29-Jul-2018, 10:33
Pim,
Glass tables are in? Maybe. I've learnt one thing from playing around with acoustic treatment in my room over the last 15-20 years and that is that whether or not something is bad/how bad it is depends to a degree on where it is in the room. The effect of a glass window, for example, varies depending on whether it's at a first reflection point or not. An exposed glass window surface will certainly add to the brightness of the room but it will add more if it's at a first reflection point. You can't change the location of the window but you can change the location of first reflection points by moving the speaker and/or the listening position in many cases so if you've got a normal size window you may be able to leave it uncovered and enjoy the scene by rearranging the speakers and the listening position but all bets are off on that if you've got a wall to wall, floor to ceiling window. That leaves 2 options. The obvious one is curtains but surprisingly you can minimise the effect of large areas of glass on side walls and the wall behind the speakers with horn speakers which are highly directional. I once heard a pair of Avant Grade Unos in a very small space with exposed glass side walls and a wall clad with aluminium sheets behind them and they sounded quite nice, not bright at all. I've been in another listening "room", an extremely large open plan space around the width of 3 normal rooms, with the listening area in the middle, uncovered 4 to 4.5 metre high glass across that whole width and then wrapping around a bit on either side, and a large open plan dining area behind and the system sounded great. The whole space had a huge volume and air is actually quite a reasonable absorber of high frequencies so long reflection paths which existed in that space controlled the high frequency reflections off the glass very well. I'm not saying that glass isn't a problem, it can be, but it is a problem that can be worked with and there are several ways of dealing with it extremely successfully. Glass tables can similarly be judiciously placed out of a first direction path or simply throw a table cloth or blanket over them when you're listening.
I'd leave source material out of your set of priorities, there's nothing we can do about that apart from choosing not to buy material with problems but we want to listen to music we like and sometimes w have to put up with substandard source material if the music is good enough. I wouldn't argue with the order of your other priorities but somewhere around source amplification, source and power I'd also add in vibration control. I would definitely put room and treatment, and speakers and placement, first as you have but I might reverse their order because speaker choice and placement can have an impact on how you deal with room problems. Some speaker choices are better for a given room than others so I think my first priority if I were starting with a totally blank slate would be to pick speakers which work well with the room they're going in and then go from there.
When it comes to physical acoustic treatment there's different approaches and it's important to consider the kind of result you want because not everyone is interested in the same things but there's one thing I've really come to appreciate: treatments that can be mounted on free standing stands and moved so that they can always be ideally placed. Treatments that are fixed to the wall lock you into one speaker placement and one listening position for best results and that can be a problem if you move the speakers or make changes in the room. With absorption there's also the fact that absorption works more effectively if there is an air space of 10-15 cm or so between the absorption and the wall behind it. That's a lot easier to arrange if the absorption panels can be mounted on stands but stand mounted panels tend not to be attractive. Stand mounted treatments are also better for dealing with glass at first reflection points however because you can place the stand in front of a window. The last thing you usually want to do is to physically fix an absorption or diffusion panel to the window.
Get the room/speakers/listening position set up well and you can make a huge improvement. Things like vibration control and power treatment make great icing on a cake but the cake is the main thing and the cake is the room and setup.
Glass tables are in? Maybe. I've learnt one thing from playing around with acoustic treatment in my room over the last 15-20 years and that is that whether or not something is bad/how bad it is depends to a degree on where it is in the room. The effect of a glass window, for example, varies depending on whether it's at a first reflection point or not. An exposed glass window surface will certainly add to the brightness of the room but it will add more if it's at a first reflection point. You can't change the location of the window but you can change the location of first reflection points by moving the speaker and/or the listening position in many cases so if you've got a normal size window you may be able to leave it uncovered and enjoy the scene by rearranging the speakers and the listening position but all bets are off on that if you've got a wall to wall, floor to ceiling window. That leaves 2 options. The obvious one is curtains but surprisingly you can minimise the effect of large areas of glass on side walls and the wall behind the speakers with horn speakers which are highly directional. I once heard a pair of Avant Grade Unos in a very small space with exposed glass side walls and a wall clad with aluminium sheets behind them and they sounded quite nice, not bright at all. I've been in another listening "room", an extremely large open plan space around the width of 3 normal rooms, with the listening area in the middle, uncovered 4 to 4.5 metre high glass across that whole width and then wrapping around a bit on either side, and a large open plan dining area behind and the system sounded great. The whole space had a huge volume and air is actually quite a reasonable absorber of high frequencies so long reflection paths which existed in that space controlled the high frequency reflections off the glass very well. I'm not saying that glass isn't a problem, it can be, but it is a problem that can be worked with and there are several ways of dealing with it extremely successfully. Glass tables can similarly be judiciously placed out of a first direction path or simply throw a table cloth or blanket over them when you're listening.
I'd leave source material out of your set of priorities, there's nothing we can do about that apart from choosing not to buy material with problems but we want to listen to music we like and sometimes w have to put up with substandard source material if the music is good enough. I wouldn't argue with the order of your other priorities but somewhere around source amplification, source and power I'd also add in vibration control. I would definitely put room and treatment, and speakers and placement, first as you have but I might reverse their order because speaker choice and placement can have an impact on how you deal with room problems. Some speaker choices are better for a given room than others so I think my first priority if I were starting with a totally blank slate would be to pick speakers which work well with the room they're going in and then go from there.
When it comes to physical acoustic treatment there's different approaches and it's important to consider the kind of result you want because not everyone is interested in the same things but there's one thing I've really come to appreciate: treatments that can be mounted on free standing stands and moved so that they can always be ideally placed. Treatments that are fixed to the wall lock you into one speaker placement and one listening position for best results and that can be a problem if you move the speakers or make changes in the room. With absorption there's also the fact that absorption works more effectively if there is an air space of 10-15 cm or so between the absorption and the wall behind it. That's a lot easier to arrange if the absorption panels can be mounted on stands but stand mounted panels tend not to be attractive. Stand mounted treatments are also better for dealing with glass at first reflection points however because you can place the stand in front of a window. The last thing you usually want to do is to physically fix an absorption or diffusion panel to the window.
Get the room/speakers/listening position set up well and you can make a huge improvement. Things like vibration control and power treatment make great icing on a cake but the cake is the main thing and the cake is the room and setup.
Roon Nucleus+, Devilalet Expert 140 Pro CI, Focal Sopra 2, PS Audio P12, Keces P8 LPS, Uptone Audio EtherREGEN with optical fibre link to my router, Shunyata Alpha NR and Sigma NR power cables, Shunyata Sigma ethernet cables, Shunyata Alpha V2 speaker cables, Grand Prix Audio Monaco rack, RealTRAPS acoustic treatment.
Brisbane, Qld, Australia
