What is the influence of your listening room?

[sangram]

A question that has been bothering me for quite a while too.

My room is fairly good as far as the environment is concerened. Unfortunately due to my hobby and the fact that I don't have a separate listening room, there are lots of flat, hard surfaces for reflections on one side wall and the front wall (speaker POV) like computer tables, steel wardrobes, guitar speakers, and the other side wall is 3/4 open with a window (I love a bright room).

This, coupled with a hard stone floor (I can't carpet, I'd die in summer) ensures the room always sounds bright, edgy and reflective - engaging, but horrible imaging and very poor bass response in the standing position. Actually a very small and narrow sweet spot.

Like redeye said - lots of hard reflecting surfaces on one side, and a large absorber (A window - can anything absorb sound better than an open window?) on the other. Naturally one channel comes out much louder than the other. My room is about 18 ft on the long side where the speakers are pointing into, so the bass thankfully is accurate and not peaky. Eliminating the room helps, by being extremely close to the speakers, but it's pretty uncomfortable to sit on the edge of a bed (my only piece of really soft furniture) at 2 ft from the speakers at typical listening levels... and besides I don't get the bass until I'm about 9 ft away from the speakers.

Horrible, horrible problems... Of course I cannot attempt high-end audio nirvana by buying expensive cables so I'm going to try reorganise my listening area a bit...

Somehow my posts seem to be only about problems and no value additions. I wonder why...

[Redeye]

sangram - that room sounds a bit of a nightmare acoustically. stone floors are about as close to zero abosorption coefficient as you can get. The best thing to do would be to leave as many magazines/coffee cups/take away boxes/speaker bits lying around on the floor as possible to act as diffusers and absorbers . Seriously, a rug or two might help matters a bit if a carpet is completely impractical.

dave - yeah, non parallel walls are the way forward although not very aesthetically pleasing to most people. The effect of ceilings are often overlooked in acoustic design especially in studios - big, hard, flat surfaces are bad news. I seem to remember that there are some Sony studios in NY which have wavy ceilings (to act as very clever diffusers) which slope upwards towards the back. In addition to being good acoustically they look really smart too. Actually, I've always thought that regular Shroeder diffusers look quite good (and you can use bits of them as shelves and stuff if you want) and they're dead easy to design/build.

[sfdoddsy]

I'd agree with that list, basically.

Because of domestic considerations I can't change my room all that much, so I use room EQ. I've used the Behringer Feedback Dewstroyer for bass, the Ultracurve for full range, a TACT RCS for full range, and now I use the dbx Driverack for full range EQ and digital crossovers.

I can't recommend room EQ highly enough.

Steve

[Kanga]

Hi Steve

I've heard that dipoles are very sensitive to room location. What kind of room do you have and how did you determine how to position the speakers in it? With all of this sophisticated eq equipment, are there any side effects? ie can you put the speakers anywhere and then just Eq it right, or does it work better if you spend time getting it as good as possible by selecting the right location and then tweaking using the Eq.
On your web page there were some before and after photos of the frequency response, and the before had some fairly broad and deep dips, but it was a bit hard to see what the frequency and dBs involved were. Can you give us some more info on this?

Thanks

Mick

[SY]

Floyd Toole has some excellent papers on practical room acoustics on Harmon International's web site. A few minutes with the browser will turn them up. The room is far more important than *nearly* any other component.

[sfdoddsy]

I have a warehouse apartment that is pretty big and pretty irregular, approx 25' at its widest, but narrowing to 16', 21' long and with 16' ceilings. This gives me some advantages, but there are odd angles all over the place. I have the speakers well out from the rear wall, which is the most important thing for dipoles, but they are closer to side walls than I would prefer.

I've actually find them fairly easy to place, although there are response differences everywhere.

I try to get speakers as good as possible and then EQ, as the smaller the amount of compensation the better, although TACT encourage users to just plonk them anywhere. When I used the TACT I found that the better your starting point, the better the ending point.

Whenever I change the speakers position, I re-EQ.

The top response graph on the site was without dipole compensation, so it was much worse than the actual room response.

This is a better shot (I hope) of the kind of response I get at my listening positioning, it was with no sub.

Steve