The question is asking those with dedicated listening rooms whether they use professional treatment products or have normal furnishings to do the job. Therefore they all have dedicated rooms but only five use professional treatment products. That of course assumes that nobody without a dedicated room has responded to the poll.
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My hi-fi room has primary functions as a music room (making as well as listening) and a home cinema room (though with lesser frequency than music). It also serves as a general purpose lounge when its additional space is needed. We are fortunate in having a sunroom/TV room/2nd lounge.
The music room definitely needs some treatment (it is untreated at present) but I have been holding off because some structural change is planned, and I will wait till that is done rather than spending money now and possibly then having to make significant changes.
My ideal would be to complete remove the room from the equation, as the best hi-fi I have ever heard was without a room.
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That you want to socialise in a listening space doesnāt mean those who want a space dedicated to music need therapy. Also, Iām not sure why you think a dedicated space can only be for one person, mine isnāt.
Of the 4 things you mention wanting to do, only 1 is listening to music. I donāt use my listening room to socialise, chat, watch tv or read a book because I can do that elsewhere, where I can also enjoy background music (which I suggest is all you need if socialising).
I often chat, read and listen to music before going to sleep but still have a dedicated bedroom.
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I have a dedicated space with profesional products but wouldnāt call it fully treated. It still has to be aesthetically pleasing (to me) as I find the environment plays a large part in the pleasure derived. I find the colour scheme, plants, furnishings, the view (daytime) etc are also important aspects.
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Absolutely not! You can have panels any colour you want, including matched to your walls, and you can have art panels from a variety of stock designs, from patterns to prints of pictures - you can even have them made with prints of any picture you like (of course subject to copyright), including your own photos or artwork. That of course ups the cost, but can make a big difference to room appearance and thus domestic acceptabilityā¦
Itās an interesting question: what constitutes a dedicated room?
The only room in my cottage not to have music is the shower room; one may infer that music / audio is an essential element to living at home. But the only room that only has a music / audio function is my evening room; in this sense itās dedicated to the enjoyment of sound reproduction. None of the walls are parallel, which makes furnishings an integral part to the room acoustics. Dedicated treatment would be difficult due to the shape and size of the room.
Having said this I am about to do away with the sofa and replace it with some comfortable chairs; I expect to have to tweak DSP for music.
Leaving out partially treated, whether dedicated or shared use, likewise dedicated but not treated?
This is the trouble with polls (as I know from having initiated some myself): you think of options that you think adequately cover what you want the poll to tease out, then other variations you might not have thought of pop-up!
I think youāve read your own biases into my post.
I donāt think such a space has to be for one person. On the other hand Iāve never met or seen such a space used in practice by more than one person. There may be a reason for that.
Equally, nowhere have I said people need therapy. I suggested as an alternative use of the money. Perhaps contemplate whether such rooms look, to some, so unwelcome and ludicrous an environment for listening that my tongue might possibly have been in my cheek?
I have no idea X)
Waiting for the OP to put me out of my misery 
I thought the poll was just for those with dedicated rooms to be honest, as HH also seems to think.
Is it actually feasible to remove all of the room effects, without resorting to āDSPā to optimise. This is included with my streaming pre-ampā¦I would not go back!
It could have been worded better, but that is clearly what the opening post says. If you have a listening room, does it use pro treatment or normal furniture?
Dedicated rooms come in many forms; they can be beautifully done, offering a relaxing environment, or they can look like some sort of torture chamber. Weāve seen both extremes here, and of course many in between.
I spent about $25k on the treatment but during a new build so everthing is integral to the wall and uniform rather than retrofitted. As a result, the living room looks mostly normal. The giveaways are the acoustic damping ceiling tiles and the soundproof door. Otherwise itās visually transparent. Daiken came and built a room within a room complete with an isolated air filtration system so noise doesnāt carry over air vents. I opted out of bass traps though and some other secondary absorbers. An overly treated room kills the live in the room illusion.
It sounds very good indeed. Easily more of an upgrade than $25k more electronics.
I listen alone in my dedicated room with room treatments exclusively. Music can be as isolationist as one wishes, and you are definately not the person to judge anyone elses choices in this matter. I have a number of valid reasons to listen alone, non of which you know, but the need for therapy is not one of them. I hope you are never in a position to have to listen alone.
I think youāll find I said āisolationist sportā. A different point to listening alone.
If one wishes to extract the absolute maximum performance possible from oneās system then I suppose a dedicated room makes sense. Iām not talking here about room treatments necessarily but rather about set-up details.
Often times optimum equipment set-up, inluding speaker placement, is compromised by domestic realities. In a dedicated room there is no need to place cables, mains blocks etc. in an aesthetically acceptable way. They can be placed to optimise performance. Same with speakers. It will likely all look a bit of a bloody mess but may very well sound much better than the same system with a compromised set-up due to being in a lounge. Actually I think hotels have lounges - homes have living rooms!
Anyway each to their own. Iāll accept the compromises.
I read āisolationistā to mean solo, solitary, aloneā¦ I read suggesting therapy to be a better use of funds to infer therapy might be required.
If neither were the case or it was all tongue in cheek, I misunderstood the point you wanted to make.
What speaker is that, the larger one?
Graham Audio LS8/1, according to Google Lens!
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Yes, gthack beats me to it. Itās the Graham LS8/1. The smaller speaker is Harbeth M30.2 40th Anniversary which he just got about 2 days ago.
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I have posted this before but with my new dedicated listening space, I have done far more treatments then previously & still in the process of adding more. I previously thought my listening space was decent sounding, it had soft furnishings like thick carpet & soft furniture, also had 5 acoustic panels (which after lots of research for the new room & experimentation were a compromise when I had them built). I added treatments to the new room, step by step & it has been a massive eye opener on how much my previous room was still holding back the kit (note I also have a dedicated mains in the new room). What I thought was decent sounding actually wasnāt that great after all, so when you see some of the pics on here with rooms with no treatments & lots of hard surfaces, I often wonder if the user realizes how much he can improve his sound with typically much less cost vs a hardware upgrade (though I understand not all treatments will be an option if in a shared space, but there are a lot more aesthetically pleasing treatments then in the past).
From research & experimenting, no typically a fully treated room shouldnāt be dead sounding, if its dead sounding you probably are using the wrong treatments. My previous room had 5 3.5" panels, new room has 10 panels 5.5-8" thick, plus 2 ASC tube traps & two 16" thick bass traps, my previous room actually sounded deader then my current one. You want broadband acoustic panels, not the real thin ones or acoustic foam, using these or adding things like rugs, curtains, tapestry on the walls, etc. These arenāt proper acoustic treatments all these do is absorb the highest of frequencies or make the room sound dead if you add enough of them, without having any impact on the frequencies you should be looking at, ie the ones lower down. The other thing is people adding things like bookshelves or plants etc. Bookshelves are not diffusors, thereās a reason why diffusors are mathematically devised, a bookshelf will just randomly scatter the sound waves, in an unpredictable fashion. Could this be better then having a flat wall, possibly but it is also possible that they make things worse.
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