I moved home at the beginning of 2024 and the difference in acoustic properties between the old room and the new (to me) room was incredibly noticeable. The previous room had a high ceiling; hardwood flooring; very large sash windows; and it was square. The new room is pretty much the opposite and the lively bright sound which I had lived with for over 20 years is now much more neutral.
One of HH’s comments above resonated particularly with me. For whatever reason, a room has to be to my liking for me to achieve a level of relaxation/ contentment to create any chance of me sitting down to listen to music. What is fascinating to me is that this thread has made me realise that I have probably spent far too much money on my music playing kit than may be appropriate, as there is no way in this world that I could even begin to contemplate installing any of the measures the OP has used to achieve his nirvana. I would just be incredibly uncomfortable in such a room.
I totally get that I am definitely not getting the best performance from my music - hence my comment that I could probably make do with a lot less and have a similar level of enjoyment - my bedroom system driven by a Nait 2 for example! So thank you JonP for helping me put this all in much better context than I have managed to do until now.
Clearly not. That seems a fairly obtuse interpretation given both the title of the thread and the pretty measured responses.
One of the more interesting aspects of this thread, for me, is that the OP assumes you cannot achieve what he has without sacrificing aesthetics but that’s followed by a number of people who also assume that when there’s little evidence of it being the case.
The reality is that even the companies who produce stuff which measures or treats rooms do not and would not expect that what you’d end up with would be a room like the OPs. Thus the many pretty sensible attempts to produce treatment options which are domestically acceptable. This keeps being overlooked. You can improve a well balanced and truly excellent high end system with room treatment but the point is that just a few pretty simple things do that. Who at that point would continue and why? What we’re being sold is something which takes the fantastic and makes it even better without it looking like, well with all due respect, the OPs. The whole message of the room treatment industry is that you achieve incredible things without anything have to look like that. Having heard the living spaces of a couple of friends I have to agree.
If you actively choose to get beyond what the professionals believe to be sane then of course they’ll take your money and of course you’ll be satisfied because measurements can be taken to show that “something’’ has changed. Is that something sensible or audible or musical? Can’t see it myself. When you’ve got the basics sorted then you’re sorted.
After that you’re listening to the system and the room and have completely lost the idea of listening to music. Thus I don’t think most people here are decrying what is essentially an outlier just because of domestic acceptability. Once you have a high end system it’s all diminishing returns. Room treatment can refine your system magnificently but it can’t redefine the law of diminishing returns. A room with 4 bass traps costing £1,000 from IKEA really isn’t going to be bested profoundly by 20 traps costing £50,000.
The OP will never be satisfied because of this approach. They will start to experiment with further treatments and then they’ll go back to changing their boxes.
Thanks for your reflections, Fatcat, you interpret it precisely.
You see, we all live in homes and my journey began when I got the Sonus Faber Serafinos and I was amazed what they opened up from what the 552 et al. were doing. Plus Serafinos are not cheap.
Then I heard Autumn Leaves by Eva Cassidy and man it became shrill. So off became my plight (remember, empty canvas and tolerant partner) I got GIK Acoustics engineer start me off, then I bought the right microphone and continued with REW, gradually calibrating as I went along.
My thread title was slightly jocular putting the ? With the ! Implying that I knew I would be scoffed, yet also with the subtext that everyone investing in Naim values its fidelity, perhaps analogy could be me being a streaker running over a football pitch.
I used ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude - maybe this is polyamory? Mind you some just like Grok.
Afraid I switch off at these words or versions of same every single time. Zero tolerance policy on the basis that:
most posting the above start from an assumption that you are stupid and they are not.
there is an assumption that words (and pictures) can only be interpreted one way and it’s yours.
I am sick to death of explaining that I’m visually impaired and the very nature of that pretty much guarantees that in order to read and interpret any writing I will almost always have read it as much as and usually more than the person who wrote it in the first place.
I’m afraid that my interpretation of the original post stands. OP discovers something is shrill and so the solution is “judicious” room treatment and equipment isolation. The juxtaposition of that text and the accompanying pictures to most reasonable people, and let’s face it, most of the responses on here (yourself and a couple of other people excepted) suggests that most think the OP has a very loose grasp on the word “judicious”. If there was an attempt at humour in there then the mere fact that had to be explained shows just how much no-one saw it.
Although I bet the acoustics are quite good, allowing you to get to a meditative state.
Aesthetics, clearly not for everyone, but then everyone can make their own choice rather than judgement.
Well done JonP for following your passion. Give that radiator a lick of paint, I did mine and it looks much better together with the room. Mass loaded vinyl (5mm) for underneath the rugs.
And today I finished my acoustic treatments, well as far as I want to take them any how with these defractors in the seating position. I had some panels with material in before however my research has suggested they would have been useless, so followed a simple tutorial on youtube to make these. Total cost was £54.
