Spoiler Alert !!
It didn’t end well.
1 Like
After you installed the egg crate sound absorbers, Mike, what kind of SQ difference did you notice? Was it a revelation? Just curious as I’ve often thot of doing similar.
It’s an acoustic treatment and also a visual improvement. When I’m listening to music, I don’t like having an enormous, black TV screen in my line of sight reflecting the room back at me.
2 Likes
It turned an extremely live room into an almost dead one. The clap test now has virtually no bounce back.
3 Likes
How do you find the sound? Based on my own experience, removing room effects entirely from the equation created the best sound I have ever heard from any hifi system, and that was a lesser system than I have now, so for me it remains a goal. The tricky thing is doing that while avoiding going so anechoic as to make the room so dead that it becomes unpleasant on the ears. (Link: Best sounding system ever heard)
Room treatment is essential if you want to get the best out of your system and at the prices we pay for all our bits’n’pieces, why would anyone not want to?
Those members being in possession of a “the wife” get a free pass, obvs. 
1 Like
It’s not the side effects of the cocaine…
Yes, from the system pics thread it’s surprising how few people seem to consider the room and yet spend a fortune on the system, including tweaking all aspects of cables etc, when the room is likely to compromise the sound far more. Of course, if a room is not totally dedicated to listening there have to be compromises, especially when also a general purpose room shared with other people, but some treatment can be quite discrete, given availability of art panels etc.
But room treatment requires a light touch in my opinion. You can go nuts with it for a home cinema setup. In that scenario you want to remove any room interactions in otder to put you where the action is.
But the most treated stereo rooms (I say this from experience of having had one) just reduce it to giant headphones. It’s the imperfections in the room that give the live performance in your room illusion. You just want to take the edge off extreme problems, not deaden the room like a studio.
I recently built a house with a dedicated room. The treatment was about $20k but I didn’t do panels or traps. When I set up a crappy soundbar for the kids to watch TV after we moved I thought, “holy cow this thing never sounded like this before. Crikey!”
3 Likes
Yeah, well, you know - and a rug.
10 Likes
Without a doubt a rug holds the whole room together man.
3 Likes
Not like the inside of the TARDIS that’s for sure …
1 Like
I’m all for room treatment but I want to relax when I listen to music and for me there is nothing in that image I would find relaxing at all.
It has the ambience of an interrogation suite and I’d be expecting shadowy figures to emerge from the back of the TV. The treatment itself doesn’t look expensive because it looks broadly like a cross between the traditional tops of egg boxes and the top of Lego. It looks cheap and unfinished and the room looks like a converted storage cupboard. Something a dealer might build thinking it would impress when really it has no real world connection to how most of us enjoy our music.
Sorry to be so brutal. We enjoy what we enjoy but that’s as far away from a relaxing environment to love music as I could possibly imagine.
2 Likes
Looks amazing!
It is interesting how using RT can change the presentation of a system so much – and all you’ve done here is to apply it in an indiscreet/highly visible manner, which is the only option for you. Of course, many rooms/spaces are treated from ‘ground-up’ in the design process.
I’m with you, in that it’s not the aesthetic which matters, but what the result is, and if you listen to music in very low/no light, the aesthetic hardly matters 
But apart from that?!
Seriously though I have to agree. No disrespect intended to the OP - each to his/her own.
1 Like
I’m struggling to see the difference between that and a padded cell.
More seriously, the fact it’s out of alignment from the skirting upwards next to the switch makes it look a bit half arsed. You wouldn’t want them tiling your bathroom.
Similarly, that’s not low lighting. It’s stark and harsh casting shadows like something from a horror film. How tense must you be in the first place if that’s what relaxes you?
2 Likes
Oh yawn.
To be fair I’d never be able to yawn in that room. I’d be on pins 