The Listening Room Reality

Nice little painting on top of your diffuser. It is a real painting, yes ? Not a canvas print job.
Either way it looks lovely.
If it is real and has various thickness of brush mark, this will act as a micro diffuser on those high frequencies to help air imaging. :wink:

Thank you Tobyjug. Indeed it is an original by a local Sussex artist called Andy Waite, and we love his abstract style of painting the Sussex country side. We are lucky to have 6 pieces of his works some a lot bigger. ATB Peter

Chris, unfortunately you have a lot of problems with reflections, I suspect that your room has a lot of hard surfaces and very little soft furnishing.

The big hole in the bass response of the left speaker is definitely confirmed as being caused by a reflection at a distance 7m or possibly a little more. You could try moving it a little bit back towards it’s original position (maybe try 100mm), but there are still a lot of reflections muddying the sound. Is the distance from the left corner to the wall behind the dining table somewhere around 7.2 to 7.6M perhaps?

A bit impressionist painting, not ?

Sadely, to a certain point, everybody has reflections problems.
But very few are aware of that.
And most simply don’t wish to know.
The power of denial :wink:
At the same time it is very understandable.

Yes, that wall is between 7m and 7.4m from the left speaker at various points along it.

Now I’m wondering if Dutch & Dutch 8cs or Kii Threes are worth a test.

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I believe that putting a bass trap in the corner of the room (left as viewed from the sofa) will help a lot as it will reduce the cancellation.

It will need to be large and importantly it will need to be a pressure mode device, so it can’t be one of the large blocks of open cell foam that are often misrepresented as bass traps.

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I will have to respectfully completely disagree with this statement, you need to sort the room issues first then you know you are listening to the speakers.

Every improvement in source and then amplification further prove, to me at least, that the Briks I have just sound better and better, things have very definitely ‘clicked’ since the install of the GIK acoustic panels.

Regards

Richard

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Room issues are more related to the type of speakers than room itself.
If you adapt the speakers to your room particularities, you will have less acoustic treatment to do.
Will you buy Magico S3 for a 15 m2 room or ATC 100 ?

Well chosen speakers adapted to a room with minimal acoustic treatment will sound better than wrong speakers with a hard treated acoustic room. At least it’s my experience and point of view.
Personally I don’t like the sound of heavy treated rooms. The sound is too linear, damped and lifeless.

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That occurs because mid frequency damping has been used where diffusers should have been used.

Getting it right is either a matter of luck (no room treatment & hitting on the right speakers first time), cost (no room treatment & trying many different pairs of speakers until you get it right), effort (getting speakers that are not obviously wrong for the room then adjusting the room treatment to get it right) or a combination of all of these.

In practice getting speakers that you like and are approximately right to complement the room size and shape and then adjusting the room sound using acoustic treatment, will give a better result than using a lot of effort and money picking speakers to be as close as possible a fit to the untreated room (even if you’re not so keen on the way those speakers present the music) and then using less room treatment.

The different ways that speakers present the music is such a personal thing, that it’s really important to how the final result sounds.

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It’s what I wanted to say globally. First : choose the right speakers to fit the room characteristics, then adjust acoustic treatment where needed. Instead of treating the room entirely and put inside any speakers you want.

Sorry if this has already been said but the opening post is/should be blindingly obvious to anyone remotely interested in home audio, or theatre acoustics for that matter. Unless one lives in an anechoic chamber of course.
So forgive me for skipping the 300 or so posts to get here. I have always listened to the music in the room not the HiFi per se, I thought most people did.
My 4 storie 200 year old cottage has unusual shaped rooms, difficult to describe but the layout and stairwells make the inside of the house like one giant horn loaded enclosure. The “HiFi” resides on the ground floor but I often enjoy listening to music whilst sat in my basement level kitchen where the stairs open out like the mouth of said giant horn loaded speaker!

:grin:

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The difference is that you are saying “choose the right speakers to fit the room characteristics”

I’m saying “choose speakers that fundamentally present music to you in the right way - irrespective of the room (but make sure they don’t perform too badly in the room)”, then sort out the interaction between the speakers and the room.

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I don’t see heavily treated rooms on these pics. Naim factory and Cymbiosis.

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You do wonder what’s FINALLY hiding behind those walls panels- Naim’s listening room used to sound terrible, and I have heard the old room on numerous occasions. ATB Peter
In fact this doesn’t really matter even, as long as YOU are happy with the sound you are getting from your system in your room, and we are happy with the sound we have worked hard on achieving in our rooms.
It is all very personal and equally individual, what sound we crave, as we as always HEAR THINGS VERY DIFFERENTLY.

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The entire surface of both sidewalls in the Naim listening room are adorned with diffusers, that’s what the brown strips are!

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In both pics Naim tries to show his system sounding the best ( 500 series) . He doesn’t see the need to damp heavily the room in both pictures.

I see only one grey diffuser on the right. So I guess there is another one on the left. It’s not the entire room.

FR, I’ve been there, I’ve seen it.
I know the brown strips really are diffusers 'cause I talked about them with the Naim staff!

Ok Xanthe, i believe you now. It’s not very apparent on the pic to guess that the brown side walls are diffuser.