First off is your room a dedicated listening room? These rooms have the most issues because they are not lived in rooms with all the things that go with them. Most listening rooms tend to have a center chair or sofa and the equipment. They have echo and ring because they are bare. If talking to another person in a room sounds bad, one needs to work on their room. If the room is lived in and conversion is not harsh or distracting do not waste any money on traps or absorbers.
My biggest advice is not to be sucked into the consumer trap of buying or using any room acoustic product that absorbs sound. All they do is dull your system and suck you into buying more expensive equipment. Do dealer and professional recording studios need and use these, yes they most certainly do. For recording it is obvious, they are making a recording. Audio dealers use them because they are not lived in rooms (no heavy drapes, not a lot of furniture, no bookcases, or shelves of albums, no fireplaces, etc) and even worse and most importantly they are not setup for one single permanent system. Most of our rooms are lived in rooms and again most just deal with one system. What is needed in most home listening rooms is tweaking the setup to the room you have then adding Audio Defusing Items when the limits of adjusting the system to the room end. Most of these items have very high WAF appeal such as bookcases, DVD storage, tapestries, picture frames, add a corner chair or arm chair. All these things break up the bare and plain straight walls. Here is a simple flow chart to try: Step One: tweak your system for best sound in the room it is in Step Two: add or arrange audio diffusers Step Three: listen to your system again Step Four: have the wife hold a mirror on the wall, you sit in the listening position, and have her move forward until you can see the mains centered in the mirror. Put tapestry where mirror is. Step Five: listen to your system again Step Six: if things are not exactly right, consider adding an active subwoofer (Thiel, Vandersteen, or any that blends by actively removing the bottom off your mains) Step Seven: return to step one if not satisfied In the home environment, expensive traps and absorbers only add to the need for more expensive equipment to make up for the loss of dynamics caused by their addition (it is trying to treat a symptom not curing the cause). There are some extreme cases of trying to make a room that should not be used for home audio into a listening room that could force one to use these professional products, but why send money to put a square oversized peg in a small round hole? A perfect example of this is the Venetian Room at the HiFi Show. It has an Italian Motif with picture frames that are hung along the walls. Equipment in the plain room next door sounds like crap and no amount of traps or absorbers helped only made the music lifeless. Move the equipment next door into the Venetian Room and WOW Music. The rooms are the same except for the more lived in wall hangings. -- iPhone ------------------------------------------------------------------------ iPhone's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=13622 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=38859
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