Devialet Chat

Having just got the instructions on how to post photos, I thought it was about time to show my system. The equipment list is in my signature.

The room is a bit on the awkward side being L shaped so each photo is from a different position and angle to end up providing a full 360 degree view of the room and setup. An extreme wide angle lens was used so the perspective looks pretty extreme in places but  the wide angle lens does let me fit everything in fairly easily.

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Front of the room from just behind my chair. There is a corner Mondo Trap straddling each corner at 45 degrees and just behind each speaker there’s a Mondo panel, identical to the one in the centre. The speakers are obvious. There’s a 2 shelf Grand Prix Audio Monaco rack with the carbon fibre Formula shelves in the middle, Roon Nucleus+ on the top shelf and the Expert 140 Pro on the bottom shelf. To the right of the left speaker in the background there’s a Monaco amp stand (basic perspex shelf) with the PS12. The speaker cables are Kimber Select copper and the red cables in the background are WireWorld Starlight Cat 8 ethernet. Hidden out of sight behind the 2 shelf Monaco rack is the ethernet switch connecting everything, an Uptone Audio EtherREGEN which really does make a difference.

The room is 5.2 metres wide here and you can see one of the major issues for my room on the right, that archway to the hall from the front door you can see through it.


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This is the view to the right from near the left wall. It gives a better view of the panel behind each speaker and it’s placement in the room relatively close to the speaker and well forward of the corner and the bass trap there.


The next room issue is visible, that  wall to the right of the chair. The room is L-shaped and the bend is that corner you can see on the right behind the chair. From the front wall to that wall that ends near the chair is 4 metres. The speakers are placed 2 metres from the wall behind them, measured to the tweeter, so half way between that front wall and the wall next to the chair. They’re 1.3 metres from the side walls. Short direct sound path to the chair and  around 3.5 times longer first reflection path does a good job of attenuating the first reflection on the left without needing to absorb or diffuse it. A first reflection from the right side has never been an issue and I suspect that the sound that would otherwise deliver the first reflection actually exits the room through the archway and isn’t reflected back into the room from the wall on the far side of the  hall. What isn’t really obvious because of the way perspective is rendered by the wide angle lens is that the corner to the right of the archway is actually angled at 45 degrees so there isn’t a right angle corner there.

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View from the right to the rear, from beside the Monaco rack. That left side wall is 7 metres long so the room extends 3 metres behind the listening chair. You can see another Mondo corner trap in the rear corner.


The pictures on the wall aren’t visible from the listening chair unless I turn around. They act to break up reflections in the rear area a bit and that actually does improve the sound slightly over leaving the wall bare but they’re mainly there because I don’t like the look of a long, bare wall there. 

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Finally, looking down the left side of the room. That area behind the chair is 3 metres wide and 3 metres deep. You can see the Mondo corner traps in each corner and the final Mondo panel in the middle. The sofa and chair at the rear are well forward of the wall with a fair bit of free space behind them. There’s also another archway entrance there, leading to a large open plan space with the kitchen and dining/living room area.


This room is purely a listening room. Things sound really good in the listening chair and tonally very good back at the sofa but the stereo imaging disappears back there because you’re off centre and out of line of sight to the right speaker. I actually like curling up on the sofa and reading with music playing in the background. When people visit, everyone takes turns in the listening chair.

Splendid. Beautiful huge simple space.

@IanG-UK '

Many thanks for the comments. It isn't quite as large as a wide angle lens makes it look, for example it's not much further from the camera to the back of the chair than it is from the back of the chair to the back of the room in the last photo. The total floor area is a fraction over 29 square metres.

Outstanding job!  Shows that with some thought, almost any shape of room can be a quality listening room.  By keeping the walls neutral the panels simply blend in, making spousal friendly. 

Thanks for sharing.

Nice Setup!  Its great to have a dedicated room for audio. You must be getting a great holographic image. Which panels are those? GIK acoustics?

@Norty & @sam1000 ,

Many thanks for your comments.

The panels do blend in well but spousal friendly? Not certain. When my wife and I moved here we had a deal that I could have a room for the system in which I could do what I liked so making it spousal friendly was never an issue. One of my wife's friends who visited soon after we moved remarked that she'd never seen a living room set up for one person before and I responded that this wasn't the living room :-) I don't think it would make a spousal friendly living room. Living rooms are a bit more multi-purpose and this room doesn't work for that. While my wife was happy about me doing what I liked in the room and never objected on colour grounds, she never liked my preference for modern furniture so I think it takes a bit more than good colour matching to satisfy all spousal concerns.

Having a dedicated listening room is great and the imaging is impressive. You would expect a left/right imbalance because of the shape of the room but strangely that doesn't seem to happen but because of the L shape and the change in the width of the room just behind the listening chair plus the archways, the sense of the space collapses to the left if the volume of the sound in the right channel drops too much like when the musicians on that side of the soundstage take a break while the soloist and people on the left keep playing. The placement of the musicians doesn't change but the "feel" or sense of the space they're in does change. I've never been able to compensate for that so I've had to settle for getting the stereo imaging superb and stable and doing the best I can with the sense of ambience that contributes to the feel of the performance environment.

Very nice setup David. You have a very understanding wife :-)
I love the Sopras in red.

(22-Feb-2020, 19:24)Drifter Wrote: [ -> ]Very nice setup David. You have a very understanding wife :-)
I love the Sopras in red.

Thanks for the comment. The Sopras in red are very nice.

Do you get noise or anything echo from the arch opening ?

We have giant opening and we used two layers of theater curtains. It works fabulously

Happy to provide info and pics


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

@no32

No echo from the archway openings to my ears and no visitor has mentioned it. I'm in a local audio club which has its meetings in members homes. There have been many meetings here and I've had lots of comments about the room and the layout but no visitor has mentioned that issue. I've been here for 18 years and I've had lots of thoughts about the various issues with the room and I've tried lots of tweaks to the acoustic treatment in the room over those years.

The one problem I have had with reflections from the hallway ended up being due to high frequency reflections from the ceramic tiled floors outside the archways but putting woollen rugs on the floor in both locations fixed that. Over the 18 years I've been here I've tried a number of things with that opening, a screen across it, acoustic panels there, acoustic panels against the wall opposite the archway, a DIY diffusor, and a wooden panel. In other words I've tried absorbing sound reflecting back into the room, I've tried to create a false wall to keep sound in the room and reflecting back as if there was a wall there, and I've tried balancing the loss to the hallway with absorption in the same position on the opposite wall. There were plusses and minuses with each approach but in the end I felt that the minuses outweighed the plusses in each case. The one thing which has worked really well is covering the tiles in the hallway there with a woollen rug, and doing the same just outside the rear archway as well.

I suspect a lot depends on geometry since sound reflects from a surface at an angle equal to the angle at which it strikes the surface. The angle of toe in of my speakers, pointed directly at the listening position, results in the archway being considerably off axis for both speakers. That ensures that the mid and high frequencies which would be most noticeable if reflected back into the room are somewhat down in level, the increased length of the reflection path relative to the direct sound path also weakens the reflections significantly, and the angles at which the sound is exiting the room ensures that much of the first reflections from the wall in the hallway opposite the archway are not reflected back into the room anyway. There is certainly some audible effect at times from the opening on the sense I get of the acoustic space captured by a recording but that is relatively minor.

Given what I've tried, especially the acoustic panels, I seriously doubt whether curtains would be beneficial in my case. What I found with placing absorption there is that while it reduced the amount of sound reaching the hallway area through the archway and also reduced the amount of sound reflecting back into the room, what it didn't do was to provide the reflection into the room that the wall on the left side of the room provides. Absorption there actually increased the reduction in sound pressure within the room and that loss ended up having a worse effect than just leaving the archway open. The rug on the tiled floor of the archway deals with the worst problem from sound reflecting back into the room without increasing the sound pressure loss from the opening.

Thanks for the thought. What you're suggesting could well be an issue in some situations but it's not an audible problem here after installing rugs on the tiled floors outside the room.