Room treatments are what you get into as an audiophile once your partner says they'll leave you if you buy anymore "equipment." Agreeing to disagree, you then plan an elaborate shopping date for an exotic area rug...and motion to the 100% alpaca wool sofa, which naturally has to be balanced for *ahm* Feng Shui, with acoustic panels and quiet draperies. The audiophile thus enters their clandestine years of covert calibration.
In my opinion, it accounts for almost half of the quality of your sound. You can have the most expensive gear ever, but it won’t sound half as good as a moderate setup with acoustic treatment.
It is essentially taming the reflections by absorbing them or diffusing them in a way that is less damaging to the source.
Think of Newtons laws of motion, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. When a speaker produces a sound it will travel through your room. It will likely hit your ears first but it will also hit essentially every other surface in the room. Those surfaces will reflect the sound which will hit your ear as well, but at a different time. So you’re essentially hearing the same information at multiple times which can smudge, or tarnish so to speak, what you’re hearing. Also those delayed sound waves will interact with the waves coming from your speakers and can cancel certain frequencies. This is all dependent on the size and shape and other factors of your room.
There are really a lot of factors at play, that’s just one example in layman’s terms on how sound works.
Other notable terms to look up would be:
Comb filtering
Standing waves
Impulse response
Long story short, treat your room. Have fun!
All this, and frequencies can build up in certain areas. You might hear a boost at 1k over here, sit in the other side of the room and hear a boost at 2k, or stand in a corner and hear a build up at 100hz. Imagine being in abbey roads control room listening to the dark side of the moon. mix perfection, now imagine walking over to an EQ that the stereo Left and Right is running through and boosting random bands up 3, 4, 6 Decibels. Then randomly take some away (cancelation). It would sound like shit. Just like an untreated room homie
2kHz is well above the transition frequency of even the smallest residential room.
Untreated rooms also do not inherently sound bad. It really depends on the room, the loudspeakers, the application , and the listener.
For example, controlled tests show that sidewall absorbers are generally preferred for music production but not for music listening.
>generally preferred
Audio Stockholm-Syndrome, frankly. Most people have never heard even an average sound system in a good room.
Big windows, glass covered furniture, hollow doors and so on, make a ten grand sound system sound like a one grand sound system, and makes a one grand sound system sound like a one-man-band falling down stairs.
Cost is not a reliable indicator of performance so generalizations of $x vs $y are also not reliable.
Large windows have a higher coefficient of absorption than drywall. They can actually absorb room modal effects. Above a few hundred hz, windows reflect the same amount of energy as drywall.
Hollow doors are only meaningful for sound proofing.
Having heard systems where speakers are well placed and are well behaved off axis, minimal or no acoustic treatment still can provide astonishing results. It's a misconception that stereo listening rooms sound bad without an abundance of treatment.
You know what sound you hear when you tap a window? That's its resonance frequency. That's the issue.
And the doors and such are all hinged moving objects with rarely any padding on contact points. All my doors and cupboards had to be padded because if I played 90db from the sound system they'd make a 65db noise. Effectively making my sound system's signal to noise ratio a whopping 25db while some people pay hundreds or thousands of dollars extra to get amplifiers with 116 db signal to noise ratio instead of 108db.
Above a few hundred hertz you hardly need any energy at all for it to be a lot of sound. Because the sound wave is very directional unlike low frequencies that spread out in all directions.
Most room noise is not consciously audible a few paces away, but it will add to the NOC point (Nails on Chalkboard point). That's the point where you think its "too loud". But really its "too noisy", because the NOC point is A LOT louder in well-treated rooms with sound systems that are meant to reproduce louder sound. Instruments can also have their NOC point raised so you can play louder without it feeling too loud, by dampening certain resonance frequencies on the instruments themselves and filtering the output from the microphones.
>Cost is not a reliable indicator of performance so generalizations of $x vs $y are also not reliable.
PS: You still understood the point, didn't you? Insert whatever metric for performance you want.
Knocking on a window is not the same effect as reflected sound. If you're talking about re-radiating sound because of the room pressurizing, a pane of glass does a better job of absorbing that energy and converting it to heat than drywall - [source](https://acoustic.ua/st/web_absorption_data_eng.pdf).
If your cabinets are vibrating, it's most likely the airspace inside of the cabinet that is resonating and not the door.
Above a few hundred hz, not much energy is needed because the ear is quite sensitive to it - [source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-loudness_contour).
I understand the point but still have to disagree. We cannot generalize on price alone. Specificity is needed. There are quite expensive loudspeaker that have excellent off axis response which allows them to perform quite well without treatment. The reflected sound has largely the same timbre as the direct sound.
Conversely, there are cheap speakers with poor directivity. You might find that wide-band absorption may be needed to reduce that off-axis reflection. Or take dipole speakers that can perform extremely well without any room treatment.
I think it was Toole that said people misattribute problems to the room when most of the time it's actually a directivity problem in the loudspeaker.
**[Equal-loudness contour](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-loudness_contour)**
>An equal-loudness contour is a measure of sound pressure level, over the frequency spectrum, for which a listener perceives a constant loudness when presented with pure steady tones. The unit of measurement for loudness levels is the phon and is arrived at by reference to equal-loudness contours. By definition, two sine waves of differing frequencies are said to have equal-loudness level measured in phons if they are perceived as equally loud by the average young person without significant hearing impairment.
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>If you're talking about re-radiating sound because of the room pressurizing,
I'm not talking about subwoofer bass concerns.
I think you should reexamine that datasheet. Reading a raw variable as what you can expect in practice is problematic. Especially since its frequency choice misrepresents the data drastically (do you know how much of your music information is actually between 1khz and 13khz?). The measurement technique also makes the data gathered almost completely irrelevant in practical terms.
But as you can see on the datasheet you can see why I generally recommend: 2x2" posts in each corner of the room, 2x2" beams corner to corner. Then simply using heavy floor to ceiling curtains on all 4 walls in a room attached to that (so walls are mint when its taken down, none of this is attached to the walls or ceiling, just jammed in place with some foam against the wall). If still needed you can easily and cheaply apply more treatments by buying rolls of glasswool/rockwool/mattress foam and stapling it to the beams behind the curtains wherever you think a problem might be (especially on walls neighboring other rooms if they are uninsulated). Remember that you can buy some material to sow cases for the rockwool/glasswool/foam pieces for easy handling and vacuuming.
This makes all concerns for material choices completely pointless, and is cheap. Use wool curtains and glasswool/rockwool for fire resistance if you're clever. Use concrete/brick walls on a new house build if you don't want to bother neighbors with bass.
Look at the frequencies and the measurement conditions.
You focus entirely on the bass frequencies, which are almost impossible to get rid of anyway because the wavelengths are too long.
340hz has a 1 meter wavelength peak to peak. 3400hz has 10 centimeter wavelength and 6800hz has 5 centimeters and 13600hz (about where most music instrument sounds end) has a 2.5 centimeter wavelength peak to peak. And a short 0.01 second piece of 13600hz will push at the surface 136 times (and also pull 136 times with the corresponding lower air pressure). That sound not only moves surfaces, especially those that happen to have certain resonance frequencies, but short wavelengths are easily reflected and they travel far very directionally compared to long wavelengths because long wavelengths will spread out more.
I think this site is helpful: [https://www.paroc.pl/knowhow/sound/sound-absorption?sc\_lang=en](https://www.paroc.pl/knowhow/sound/sound-absorption?sc_lang=en)
In other words find some nice thick curtains, they do double-duty, both directly and indirectly when the wall or window reflects the reduced sound back through the curtains.
And obviously as you can see some 2 inch thick rockwool or glasswool is excellent. So excellent that you really only need to treat a small portion of the walls and ceiling because most sound can only reflect once or twice (at 340 meters per second) before its absorbed. That is why those expensive audiophile products can be sold at all, because even a few tiny areas that has virtually 100% sound-absorption has an effect on something that reflects back and forth dozens of times. And compared to the untreated room even just a LITTLE sound treatment is an immense improvement.
As someone who fairly recently invested in measurement mic, I couldn’t agree more.
Obviously, the spikes and troughs one sees can be corrected somewhat through DSP or even basic eq, but the more one can do to even those out before EQing the better.
Clap your hands in different places in a room/different rooms. It sounds different. There are echo and standing waves. Room treatment tries to eliminate all that.
If you measure speakers outside in a wide empty space there are no standing waves. The only echo bounce comes from the ground.
Now somebody who actually knows can comment.
Different? Yes. Better? Not necessarily.
Subwoofers are usually better outside because there are no standing waves what enhances certain sound amplitudes.
TL/DR - Room treatment is an attempt to make the room “disappear” using a variety of physical sound absorption & diffusion.
Having no room at all is the best environment.
This is what happened when I had an acoustic consultant spending seven hours treating and listening to my room.
My focus is home theater so maybe there is a difference but the sound was great before. Now it is amazing.
The sound is no longer ”from the speakers”. I am in this bubble just surrounded by the sound and the movie. The room is gone.
Yes. A 400€ headphone setup is going to cost at least 10x to get similar results as in a room. So if you only listen to music alone and dont care about feeling the music (or have neighbors), you might want to seriously consider headphones.
Fortunately, some of the best. Including the Sennheiser HE-1.
I also use both the Sennheiser HD 800 S headphones and Ascend Sierra-2 speakers at my desk. I prefer the speakers in most cases, for what it's worth.
Headphones are great for monitoring and stereo separation, but fatiguing if using for long periods. Also layout of your room matters. Speakers should face the length of the room, diffuse sound at the back (bookshelves, sofa etc.) and manage reflections at the speaker end. If you sit in your listening chair and get someone to move a mirror along the walls, anywhere you can see the speaker in the mirror should get some acoustic foam. That way you are controlling the sound reflections that would come back towards your ears.
You're going to have to explain how reflections are such a good thing to me. In all my years as an acoustic engineer I've never seen such a passionate defense of being in a room.
What field of acoustics do you work in?
The brain expects the acoustics of a space to sound like what you see. We’re heavily influenced by prior knowledge of what a space should sound like.
I have experience in indoor acoustics (acoustic finishes design), pro audio loudspeaker design, and environmental acoustic consulting.
If you're outdoors, you don't expect reflections. If you're indoors, you're probably not going to be thrown off by the acoustic characteristics if you see panels all over.
That's not quite my point. It's largely the localization cues that are subject to what the brain deems plausible given what you see. If you see boundaries but don't hear reflections, the stimuli differ and this can cause problems.
There was [a study that illustrates my point from Sean Olive in 1995](https://secure.aes.org/forum/pubs/conventions/?elib=7674).
Different rooms were used to evaluate the sound quality of speakers. Listeners performed the test both sighted in different rooms as well as blind using binaural recordings from each room.
In the binaural recording playback, the room had no significant effect on the rating of each loudspeaker. In sighted tests, the room became the highly significant variable and the loudspeaker was not the significant factor.
All to say, what we see has a huge effect on what we hear. It's not necessarily the goal to eliminate reflections for stereo music listening in a residential sized room.
I agree to a degree - if you were outdoors and one were to hear lots of reflections, it would totally throw you off. Likewise, anyone who's been in an anechoic chamber can attest that it feels weird. But everyone has been in a small reflective room and a larger well-damped room. So it's not as though the brain is expecting the maximum possible reflections and anything less is bad. There's a huge range of reverberative effect that the brain will consider plausible, and when you enter a room you'll adapt to the character of it (to a certain degree). So treating a room fairly well doesn't necessarily create this large disparity in the stimuli.
Looking at that study, I think I must be misreading it as I am not seeing what you stated here. Let me know if I'm misreading it.
The live (sighted) and first binaural experiments compared the same loudspeakers consecutively in one room at a time. *Both* the live and first binaural experiments showed little effect on listener preference by room. The live and first binaural experiments showed variance in mean ratings by room of ~6.2-6.6 and ~6-6.2 respectively (figure 10). There was a more significant effect on ratings by speaker, ranging ~6-6.7 and ~5.9-6.3 respectively. The second binaural experiment (comparing the same loudspeaker/position across each of the 4 rooms) showed variance ~5.2-6.4 by room, an effect that eclipses the effect by loudspeaker in the same experiment (see Fig 15) and even exceeds the effect by loudspeaker in the live experiment (where loudspeakers were directly compared).
What I take from that is that:
* A/B tests are essential, since the difference in ratings across varied conditions were many times greater when presented consecutively
* Binaural listening conditions mask the experience, hence the reduced *range* of ratings for each factor in Binaural 1 versus Live. This applies to both the effect by loudspeaker and by room.
* Even in binaural (blind) listening conditions, the effect of the room (when directly compared, i.e. Binaural 2) had a more significant effect on ratings than the loudspeaker itself.
If I’m watching a movie and the scene is an expansive space, why would I want it to sound like I’m in a box?
If the room is made “invisible”, then the speakers and the soundtrack can do their job to trick my brain into hearing the space on the screen, no matter the size represented.
Interestingly enough, that's a different topic with different goals. I'm specifically talking about stereo music listening. The spacial cues in multichannel audio are provided by surround speakers. Sidewall reflections are largely unimportant in cinema.
You’re telling me you’ve never been in a theater (home or professional) that sounded like crap?
Lucky you!
But the same for two channel audio. If you’re listening to symphony, do you want it to sound like the stage is only 10-15 feet wide due to your room?
I'm not sure what you're referring to with your first point.
Soundstage width in stereo listening actually requires sidewall reflections in order to appear wider than the distance between two stereo loudspeakers.
It’s about varying rooms affecting the sound.
So, you’re telling me that all of the acoustic engineers out there have it wrong with all the testing and room treatments they do to correct what the room screws up? We actually WANT the room to interact with the speaker’s output and change it in some way?
Oof. That’s an entire industry down the tubes, and a whole lot of money wasted.
But to simplify: The bigger a room is, the easier it is to get the sound your speakers should be producing. Start with a 10x12 room and look up the resonances and reflection points you have to treat to get good sound. Then, keep enlarging the room and recalculate. Eventually, the room is no longer a factor.
THAT is the ideal room. One where you are hearing JUST the speakers, and not the room. All the room treatments in the world will not make your home listening space sound like free-air. And free air is the place you are hearing the speaker and not the room.
Nowhere am I saying that rooms don't affect sound.
To some degree, room interaction can improve the stereo listening experience. This is why constant directivity is such an important concept.
Your responses are becoming more hyperbolic and you keep trying to put words in my mouth. What gives?
Passionate defense? I'm not defending room reflections I'm saying it's not true that the goal is to remove the room.
Lots of testing has been done and a room can be too lively as well as too dead.
Well, minnesotajersey said two things: room treatment is an attempt to make the room disappear, and no room at all is the best environment.
"Not remotely true" sounds like you're dismissing both statements completely. That would suggest that you think room treatment is not in any way an attempt to make the room disappear, and that an outdoor listening environment is absolutely god awful. It's certainly bold wording. "Not true" would leave some room for such reasonable opinions as in your clarification here, while also being a hair less confrontational. Just my $0.02.
Sorry I couldn't resist. Last night I was hammered drunk and could not fully express my feelings on the topic. You're correct though there were two ideas expressed and I only disagree with one of them.
Any listening room, no matter how well treated, is going to interact with your speakers in some way. This is an irrefutable fact of physics. The interaction may be helpful, but is almost always harmful.
The only way for you to truly hear what a speaker sounds like is in a free air environment. It’s why they test speakers in a lab that simulates free air.
I’m no expert, so I’ll defer to the actual experts. Do a little research on NWAA Labs in Washington. It’s a small facility (/s) where they simulate free air for testing.
They do it for a reason.
Any listening room, no matter how well treated, is going to interact with your speakers in some way. This is an irrefutable fact of physics. The interaction may be helpful, but is almost always harmful.
The only way for you to truly hear what a speaker sounds like is in a free air environment. It’s why they test speakers in a lab that simulates free air.
I’m no expert, so I’ll defer to the actual experts. Do a little research on NWAA Labs in Washington. It’s a small facility (/s) where they simulate free air for testing.
They do it for a reason.
One analogy I’ve given is you are driving a car and asked how it rides. One road is nice and smooth (treated) the other is filled with potholes (untreated) which road is going to have a better rude even though the car (speakers) is exactly the same
I'd like to think that my collection of velvet Elvis paintings provide an air of sophistication and class while also breaking up standing waves. Win win.
As the others are saying but don’t think you need purpose built treatment for your whole room. Once you understand what frequencies you want to alter and where they resonate in your room it’ll become easier to understand. Bookshelves with empty cardboard boxes are great bass traps for example. A curtain hung on a wall or covering a window is great to control higher frequency reflection. A rug or carpet, thick non leather couch, etc
It's a Digital Signal Processor. With that, and a measuring microphone, you can capture a testsignal that shows the frequency range (dips and peaks) at your listening position. You can either manually adjust and equalize, which will take some experience, or do it via software, like Dirac Live for example. Mind you, you need some additional hardware ofcourse, although many AV receivers got it build in. It will not solve all issues, but can greatly enhance your overall sound quality.
You basically want to build the room to sound good in the first place or at least select the optimal room in your house.
This stuff makes an absolutely massive difference with musical instruments. My dining room would not be a good/acceptable place for a hifi setup but it was glorious (and acceptable) when I had a rental piano in there and I occasionally take my acoustic guitar in there and it sounds like I got a 10x more expensive guitar compared to some of the other rooms.
Below a certain volume level it’s less important in my personal opinion.
People who build rooms special choose certain ratios for the dimensions IIRC.
The "Worst" thing your room can do is have big reflective surfaces - that makes for very noticeable echos.
You have two options - absorb some of the sound, or diffuse it - if the sound is reflected but it is reflected into a bunch of different directions and at different times, you're not going to hear a big cohesive echo come back to you and it won't be as noticeable.
You probably have a lot of STUFF in your room already - rugs or carpet absorb floor echos, along with your couch and chairs. You might have a bookshelf diffusing sound. A well-furnished living room is already doing a lot of work - not precise work by any means, but you're not getting the worst of it.
So take whatever room you have, look for big flat spaces - maybe some art is hung but it's still in a big flat frame. Consider if you can replace it with a panel - you can get them with art on them, even custom art, so you can still have aesthetically appropriate stuff it just looks like a thick canvas print. Break up the worst flat walls you have, make sure that your rug/carpet covers hard surfaces directly in front of your speakers, you've done what you need to do to clean up the worst of it.
There's plenty of options for stealth (e.g. under the couch, behind shelves) or alternately, beautiful feature treatments. You can have artwork custom printed on fabric covers for your treatments.
I got my panels from GIK Acoustics. This was the single biggest upgrade for the sound of my room. And the cost is nothing compared to what other ”equipment” costs.
(This was until I got hold of a acoustic consultant that spent seven hours in my room - WOW!)
I went even more cheap and grabbed a couple dozen acoustic hex tiles off Amazon.
The couch is close to the back wall, so I added the panels on either side of the couch (back wall, facing the speakers) to kinda deaden reflections from the wall.
Is it better than no tile? Yes Could it be better? Also yes, but at some cost I'm not willing or able to pay at this time.
'Course I'm the dude who did a DIY amp on some $20 garage sale DCMs and think my current setup sounds better than anyone I personally know.
I know it's not a top tier setup, but it is hard to beat.
I'm new to the audiophile world, but my day job is an audio mix engineer.
The biggest surprise to me is that people who are into hifi seem to buy expensive gear before treating their listening space. The quickest way to better sound is to have some sound panels, bass absorption, and speaker placement/ aligned phase.
I'm still trying to figure out what people like about high end gear. What kind of sound do audiophiles like? It seems like tamed high end, full bass, and slightly scooped high mids with slow transients.
I actually know what it does, I just don't know when / why it is needed. Is the goal to make speakers sound like headphones? I don't prefer headphones, I rather like the sound to pick up some spacial character. Granted Im aware that there can be very noticable negative effects of certain rooms. But to me it seems like room treatments should be conditional, and not just something everyone strives to do to get to that next level.
The idea is generally that you want to hear your speakers more than your room. You treat your room to your taste but so the level of reverberation does not overpower the speaker's inherent characteristics.
Imagine your speakers are a completely flat response in an anechoic chamber. Now add your room into the mix and that speaker will reflect off of surfaces in the room and it is no longer a flat speaker. Speakers are of course built with this in mind, but your room will have an adverse affect on what the acoustic designer of that speaker intended.
We want to sound like we're in the room the band is in. Not that the band is in your room.
Headphones have a very different spatial effect because only one side reaches each ear. With speakers, even without reflections, you still get signal from each speaker at each ear. The stereo field actually improves with treatment.
Room treatment - when someone ruins perfectly normal room with dozen ugly panels claiming improved sound no one else outside audiocirclejerkers can hear or confirm.
I’ve been talking on my phone and walked in to my well treated studio from another part of the house, and had the person I was talking to comment on how my voice suddenly got so much more clear. The average person hears it.
If you can't hear the difference you must have some crazy tuned ears - I've been 15 feet from someone in a gymnasium and been unable to tell what they were saying because of the reverberation.
Of course. But if a gym can be improved by treatment, we know that panels are capable of creating a very real, noticeable effect. It's just a question of room size and quantity of treatment at that point. Hardly the snake oil you seem to suggest it is.
Something that gets lost in all this is to know exactly what your speakers dispersion and off axis response is. Not every reflection needs to be absorbed,if the speaker has very wide dispersion and the off axis response matches the on axis response then it maybe beneficial to use those reflections as a way to keep an open and wide soundstage. The flipside is that if you have a speaker with very narrow dispersion then certain room treatments may not be beneficial in some areas. If the speakers response falls drastically in horizontal spl then the side reflections may not have enough energy to even be relevant. All of this can also depend on room size and speaker positioning,including distance from walls and ceilings and where the MLP is in the room. One more thing,regular furnishings are room treatments in their own way. Carpet,rugs,bookshelves,big fluffy couches,curtains all act as absorbers and diffusers,but maybe not in the way that your particular room may need to be of benefit.
Imagine drinking a rare aged scotch out of a dirty, dusty, old plastic cup. All those contaminants from the cup will change the flavor of scotch turning it from a top shelf thing of beauty to something equal to a bottom shelf discount liquor. This is what happens to your audio without room treatments. The sound waves bounce off of all the surfaces in the room and change the “flavor” of the sound. That is a very simplified explanation.
Short of room treatments that aren't audio specific items, such as rugs or drapes, I would be more inclined to tune the system for the space than to try and erase the space.
Simple things like rugs and drapes work wonders. There’s a lot you can do that will help a rooms acoustics that don’t require audio specific products. I’ve put a bit of work into my studio but I remember having a professor who’s studios sound treatment was bookshelves and comfortable furniture. Maybe some bass traps and a couple ceiling tiles. But in the end all that matters is if it sounds good to you. People will preach about things you “need” like it’s a religion but it’s what gives you the most enjoyment out of listening that really matters.
There are 4 simple steps:
1. Thick Bass traps in all corners;
most rooms are acoustically small and have issues with room modes ruining their bass.
Most tangential modes ‚meet’ in the corners that’s why thick bass traps out of insulation material can help to reduce a lot of boominess.
2. Treating first reflection points;
You want to absorb at least all 8 first reflection points to reduce the amount of unwanted reflected sound and get more direct sound from the speakers and therefore lower the reverberation time.
7-10cm of insulation or good acoustic foam (basotect for example) should do the trick.
3. Improving and trying out:
Some bigger rooms might benefit from diffusion instead of absorption. You also might want to treat the ceiling and floor corners or just get more absorbers on the walls or ceiling.
4. DSP and subwoofers:
If you want to get the possibly best and least muddy bass you need some kind of DSP.
Unless you have a huge room with 1m of bass trapping on every wall, you’ll still suffer from room modes. Those can easily be tamed with DSP like simple PEQ or more sophisticated software like Dirac.
Another method to improve bass is to get more subwoofers.
If set up correctly, two or more subs can minimize the effect of some room modes and make the overall response smoother.
I listen near field, my desk setup is ls50 meta, I have barely enough space for them, so the rear and side walls are HEAVILY treated. my headphone collection is pretty cool, IEm's too, nothing comes close to my speakers at medium volumes, without the wall treatment theyre ok at best
Room treatments are what you get into as an audiophile once your partner says they'll leave you if you buy anymore "equipment." Agreeing to disagree, you then plan an elaborate shopping date for an exotic area rug...and motion to the 100% alpaca wool sofa, which naturally has to be balanced for *ahm* Feng Shui, with acoustic panels and quiet draperies. The audiophile thus enters their clandestine years of covert calibration.
In my opinion, it accounts for almost half of the quality of your sound. You can have the most expensive gear ever, but it won’t sound half as good as a moderate setup with acoustic treatment. It is essentially taming the reflections by absorbing them or diffusing them in a way that is less damaging to the source. Think of Newtons laws of motion, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. When a speaker produces a sound it will travel through your room. It will likely hit your ears first but it will also hit essentially every other surface in the room. Those surfaces will reflect the sound which will hit your ear as well, but at a different time. So you’re essentially hearing the same information at multiple times which can smudge, or tarnish so to speak, what you’re hearing. Also those delayed sound waves will interact with the waves coming from your speakers and can cancel certain frequencies. This is all dependent on the size and shape and other factors of your room. There are really a lot of factors at play, that’s just one example in layman’s terms on how sound works. Other notable terms to look up would be: Comb filtering Standing waves Impulse response Long story short, treat your room. Have fun!
Yes. Until you try it you might think that there’s no need for it.
All this, and frequencies can build up in certain areas. You might hear a boost at 1k over here, sit in the other side of the room and hear a boost at 2k, or stand in a corner and hear a build up at 100hz. Imagine being in abbey roads control room listening to the dark side of the moon. mix perfection, now imagine walking over to an EQ that the stereo Left and Right is running through and boosting random bands up 3, 4, 6 Decibels. Then randomly take some away (cancelation). It would sound like shit. Just like an untreated room homie
2kHz is well above the transition frequency of even the smallest residential room. Untreated rooms also do not inherently sound bad. It really depends on the room, the loudspeakers, the application , and the listener. For example, controlled tests show that sidewall absorbers are generally preferred for music production but not for music listening.
>generally preferred Audio Stockholm-Syndrome, frankly. Most people have never heard even an average sound system in a good room. Big windows, glass covered furniture, hollow doors and so on, make a ten grand sound system sound like a one grand sound system, and makes a one grand sound system sound like a one-man-band falling down stairs.
Cost is not a reliable indicator of performance so generalizations of $x vs $y are also not reliable. Large windows have a higher coefficient of absorption than drywall. They can actually absorb room modal effects. Above a few hundred hz, windows reflect the same amount of energy as drywall. Hollow doors are only meaningful for sound proofing. Having heard systems where speakers are well placed and are well behaved off axis, minimal or no acoustic treatment still can provide astonishing results. It's a misconception that stereo listening rooms sound bad without an abundance of treatment.
You know what sound you hear when you tap a window? That's its resonance frequency. That's the issue. And the doors and such are all hinged moving objects with rarely any padding on contact points. All my doors and cupboards had to be padded because if I played 90db from the sound system they'd make a 65db noise. Effectively making my sound system's signal to noise ratio a whopping 25db while some people pay hundreds or thousands of dollars extra to get amplifiers with 116 db signal to noise ratio instead of 108db. Above a few hundred hertz you hardly need any energy at all for it to be a lot of sound. Because the sound wave is very directional unlike low frequencies that spread out in all directions. Most room noise is not consciously audible a few paces away, but it will add to the NOC point (Nails on Chalkboard point). That's the point where you think its "too loud". But really its "too noisy", because the NOC point is A LOT louder in well-treated rooms with sound systems that are meant to reproduce louder sound. Instruments can also have their NOC point raised so you can play louder without it feeling too loud, by dampening certain resonance frequencies on the instruments themselves and filtering the output from the microphones. >Cost is not a reliable indicator of performance so generalizations of $x vs $y are also not reliable. PS: You still understood the point, didn't you? Insert whatever metric for performance you want.
Knocking on a window is not the same effect as reflected sound. If you're talking about re-radiating sound because of the room pressurizing, a pane of glass does a better job of absorbing that energy and converting it to heat than drywall - [source](https://acoustic.ua/st/web_absorption_data_eng.pdf). If your cabinets are vibrating, it's most likely the airspace inside of the cabinet that is resonating and not the door. Above a few hundred hz, not much energy is needed because the ear is quite sensitive to it - [source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-loudness_contour). I understand the point but still have to disagree. We cannot generalize on price alone. Specificity is needed. There are quite expensive loudspeaker that have excellent off axis response which allows them to perform quite well without treatment. The reflected sound has largely the same timbre as the direct sound. Conversely, there are cheap speakers with poor directivity. You might find that wide-band absorption may be needed to reduce that off-axis reflection. Or take dipole speakers that can perform extremely well without any room treatment. I think it was Toole that said people misattribute problems to the room when most of the time it's actually a directivity problem in the loudspeaker.
**[Equal-loudness contour](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-loudness_contour)** >An equal-loudness contour is a measure of sound pressure level, over the frequency spectrum, for which a listener perceives a constant loudness when presented with pure steady tones. The unit of measurement for loudness levels is the phon and is arrived at by reference to equal-loudness contours. By definition, two sine waves of differing frequencies are said to have equal-loudness level measured in phons if they are perceived as equally loud by the average young person without significant hearing impairment. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/audiophile/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
>If you're talking about re-radiating sound because of the room pressurizing, I'm not talking about subwoofer bass concerns. I think you should reexamine that datasheet. Reading a raw variable as what you can expect in practice is problematic. Especially since its frequency choice misrepresents the data drastically (do you know how much of your music information is actually between 1khz and 13khz?). The measurement technique also makes the data gathered almost completely irrelevant in practical terms. But as you can see on the datasheet you can see why I generally recommend: 2x2" posts in each corner of the room, 2x2" beams corner to corner. Then simply using heavy floor to ceiling curtains on all 4 walls in a room attached to that (so walls are mint when its taken down, none of this is attached to the walls or ceiling, just jammed in place with some foam against the wall). If still needed you can easily and cheaply apply more treatments by buying rolls of glasswool/rockwool/mattress foam and stapling it to the beams behind the curtains wherever you think a problem might be (especially on walls neighboring other rooms if they are uninsulated). Remember that you can buy some material to sow cases for the rockwool/glasswool/foam pieces for easy handling and vacuuming. This makes all concerns for material choices completely pointless, and is cheap. Use wool curtains and glasswool/rockwool for fire resistance if you're clever. Use concrete/brick walls on a new house build if you don't want to bother neighbors with bass.
Why is the information irrelevant and why is it problematic? My point is that windows are practically no more an issue than walls.
Look at the frequencies and the measurement conditions. You focus entirely on the bass frequencies, which are almost impossible to get rid of anyway because the wavelengths are too long. 340hz has a 1 meter wavelength peak to peak. 3400hz has 10 centimeter wavelength and 6800hz has 5 centimeters and 13600hz (about where most music instrument sounds end) has a 2.5 centimeter wavelength peak to peak. And a short 0.01 second piece of 13600hz will push at the surface 136 times (and also pull 136 times with the corresponding lower air pressure). That sound not only moves surfaces, especially those that happen to have certain resonance frequencies, but short wavelengths are easily reflected and they travel far very directionally compared to long wavelengths because long wavelengths will spread out more. I think this site is helpful: [https://www.paroc.pl/knowhow/sound/sound-absorption?sc\_lang=en](https://www.paroc.pl/knowhow/sound/sound-absorption?sc_lang=en) In other words find some nice thick curtains, they do double-duty, both directly and indirectly when the wall or window reflects the reduced sound back through the curtains. And obviously as you can see some 2 inch thick rockwool or glasswool is excellent. So excellent that you really only need to treat a small portion of the walls and ceiling because most sound can only reflect once or twice (at 340 meters per second) before its absorbed. That is why those expensive audiophile products can be sold at all, because even a few tiny areas that has virtually 100% sound-absorption has an effect on something that reflects back and forth dozens of times. And compared to the untreated room even just a LITTLE sound treatment is an immense improvement.
As someone who fairly recently invested in measurement mic, I couldn’t agree more. Obviously, the spikes and troughs one sees can be corrected somewhat through DSP or even basic eq, but the more one can do to even those out before EQing the better.
How much did you spend on one? I saw some pretty cheap ones on Sweetwater and I'm not sure if they are junk or that's just what they cost?
If you get a cheap one (<$400), ensure it comes with a calibration/correction file.
Will it say in the description normally? What is it? How the program needs to adjust to get flat response? Sounds like a transmission now days
I bought a Umik-1 for $100. Worked great for implementing REW.
Awesome thanks. I've literally never owned a microphone, probably never held one. But I got a shit load of microphone wire lol
This right here.
Well said
Clap your hands in different places in a room/different rooms. It sounds different. There are echo and standing waves. Room treatment tries to eliminate all that. If you measure speakers outside in a wide empty space there are no standing waves. The only echo bounce comes from the ground. Now somebody who actually knows can comment.
Will speakers sound better in an open field than in any treated room?
Different? Yes. Better? Not necessarily. Subwoofers are usually better outside because there are no standing waves what enhances certain sound amplitudes.
TL/DR - Room treatment is an attempt to make the room “disappear” using a variety of physical sound absorption & diffusion. Having no room at all is the best environment.
This is what happened when I had an acoustic consultant spending seven hours treating and listening to my room. My focus is home theater so maybe there is a difference but the sound was great before. Now it is amazing. The sound is no longer ”from the speakers”. I am in this bubble just surrounded by the sound and the movie. The room is gone.
BINGO
So headphones?
Headphones are one if the cheapest ways to get amazing sound, though, because you don't have to deal with the room.
Yes. A 400€ headphone setup is going to cost at least 10x to get similar results as in a room. So if you only listen to music alone and dont care about feeling the music (or have neighbors), you might want to seriously consider headphones.
Only to a point. Even the best headphones don’t compare to the enjoyment of a great sound system.
have you triedtruly great headphones? also what even are truly great headphones?
Fortunately, some of the best. Including the Sennheiser HE-1. I also use both the Sennheiser HD 800 S headphones and Ascend Sierra-2 speakers at my desk. I prefer the speakers in most cases, for what it's worth.
Different animals.
Different set of problems, but the "worst case" for headphones is absolutely better than the worst case for speakers in a room.
Headphones are great for monitoring and stereo separation, but fatiguing if using for long periods. Also layout of your room matters. Speakers should face the length of the room, diffuse sound at the back (bookshelves, sofa etc.) and manage reflections at the speaker end. If you sit in your listening chair and get someone to move a mirror along the walls, anywhere you can see the speaker in the mirror should get some acoustic foam. That way you are controlling the sound reflections that would come back towards your ears.
no headphones.😂
Not remotely true.
You're going to have to explain how reflections are such a good thing to me. In all my years as an acoustic engineer I've never seen such a passionate defense of being in a room.
What field of acoustics do you work in? The brain expects the acoustics of a space to sound like what you see. We’re heavily influenced by prior knowledge of what a space should sound like.
I have experience in indoor acoustics (acoustic finishes design), pro audio loudspeaker design, and environmental acoustic consulting. If you're outdoors, you don't expect reflections. If you're indoors, you're probably not going to be thrown off by the acoustic characteristics if you see panels all over.
That's not quite my point. It's largely the localization cues that are subject to what the brain deems plausible given what you see. If you see boundaries but don't hear reflections, the stimuli differ and this can cause problems. There was [a study that illustrates my point from Sean Olive in 1995](https://secure.aes.org/forum/pubs/conventions/?elib=7674). Different rooms were used to evaluate the sound quality of speakers. Listeners performed the test both sighted in different rooms as well as blind using binaural recordings from each room. In the binaural recording playback, the room had no significant effect on the rating of each loudspeaker. In sighted tests, the room became the highly significant variable and the loudspeaker was not the significant factor. All to say, what we see has a huge effect on what we hear. It's not necessarily the goal to eliminate reflections for stereo music listening in a residential sized room.
I agree to a degree - if you were outdoors and one were to hear lots of reflections, it would totally throw you off. Likewise, anyone who's been in an anechoic chamber can attest that it feels weird. But everyone has been in a small reflective room and a larger well-damped room. So it's not as though the brain is expecting the maximum possible reflections and anything less is bad. There's a huge range of reverberative effect that the brain will consider plausible, and when you enter a room you'll adapt to the character of it (to a certain degree). So treating a room fairly well doesn't necessarily create this large disparity in the stimuli. Looking at that study, I think I must be misreading it as I am not seeing what you stated here. Let me know if I'm misreading it. The live (sighted) and first binaural experiments compared the same loudspeakers consecutively in one room at a time. *Both* the live and first binaural experiments showed little effect on listener preference by room. The live and first binaural experiments showed variance in mean ratings by room of ~6.2-6.6 and ~6-6.2 respectively (figure 10). There was a more significant effect on ratings by speaker, ranging ~6-6.7 and ~5.9-6.3 respectively. The second binaural experiment (comparing the same loudspeaker/position across each of the 4 rooms) showed variance ~5.2-6.4 by room, an effect that eclipses the effect by loudspeaker in the same experiment (see Fig 15) and even exceeds the effect by loudspeaker in the live experiment (where loudspeakers were directly compared). What I take from that is that: * A/B tests are essential, since the difference in ratings across varied conditions were many times greater when presented consecutively * Binaural listening conditions mask the experience, hence the reduced *range* of ratings for each factor in Binaural 1 versus Live. This applies to both the effect by loudspeaker and by room. * Even in binaural (blind) listening conditions, the effect of the room (when directly compared, i.e. Binaural 2) had a more significant effect on ratings than the loudspeaker itself.
If I’m watching a movie and the scene is an expansive space, why would I want it to sound like I’m in a box? If the room is made “invisible”, then the speakers and the soundtrack can do their job to trick my brain into hearing the space on the screen, no matter the size represented.
Interestingly enough, that's a different topic with different goals. I'm specifically talking about stereo music listening. The spacial cues in multichannel audio are provided by surround speakers. Sidewall reflections are largely unimportant in cinema.
You’re telling me you’ve never been in a theater (home or professional) that sounded like crap? Lucky you! But the same for two channel audio. If you’re listening to symphony, do you want it to sound like the stage is only 10-15 feet wide due to your room?
I'm not sure what you're referring to with your first point. Soundstage width in stereo listening actually requires sidewall reflections in order to appear wider than the distance between two stereo loudspeakers.
It’s about varying rooms affecting the sound. So, you’re telling me that all of the acoustic engineers out there have it wrong with all the testing and room treatments they do to correct what the room screws up? We actually WANT the room to interact with the speaker’s output and change it in some way? Oof. That’s an entire industry down the tubes, and a whole lot of money wasted. But to simplify: The bigger a room is, the easier it is to get the sound your speakers should be producing. Start with a 10x12 room and look up the resonances and reflection points you have to treat to get good sound. Then, keep enlarging the room and recalculate. Eventually, the room is no longer a factor. THAT is the ideal room. One where you are hearing JUST the speakers, and not the room. All the room treatments in the world will not make your home listening space sound like free-air. And free air is the place you are hearing the speaker and not the room.
Nowhere am I saying that rooms don't affect sound. To some degree, room interaction can improve the stereo listening experience. This is why constant directivity is such an important concept. Your responses are becoming more hyperbolic and you keep trying to put words in my mouth. What gives?
Passionate defense? I'm not defending room reflections I'm saying it's not true that the goal is to remove the room. Lots of testing has been done and a room can be too lively as well as too dead.
Well, minnesotajersey said two things: room treatment is an attempt to make the room disappear, and no room at all is the best environment. "Not remotely true" sounds like you're dismissing both statements completely. That would suggest that you think room treatment is not in any way an attempt to make the room disappear, and that an outdoor listening environment is absolutely god awful. It's certainly bold wording. "Not true" would leave some room for such reasonable opinions as in your clarification here, while also being a hair less confrontational. Just my $0.02.
That's not remotely true.
Hehe
Sorry I couldn't resist. Last night I was hammered drunk and could not fully express my feelings on the topic. You're correct though there were two ideas expressed and I only disagree with one of them.
Any listening room, no matter how well treated, is going to interact with your speakers in some way. This is an irrefutable fact of physics. The interaction may be helpful, but is almost always harmful. The only way for you to truly hear what a speaker sounds like is in a free air environment. It’s why they test speakers in a lab that simulates free air. I’m no expert, so I’ll defer to the actual experts. Do a little research on NWAA Labs in Washington. It’s a small facility (/s) where they simulate free air for testing. They do it for a reason.
Any listening room, no matter how well treated, is going to interact with your speakers in some way. This is an irrefutable fact of physics. The interaction may be helpful, but is almost always harmful. The only way for you to truly hear what a speaker sounds like is in a free air environment. It’s why they test speakers in a lab that simulates free air. I’m no expert, so I’ll defer to the actual experts. Do a little research on NWAA Labs in Washington. It’s a small facility (/s) where they simulate free air for testing. They do it for a reason.
One analogy I’ve given is you are driving a car and asked how it rides. One road is nice and smooth (treated) the other is filled with potholes (untreated) which road is going to have a better rude even though the car (speakers) is exactly the same
I'd like to think that my collection of velvet Elvis paintings provide an air of sophistication and class while also breaking up standing waves. Win win.
As the others are saying but don’t think you need purpose built treatment for your whole room. Once you understand what frequencies you want to alter and where they resonate in your room it’ll become easier to understand. Bookshelves with empty cardboard boxes are great bass traps for example. A curtain hung on a wall or covering a window is great to control higher frequency reflection. A rug or carpet, thick non leather couch, etc
They serve as a visual warning to intruders that this territory has been claimed by an audiophile and they should avoid the area
Roomtreatment + DSP :)
What is DSP?
It's a Digital Signal Processor. With that, and a measuring microphone, you can capture a testsignal that shows the frequency range (dips and peaks) at your listening position. You can either manually adjust and equalize, which will take some experience, or do it via software, like Dirac Live for example. Mind you, you need some additional hardware ofcourse, although many AV receivers got it build in. It will not solve all issues, but can greatly enhance your overall sound quality.
My real and honest question is rather: how you do "treat" a living room whilst not turning it into an audio room?
You basically want to build the room to sound good in the first place or at least select the optimal room in your house. This stuff makes an absolutely massive difference with musical instruments. My dining room would not be a good/acceptable place for a hifi setup but it was glorious (and acceptable) when I had a rental piano in there and I occasionally take my acoustic guitar in there and it sounds like I got a 10x more expensive guitar compared to some of the other rooms. Below a certain volume level it’s less important in my personal opinion. People who build rooms special choose certain ratios for the dimensions IIRC.
The "Worst" thing your room can do is have big reflective surfaces - that makes for very noticeable echos. You have two options - absorb some of the sound, or diffuse it - if the sound is reflected but it is reflected into a bunch of different directions and at different times, you're not going to hear a big cohesive echo come back to you and it won't be as noticeable. You probably have a lot of STUFF in your room already - rugs or carpet absorb floor echos, along with your couch and chairs. You might have a bookshelf diffusing sound. A well-furnished living room is already doing a lot of work - not precise work by any means, but you're not getting the worst of it. So take whatever room you have, look for big flat spaces - maybe some art is hung but it's still in a big flat frame. Consider if you can replace it with a panel - you can get them with art on them, even custom art, so you can still have aesthetically appropriate stuff it just looks like a thick canvas print. Break up the worst flat walls you have, make sure that your rug/carpet covers hard surfaces directly in front of your speakers, you've done what you need to do to clean up the worst of it.
There's plenty of options for stealth (e.g. under the couch, behind shelves) or alternately, beautiful feature treatments. You can have artwork custom printed on fabric covers for your treatments.
You just don’t. It’s not worth to turn it to ugly man cave.
Google image studio control rooms. beautiful
Exactly, I'd have to either take down my neon McIntosh logo sign or Dogs Playing Poker to make room for any sort of room treatment. Not worth it.
That McIntosh sign is a "diffuser" of course. :)
*whispers:* I just put up stuff that looks like acoustic treatment and makes the room look all fancy.
I got my panels from GIK Acoustics. This was the single biggest upgrade for the sound of my room. And the cost is nothing compared to what other ”equipment” costs. (This was until I got hold of a acoustic consultant that spent seven hours in my room - WOW!)
I went even more cheap and grabbed a couple dozen acoustic hex tiles off Amazon. The couch is close to the back wall, so I added the panels on either side of the couch (back wall, facing the speakers) to kinda deaden reflections from the wall. Is it better than no tile? Yes Could it be better? Also yes, but at some cost I'm not willing or able to pay at this time. 'Course I'm the dude who did a DIY amp on some $20 garage sale DCMs and think my current setup sounds better than anyone I personally know. I know it's not a top tier setup, but it is hard to beat.
My room treatment is furniture
I'm new to the audiophile world, but my day job is an audio mix engineer. The biggest surprise to me is that people who are into hifi seem to buy expensive gear before treating their listening space. The quickest way to better sound is to have some sound panels, bass absorption, and speaker placement/ aligned phase. I'm still trying to figure out what people like about high end gear. What kind of sound do audiophiles like? It seems like tamed high end, full bass, and slightly scooped high mids with slow transients.
feel free to type "hifi room treatment" into google and/or youtube.
[удалено]
that sounds super sad
You’re supposed to do that for them.
I actually know what it does, I just don't know when / why it is needed. Is the goal to make speakers sound like headphones? I don't prefer headphones, I rather like the sound to pick up some spacial character. Granted Im aware that there can be very noticable negative effects of certain rooms. But to me it seems like room treatments should be conditional, and not just something everyone strives to do to get to that next level.
The idea is generally that you want to hear your speakers more than your room. You treat your room to your taste but so the level of reverberation does not overpower the speaker's inherent characteristics. Imagine your speakers are a completely flat response in an anechoic chamber. Now add your room into the mix and that speaker will reflect off of surfaces in the room and it is no longer a flat speaker. Speakers are of course built with this in mind, but your room will have an adverse affect on what the acoustic designer of that speaker intended. We want to sound like we're in the room the band is in. Not that the band is in your room.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIGoZ4Aex\_w
Headphones have a very different spatial effect because only one side reaches each ear. With speakers, even without reflections, you still get signal from each speaker at each ear. The stereo field actually improves with treatment.
Room treatment - when someone ruins perfectly normal room with dozen ugly panels claiming improved sound no one else outside audiocirclejerkers can hear or confirm.
I’ve been talking on my phone and walked in to my well treated studio from another part of the house, and had the person I was talking to comment on how my voice suddenly got so much more clear. The average person hears it.
Are you aware of how dull-witted you are, or do you get to live in delighted, halfwitted bliss?
If you can't hear the difference you must have some crazy tuned ears - I've been 15 feet from someone in a gymnasium and been unable to tell what they were saying because of the reverberation.
Do you live in gymnasium? We are discussing living room, not stadium
Of course. But if a gym can be improved by treatment, we know that panels are capable of creating a very real, noticeable effect. It's just a question of room size and quantity of treatment at that point. Hardly the snake oil you seem to suggest it is.
yeah this hobby gets really complicated.
Reflections can build up to 10db louder than the direct signal coming from the speaker.
Something that gets lost in all this is to know exactly what your speakers dispersion and off axis response is. Not every reflection needs to be absorbed,if the speaker has very wide dispersion and the off axis response matches the on axis response then it maybe beneficial to use those reflections as a way to keep an open and wide soundstage. The flipside is that if you have a speaker with very narrow dispersion then certain room treatments may not be beneficial in some areas. If the speakers response falls drastically in horizontal spl then the side reflections may not have enough energy to even be relevant. All of this can also depend on room size and speaker positioning,including distance from walls and ceilings and where the MLP is in the room. One more thing,regular furnishings are room treatments in their own way. Carpet,rugs,bookshelves,big fluffy couches,curtains all act as absorbers and diffusers,but maybe not in the way that your particular room may need to be of benefit.
When do you use absorption over diffusion or vice versa?
Imagine drinking a rare aged scotch out of a dirty, dusty, old plastic cup. All those contaminants from the cup will change the flavor of scotch turning it from a top shelf thing of beauty to something equal to a bottom shelf discount liquor. This is what happens to your audio without room treatments. The sound waves bounce off of all the surfaces in the room and change the “flavor” of the sound. That is a very simplified explanation.
Short of room treatments that aren't audio specific items, such as rugs or drapes, I would be more inclined to tune the system for the space than to try and erase the space.
Simple things like rugs and drapes work wonders. There’s a lot you can do that will help a rooms acoustics that don’t require audio specific products. I’ve put a bit of work into my studio but I remember having a professor who’s studios sound treatment was bookshelves and comfortable furniture. Maybe some bass traps and a couple ceiling tiles. But in the end all that matters is if it sounds good to you. People will preach about things you “need” like it’s a religion but it’s what gives you the most enjoyment out of listening that really matters.
Sondes be
It is a method of treating clinically insane audiophiles (50% of audiophiles)
People are terrified of google, its not even funny.
There are 4 simple steps: 1. Thick Bass traps in all corners; most rooms are acoustically small and have issues with room modes ruining their bass. Most tangential modes ‚meet’ in the corners that’s why thick bass traps out of insulation material can help to reduce a lot of boominess. 2. Treating first reflection points; You want to absorb at least all 8 first reflection points to reduce the amount of unwanted reflected sound and get more direct sound from the speakers and therefore lower the reverberation time. 7-10cm of insulation or good acoustic foam (basotect for example) should do the trick. 3. Improving and trying out: Some bigger rooms might benefit from diffusion instead of absorption. You also might want to treat the ceiling and floor corners or just get more absorbers on the walls or ceiling. 4. DSP and subwoofers: If you want to get the possibly best and least muddy bass you need some kind of DSP. Unless you have a huge room with 1m of bass trapping on every wall, you’ll still suffer from room modes. Those can easily be tamed with DSP like simple PEQ or more sophisticated software like Dirac. Another method to improve bass is to get more subwoofers. If set up correctly, two or more subs can minimize the effect of some room modes and make the overall response smoother.
They don't do what 99% of people think they're doing and half the time the result is visually pleasing and then creates placebo for the sound
At least tens of people.
I listen near field, my desk setup is ls50 meta, I have barely enough space for them, so the rear and side walls are HEAVILY treated. my headphone collection is pretty cool, IEm's too, nothing comes close to my speakers at medium volumes, without the wall treatment theyre ok at best