Wooden Flooring

My good lady wife had been suggesting for some time now about replacing our lounge carpet to a real wood floor. As nice as real wood flooring looks, my apprehension about this is, how it changes room accoustics, especially as I’ve reached Hi Fi nirvanha with the current system.

I was wondering has anyone gone down this route and regretted it, or preferred the change. Or even gone from from wooden flooring to carpet. I’m on a losing battle with this as it’s going to happen, just thought I would ask you learned people for possible advice.

Walter Wall won’t be happy :wink:

Buy her some really nice rugs for Christmas.

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My dealer has wooden flooring in a couple of his demo rooms, but does use the odd strategic rug and sound traps, sounds pretty good to me. He also uses the Naim chips under speakers and Fraim. I think you should be able to make it work for you, but might need some accommodation from your wife.

We have recently had a new a laminate floor in our dining room and without our enormous rug it’s really echoey. We chose laminate - I wanted wood really - because of the much lower maintenance. Real wood floors are really expensive and if you then cover it with a big rug that’s really expensive and of course you don’t see the floor. A real wood floor sits on underlay whereas with a carpet you can spike through to the solid floor beneath. I’d say get a really nice new 80/20 carpet.

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I have carpet in my media room/office and wooden floor boards in the lounge and both systems work fine. If you have the bi-amping pairs of speaker terminals, you can alternate how you connect your single speaker wires to change the toning to suit the floor type,

I have that hard vinyl flooring that looks like wood. It sits in a concrete base and ‘floats’ on the surface meaning its not attached to the floor with adhesive. Not sure how the real wood floor changes things but my room has no treatments other than a thin rug. The sound is good to my ears, I was also apprehensive but the room once full of furnishings seems just fine. Depends how stark your room is I guess as to wether you will need more rugs etc to tame the sound. Remember that most people around the world don’t use carpets!

I will add I currently have IsoAcoustics Gaia feet on the speakers, and there is a medium ish size rug in the lounge.

The main issues are likely to be how much if a cavity there is under the floor and whether it is sprung or not.

Sprung floors are awful in my opinion (currently living with one) and not just for their effect on sound quality. Furniture wobbles about when you walk near it and nothing is truly solid.

A very heavy rug that covers the entire distance from outermost corner of each speaker placed directly in front of them is certainly a must in my experience.

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Just suggest to your good lady that a nice new kitchen would be a better use of the money !!! it will change the sonics a great deal even with a rug

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In my humble opinion you have a good lady wife since she wants a real wood floor! I’m a big fan of wooden floors as well since they last forever if maintained correctly. I like that sustainability aspect as well as that the floor gets more authentic once it ages and gets a few ditches. Also, a nice floor adds to the value of your house.
We have solid and thick oak in the living, kids room and study. Once the kids are a bit older, we get the guy in for a major service and shave off a millimetre.

Regarding sound quality, an organist of a big cathedral said to me that churches being entirely of stone sound often overaccoustic, churches being entirely of wood sound dry and churches having either a wooden ceiling or wooden floor sound right and that this is not a law, but is quite often the case.

Rugs can compensate and help finetuning. I did choose the brand for our interior, and when we visited the shop, she bought terribly expensive rug:

image

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Not sure I could cope looking at that everyday. Too busy.

I have laminate on top of suspended wood floor. A large run in front of the speakers to cover the floor reflections but It tends to extend the bass a bit too much, I also have isoacoustics Gais, they help tighten it but not reduce it.

With the last two Uniti firmware updates it added more bass and I have ended up having to use DSP for Room EQ to get it under control and it sounds great with it, however I can’t apply this to my analogue side. So likely looking to move from Naim to Linn at some point so I can make use of their space optimization as I use Roons DSP at the moment. I also am looking to see what I can do room wise but I am limited in this capacity.

:small_blue_diamond:In Sweden,.99% have wooden floors in their living-room.
It is very rarely anyone has a carpet in his home,.this because of the risk of allergy.

And our music-systems sound fantastically good :grin::joy::grin:.

/Peder🙂

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Allergy to what? Wool? Surely you wear jumpers.

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I think it’s allergy to dust, dead skin, mites etc that live on the foregoing. In UK if you have asthma, they recommend hard floors in bedrooms at least. With any sort of carpet it’s very hard to vacuum it all up, especially as you probably won’t notice what’s there. With a hard floor a damp mop does the job…

Best

David

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:small_blue_diamond:I just report what is written about this in Sweden.

In the late 1960s,.and early 1970s,it was very popular to put carpets in every room here in Sweden.
But around 1990,.most threw them out.
In the living-room it is always wood-floor,.in the rest of the residence has some wood-floor,other “plastic floors”…but very,very rarely carpets.

/Peder🙂

Hi, I would not be afraid of a real wooden floor. It helps room acoustic. What is needed is a blend of carpet and curtains to balance mid-high frequencies but most of all system components need to be decoupled being a wooden floor elastic. So stay away from spikes and cones.
A room with wooden floor, walls painted with soundproofing paint and a strategically placed wool carpet and curtains makes for a real nice sounding place. Heaven would be a wood ceiling as well… :grinning: It goes without saying that it’s my humble opinion…

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Absolutely. And just put an angel as basstrap in the corners.

I think a lot depends on the rigidity of the wood floor, and whether or not it vibrates/resonates when you play music. I moved my system from a concrete floored room to a suspended timber floor, and was a little apprehensive, but the room actually has better acoustics. However, this is in a solidly built Victorian house, and when I refurbished the room, I was careful to fix the floorboards very securely to the joists to ensure that there was no movement.
If you are intending to lay wood flooring directly on a solid floor, that’s different, and if properly done on a level base, even a floating floor should be OK, although a fixed floor might be a safer bet.