We suck it up. Use headphones a bit. And curse the property and the ground it’s on with its low ceilings, naff wiring, and one plug socket per room.
Then eventually we do one of the following:
Do you know this or are you guessing it?
For the benefit of @daren_p, @mbear mentioned stading waves first and this is accurate. It makes a huge difference.
Recording studios have all their walls subtly (if aiming for a conventional square room look) at different degrees. When people talk about nodes and nulls they are really talking about the end result of how standing waves effect the room and therefore sound.
When taken to extremes, the “room within a room” construction of soundproof also ensures that the inner and outer walls are not parallel.
It’s not a guess. The theory is documented.
Yes if I was building a dedicated listening room I would make the walls a few degrees from rectangular.
There are probably ways to do this that are also aesthetically pleasing to sit in as well as listen in.
Exactly how to make that happen though it’s not as simple as it sounds.
For example, I would imagine you’d want the room to be symmetrical down the centreline so that a listener in the sweet spot didn’t have different sound patterns Entering each ear.
FWIW I didn’t though. Even building a new house, it turns out to be quite a challenge when you can’t move load bearing uprights that affect floors above. Plus there is the, “Dear, WTF did you do to the living room?” conversation I wanted to avoid.
When I was loosely planning ideas for a house conversion, I was working on a pentagonal shape, though not a regular one so that angles were less obvious. My debate with myself was whether the front or rear should be the one with an angle in the middle, and opted for front, angling walls direct to the listening position, with potential to “soffit mount” the speakers in the two front walls so as to have fronts flush and completely avoid comb filtering. Ceiling was planned to slope gently upwards away from front, so as not to be parallel with floor. Sadly COVID happened, costs went through the roof, and a re-evaluation of things important led to cancellation of the move and so the project.
You dodged a bullet. Costs went crazy after we broke ground and were effectively strapped in for the ride. Building our house was literally a case of decide your budget, then tripple it! The treatment for the listening room wasn’t even a noticeable cost in comparison to everything else that went up a lot more.
Ouch. Just comparing the costs these days for doing a 22m2 or so basement room already built, to a full extension of the house, which includes a fully insulated basement area, in 2013 makes me really glad that we did all this years ago. Prices for quality work have simply skyrocketed
Epic set up!
Thank you, Dev, that’s kind. Do come and listen, if you are ever in the Brighton area!
Am I right in remembering that you are one of the few people that I know of who owns what was reputed to be Julian Vereker’s favourite turntable, the Phonosophie P3? Didn’t JV have a special Armageddon type power supply made for it? (All in the hen’s teeth category!)
Hello Graham,
That’s very kind. We were in Brighton today and will come again and would love to take you up on your kind offer.
Best wishes
That’s great, Dev. I have lots of LPs, but do bring along any of your own that you would like to hear! (I can’t play CDs at present, as Audio T are waiting for Naim to try to find replacement transport mechanisms,)
(And do bring the delightful young lady in your Profile photo, if she’s into these ‘boys toys’!)
Easy….get a 500 year old building like mine. Nothing is flat or square.
One potential problem will be all the big glass windows.
Is there a way to get acoustic curtains, if such things exist, in order to reduce Reflection of sound waves.
Or just heavy lined curtains, or something to damp things down.
They do! I had these in my last dedicated cinema room. They weigh a tonne. The back is rubber with lead threads woven in and the patterns are basically a choice of block colours. Mine were black velvet. I had them made to order for two windows floor to ceiling and cost me about $2000 fifteen years ago. They deaden sound in and out as well as blocking 100% light.
Robert Harley’s guide to room treatment in a dedicated listening room that he has built in his house:
Dimensional ratios are key.
I think I used the same tool early on and although my three dimensions are all very different, it wasn’t great. But you build the home within the constraints of cost, time and materials you have.
Though it is fairly firmly in the bolt area.
Totally agree non parrallel walls and ceiling would help to reduce standing waves…a bit like Laurence Dickies approach to backwave damping… the trick is not to over absorb yet get reverb right…and not to over drive the room
“Bolt investigated the average modal spacing to try and achieve evenly spaced modes, but using the average mode spacing is not ideal, and the standard deviation of the mode spacing is a better measure. Ratios of 2:3:5 and 1: 21/3:41/3 (1:1.26:1.59) were suggested, but Bolt also noted that there is a broad area over which the average modal spacing criterion is acceptable. (Note, this later ratio appears to be often rounded to the commonly quoted figures of 1:1.25:1.6).”
