Systemic Development > Psycho-Acoustics

Da Room

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rollo:
   We have heard so many opinions on the room first. What is really right ? Meaning a flat room, bright room , dark room ? My experience hearing the same live Jazz ensemble in three different rooms came away with three different sounds.
  Carnegie Hall is a basically neutral sound with a touch of warmth. Whereas Lincoln Center can be a bit bright, One can listen to the same Orchestra, violin solo or piano solo and hear a different presentation.
   Which is right ? Both actually. Just different. Personally I prefer Carnegie Hall. More emotional impact when presented with a touch of richness or warmth. Each hall has sweet spots for different instruments as well. This was verified when we went to Carnegie and was met by the conductors wife while we were both looking for the sweet spot. We almost tripped each other getting to the seat. When we spoke and realized we were both doing the same thing we had a good laugh. However strongly agreed that the seat we were chasing was the sweet spot for the piano.
   Our listening room or space might want to replicate the richer OR brighter sound. Me personally i would like my room to sing along with the music as opposed to being dead flat. What do you think ???


charles
 

tmazz:
Unfortunately for the vast majority of us what we would like in a room sound is really immaterial as we are presented with a space to work with and it is what it is. Sure those of us who are lucky enough to have either a separate dedicated space of a tolerant spouse can tweak the room with treatments to nudge it in a particular direction, but even then we are really doing nothing more than putting band aids on the sonic signature that the room (which was never designed with audio in mind) had when we got it.

That said, this is a interesting thought exercise, since for the reasons stated above I have always concentrated on optimizing the space I had and never gave much consideration to what I would do if I had the opportunity to start something from scratch.

I guess you could always look for a certain type of sound when house hunting, but that would take an uber tolerant spouse to let the sound of a potential audio room be the deciding factor in picking out a house..... like Mother Teresa tolerant.  :lol:

P.I.:
First, we measure the room (with a tape measure) and determine where the major acoustic modes are in the room - [url]https://amcoustics.com/tools/amroc/url] Then we treat those issues:

http://web.archive.org/web/20010803052829/www.headphone.com/EditorialHeadroom/RoomTubes.asp

OR - something along those lines.  A few of those traps work wonders.

OR - treat the corners of the rooms where all of the nasties begin and then the primary and seciondary reflection points..  From there, we move onto OCD or SAF.

Pick one.

 :thumb: :rofl: :thumb:

dBe:

--- Quote from: doug s. on September 25, 2017, 08:23:36 PM ---imo, for a room for listening to pre-recorded music, (as opposed to the lincoln center or carnegie hall), size matters.  bigger is better.  it reduces a lot of the needed acoustical room treatments, as room reflections, overload, etc, are reduced just by the room size.  the smaller the room, the more critical the speaker/room interaction, and the need for acoustic treatment.

doug s.

--- End quote ---
Too true.  However "most"(?) of us are stuck with a smallish room into which we want to produce world class musical reproduction.

Size is the deal if it conforms to the golden ratio.  For the rest of us, we need to fool Mother Nature a bit with space expanding appliance in our rooms.  Can be done, very carefully and we have to realize there is no "perfection" available.  There are pretty good compromises available for us mere mortals.

richidoo:
Da recording room matters just as much as our playback room.
Audiophiles assume recordings are perfect, but surprise! Recordings do not have perfect acoustics. The only acoustics an engineer is concerned about are those to improve isolation. They assume the natural acoustics of their room are somewhere between good enough and ego-perfect. "Nobody ever complained" is their proof.

We love hearing the recorded ambiance as long as it doesn't screw up the tone of the instruments. But it often does because engineers don't fully consider room acoustics in their mic placement or setting up the recording. Beneath every music performer is a hard floor, often concrete, which bounces their sound back up into the mic, delayed, and that floor bounce interferes constructively (bloom) or destructively (thin.) The reflection affects amplitude and phase of the direct sound and changes the tone of the instrument.

Play a Bach cello sonata (I'm playing Steven Isserlis Bach Sonata 6 right now.) Count the frequencies at which you hear bloom and blur and you know how many mic locations there are, in this case two. You can hear the blooming on higher notes from the close mic on the body or bridge of the cello to capture the wood, finger and string texture. Then you can hear blooming at much lower frequency from the stereo room mics placed high above the floor to capture room ambience. The bounce distance from source to floor to mic determines the frequency that will be distorted. Frequencies adjacent to the freq whose wavelength equals the floor bounce distance are affected too.

The way to cure this is to attenuate the floor reflection, even if only a very small absorber close under the mic, or a pad on the floor. but that is rarely done in recordings, even by excellent professional recordists.  Even in a soundproof booth with singer you will hear her voice fluff up when she sings low enough, because she's standing on carpet covered concrete.

I think people have mental programs running in their brains that filter out the flaws of recording, system and room acoustic, allowing us to focus on the content of the recording. Audiophiles dance with the devil by learning to disable those mental filters, and by opening our awareness to the sonic flaws, we then attempt a lifelong battle to defeat the enemy we created for ourselves. But once we unlearn how to ignore bad sound, we find that most recordings have flaws for which we can't blame our system or room, and we must face the reality that perfect sound is impossible. But we gain wisdom, and in the end after summiting Mount Audiophile, we relearn how to listen and enjoy music again, but without our filters.

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