is an incredibly complex multi-variable problem that would best be solved by a mathematical modeling solution that is way beyond the capability of anyone not having a PhD in mathematics. But the rest of us can do really well by making the problem as simple as possible. I have used this approach in my own listening room and helped others successfully implement it in theirs. @hilde45in particular took his room that was initially dreadful and looked impossible and transformed that space into a space that was really, really, good. This approach works best in dedicated listening rooms.
Remember that early reflection zones in a room your size are determined by the specific spacial relationship between speaker, listening position, and reflective surfaces such as walls, ceilings and floors. If you move any of these, you will need to change the location of your side wall treatments that have been positioned in order to defeat early reflections. That subsequent moving of the side wall treatments will then change the room's frequency response. See the problem?
If you optimize each variable sequentially, then lock in that change before moving on to the next variable, you simplify the complex multivariable problem to a sequence of single variable or two variable optimizations that any of us can solve using REW as a tool.
BTW this approach is not what I would use for near field listening.
Decide about how far away from your speakers you would like to sit. You don't need REW for this. This decision is dependent upon your particular speakers, your personal preferences, and visual aesthetics. Let's say you decide you prefer to sit somewhere between 9-13 ft away from your speakers, with 11 feet your ideal distance.
Begin to determine the optimal distance between the back of your speakers and the front wall. This will be dependent on speaker design. Front, rear, and bottom ported speakers, open baffle, dipoles, etc will all be very different. Position your speakers at 1ft, 2ft, 3ft etc distances from the rear wall with your microphone positioned 11 ft from the speaker, and take REW measurements at each position. Look for the flattest frequency response below 100 Hz. That determines the distance between the speaker and the front wall.
Run scans again, this time with the speaker position fixed but with the microphone 9, 10, 11, 12, and 14 ft from the speaker. Again, look for the flattest frequency below 100 Hz. This determines the optimal distance between your speaker and your listening position.
With the speaker distance from the back wall and its distance from the listening position optimized. you will want to identify the distance between the speaker and the side wall. Place your speakers 1,2,3, 3.5 etc feet from the side wall, toed in appropriately, and take scans again. If you have side firing woofers, you will need to run this both with woofers inside and woofers outside. Identify the position that offers the best frequency response below 100 Hz. That determines your optimal distance between your speakers and the side wall. Your speakers and listening position are now optimized.
Look at the impulse graph from your last scan and focus on the reflections that are in the 8-15 ms range, and result from a total distance of 2.7 to 5.3 meters. These are the early reflections that destroy imaging. If your room is carpeted, you won't need to worry about the floor. If it is hardwood or tile, lay down some cheap area rugs between your speaker and your listening position. Cut a string 5.3 meters long, and attach it to your front baffle. Attach the other end to your listening position, then grab the middle of the string and move touch the side wall. That tells you about where on your side walls you need to provide either absorption or deflection to remove the offending early reflections. Do the same with the ceiling. Your treatment will now focus on higher frequencies. You don't get imaging clues from low frequencies. I prefer to treat side walls with deflection as opposed to absorption. This turns early reflections into later reflections and avoids over dampening of the room.
Now you are ready to position one or more subwoofers in the room, doing scans again to observe the flattest frequency response below 100 Hz.
Finally, begin to introduce treatments to achieve the best frequency response from 100 to 20K Hz.
At this point you should have a room that is in pretty good shape.
FYI, good video on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ParmEmXq05U
AI Summary: The video emphasizes that the room's acoustic makeup (1:05) is the single most important component in a hi-fi playback chain, even more so than loudspeakers, amplifiers, or DACs. The speaker admits that he previously thought a better DAC would transform his system, but he was proven wrong (0:21).
Here's the speaker's hierarchy of hi-fi optimization in order of audible impact:
Room's Acoustic Makeup (1:41)
Loudspeakers and their Placement (1:45)
Listening Position (1:52)
Subwoofer Integration (1:59)
Application of Room Correction Software (2:02) (generally below 300 hertz)
Amplifier (2:08)
DAC (2:12)
Chosen Playback Format (2:15)
The video details how different room problems, like bass resonances and reverberation, affect sound quality (3:15). It highlights that while full acoustic treatment is ideal, simple adjustments like loudspeaker placement (5:24) and listening position (6:24) can make a significant difference. The speaker also discusses the benefits of adding subwoofers (6:50) for improved bass and overall sound. He states that amplifier and DAC differences become less impactful once the room is treated and other components are optimized (9:14, 10:04).
The speaker also criticizes the "format supremacy" debates (11:58), arguing that these differences are often masked by untreated rooms. He stresses that furniture alone is not a substitute for proper acoustic panels (13:14). Ultimately, he concludes that without proper room acoustics, listeners will never hear the true capabilities of their hi-fi components (18:27), unless they are using headphones, which bypass room acoustics (16:45).
You’ve gotten some great advice here. I’ll just add that my audio mentor was a big proponent of Roomtunes, triangular tunes in the corners and rectangular tunes along the longer walls. I’m talking about the junction of the walls and the ceiling. My listening room has beam ceilings and a lot of bookshelves, and my old Roomtunes are enough to make the room a pleasant listening environment Unfortunately, I don’t think Michael Green’s RoomTunes are available anymore, but some cheap throw pillows in the upper corners of a room can go a long way. Just my two cents!
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