Listening Room Poll : Fully Treated or Normal Furnishing

OK. Thanks. In any case, I have no deliberate treatments and am happy with my room.

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No doubt, Iā€™m sure it sounds excellent & you have some top flight kit but Iā€™m also fairly confident you could achieve significantly more performance from what you already have with some treatment. For eg, I believe you have mentioned about adding more subs. While I believe, no doubt this will be an improvement I would think youā€™d probably see bigger improvements by adding something like ASC tube traps, while expensive, theyā€™d still cost significantly less. At your level of kit, when you hear bass thatā€™s only produced by the speakers/subs themselves & not the room, it can be a real eye opener.

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Looks great and something that I hope to achieve with my new room

Maybe room treatment can bring out some sonic benefits, but it is not for me, I tend to think that HIFI devices are just parts of your own living room, like any furniture, pictures, bookshelves, etc and they are there to reflect your personal lifestyle, your taste.

They should be something like this:

They may be, but they are ugly. My wife wonā€™t like them, I wonā€™t like them, and weā€™re really pretty happy with what we have now. I donā€™t feel like I need to tweak my system to 100%. It becomes an obsession for some that loses sight of the the reason for it all: the joy of music. :slight_smile:

At the pint we do more subs, we are moving the system into the larger living room, so thatā€™s another project for another day.

My next change is the upgrade the 9" tonearm for my mono cartridge to match the 12" arm I use for the stereo cartridge. :slight_smile:

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I can fully understand where your coming from but I find it somewhat strange that you talk about room treatment as tweaking your system to 100%, losing sight of the reason, an obsession, etc but then go on to talk about the next big upgrade. I wouldnā€™t consider room treatment as tweaking to 100%, I would consider more a foundation of what your whole system is built on (as is feeding your kit with the best power possible). The room is a huge amount of what you hear, many will say the room is more important then the kit in the room.

Personally I thought I previously had a pretty good sounding room, & I was very happy with the performance & believed I was getting the most out of my kit. Changing rooms & then adding some better designed acoustic treatments, step by step opened my eyes to how much performance I actually hadnā€™t realized (acoustic treatments & power improvements have had more impact on sound then any other upgrade Iā€™ve done in the past).

I can understand if room treatments arenā€™t for you, but I think its wrong to call them tweaking to 100% & losing sight of music, I believe in fact its the exact opposite.

Acoustic panels can be disguised as artwork, diffusors can be visually pleasing & things like ASC tube traps are nicer looking (IMO) vs some of the other bass traps out there.

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Well said. I would go so far as to suggest an SN3 and ND5 in a well treated room will sound better than a 252 NDX2 in a difficult room with no treatement

OK. Thanks for your POV. I donā€™t really want to get into a protracted argument about it, so Iā€™m going to leave it there. :slight_smile:

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No arguments here, the intentions of my posts are always just to try & help others out, with things that Iā€™ve experienced on my audio journey (especially if they have had significant impact), that maybe they havenā€™t :+1:

Very possible, those with experience will always say theyā€™d much rather have ā€œaverageā€ kit in an excellent room vs top of the line kit in a poor room.

I would venture to say that those with the fiddling tendency are not & wonā€™t ever enjoy the music from their HIFI, some of them looking for something that is never there.

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If I can get an emotional reaction of joy and other intense feelings listening to my records, then I think the HiFi is spot on. Can it sound better? Maybe. Do I want to work on that? No. I want to listen to music. :slight_smile:

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I appreciate all the responses here, all valid, no right or wrong. Further to the useful responses, I would venture to say that the quality of the room or set up (especially smaller rooms) will determine if professional treatment products are necessary. I once tried setting up a system in the bedroom, and although I had limited placement options, no matter how I place the speakers in the room the sound is poor. For this reason, I abandoned the system and packed it all up. I could optimise the system by considering acoustic treatment in the room but itā€™s not an option for me at all for reasons that have been aptly mentioned on this thread not worth repeating.

I share the same sentiment JosquinDesPrez. I believe everyone is aware that perfection does not exist although most of us would try to improve our systems to the best of our ability, to seek the best sound reproduction as much as we could. As I mentioned before on this thread, I have had a dedicated room with unsightly absorption and diffusion panels stuck on all walls. The room looked more like a studio than a cosy home. I have to be honest, I didnā€™t enjoy listening to music in that room although the sound was rather good. Itā€™s not so much about the sound quality from the system but the room environment. I derive a lot more enjoyment from the current system in the living room with normal furnishing. The ambiance in the living room is much more pleasant, and the bonus is the sound quality of the current system in the living room is actually better than the one in the treated dedicated room. I must have done something terribly wrong with the room! Nevertheless, the systems are completely different, all different amps, source and speakers.

Having said the above, if the room or system still sounds poor despite being adequately furnished, then acoustic treatment may be the final option although it may be regarded as undesirable.

In summary, I guess people have different goals. From the results of the poll, it appears that there are still people who have their kit in treated rooms. Iā€™m not sure to what extent the rooms are treated, partially or fully, tastefully done with aesthetically pleasing products or overly done with ostentatious ghastly looking things sticking out like a sore thumb. I could not stay and listen for a long period in my old treated dedicated room and would usually want to leave the room in about an hour or so, I could sit and listen for hours in the current living room.

If I happen to get a new dedicated room for the hifi in the near future, I hope the system will sound as good as it is right now in the living room with normal furnishing, if not better, without any professional treatment products.

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I donā€™t know about others but me personally, I would say that couldnā€™t be further from the truth. I enjoy music far more then I ever have in the past. Everything you change in audio could be considered a ā€œfiddling tendencyā€, so not sure why adding some room treatments would be considered any different? You can add it & never touch it again if you want (which canā€™t be said for many & their kit). Actually, if the room is dialed in you might be less likely to be on the endless kit upgrade merry go round, so these sort of comments really make no sense to me :thinking:

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Still? That suggests you feel it is outdated? My impression is the reverse, that many people have only recently been becoming aware of the improvement that can come from treatment and it is becoming more common, having been almost unheard of domestically decade or two ago. And a number of people on this forum have been jumping on the DSP approach and have declared how much it improved things though DSP alone is much more limited in what it can do than room treatment.

Something that is interesting from the systems pics threads is the number of rooms where the room looks really reflective, with no carpets or rugs, or only tiny rugs, no curtains etc - in the case of both being untreated, those rooms will behave very differently (and the sound much more muddled) compared to those that are fully carpeted with heavy curtains and lots of soft furnishings, notwithstanding any owners saying it sounds great.

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I would say the same, in general over the different forums I visit, its seems to be more & more common. I know locally, in the past none of the dealers typically had treated listening spaces, & now more & more are adding treatments.

I can say this, last year I upgraded from 282 to 252 (both with SCDR) & 250DR to 300DR, as much of an upgrade that was, my new space with room treatments, a dedicated line & the power delivery tweaks Iā€™ve been doing recently have had more of an impact then those actual black box upgrades (at a significantly less cost as well).

No. That just suggests a number of people have professional room treatment products in the rooms. Nothing more. I am aware of the benefits and large impact these products may bring to the room but Iā€™m not willing to consider them if the system sounds good as it is. I will consider professional room treatment products only if the system sounds unsatisfactory or poor in a room with adequate furnishing, as a last resort.

High-pile thick carpet is surely a must in my book.

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I donā€™t think these views are mutually exclusive. I did one room because I had an opportunity to do it easily (though at great expense). Yes itā€™s incredible the difference it makes. More than any electronics upgrade Iā€™ve done. I admit that. And I got it right this time by not over egging it like I did many years ago in another treated room. That gave the recording studio feeling of zero room artifice and was awful for music - great for movies though.

Yet the desire to not mess with (or throw money at) the room is also understandible. I have a very serious system in another room also and no treatment there or desire to do so. I donā€™t even have that system on a rack let alone anything on the walls. Itā€™s just not what I want for that room and the hifi has to live with it. I know it could be elevated to another level entirely by treatment but it would detract from my enjoyment of that specific room. And as I said earlier, music is about more than sound. Your other senses arenā€™t turned off while listening so yes, I want the room how I want it.

Itā€™s not a for or against argument in my view.

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I definitely prefer a ā€˜normalā€™ room for the system. Not only I guess most equipment is designed to work satisfactorily in actual domestic environments, but I want to play music in a living room not a recording studio.

When I removed a large sofa and my big round carpet wasnā€™t still here, the space became more ā€˜liveā€™ but the Sats sounded gloriously in it; some details less, but a lot more fun.

My opinion only.

Suspect those with fully treated listening rooms will be a small minority.
Having a tool like REW these days to take some subjectivity out of the electronics impact on speakers, listening/speaker position and room interaction, for me, is very helpful to highlight problems and also to identify best ways to treat.
My listening space has turned into a bit of a man cave and is far from ideal but has never sounded so good.

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