Is your listening room acoustically treated?

[David A]

I've gone a bit loony-tunes with £2.5K of GIK Acoustics treatments all over my living room (self-applied). In fact, I'm having two of my four Soffit Bass Traps collected for return tomorrow, as they are too invasive in my 5 x 4.3 x 2.5m room. See, I have a problem room which is twice as long as high, little furnishing, and a springy laminate floor, so I had to do something.

The upside is that I finally get to hear what a Devialet is truly capable of: it now sounds lush, deep & sweet instead of hard or dry. Rooms can easily halve the quality of what you've paid for... I now consider them enemy #1. This will be why there can be such disparate opinions about the Devialet sound - it's neutrality leaves the room's sound exposed.

I so envy you people with naturally large, well-proportioned rooms and solid concrete floors!

LOL. I know what you mean about bass traps being too invasive, they're big both physically and in visual impact.

Ridiculous story: years ago I decided to make some DIY bass traps. A speaker designer posted a quick and dirty DIY bass trap recipe on an audio forum which said "get some bags of ceiling insulation batts, stick them in your room corners still in their plastic bags and throw some cloth over the bags to kill the high frequency reflections from the  plastic bags", end of instructions. I decided to try it. I had a small hatchback car and I picked up 2 bags of batts. I put the back seat down to fit the batts in the car and the whole of the rear space behind the front seats was filled by the 2 bags, virtually no air space left. I drove home listening to music on my car cassette player (this was back in the '90s) and I have never again heard such glorious bass in a car. The batts worked as promised in the front corners of my room so I added another couple. Highly effective but ugly as hell in a living room.

Don't knock your laminate floor too much. A cement slab retains bass in the room and can make bass problems worse. Springy floors can actually help because they don't reinforce bass frequencies as much. They won't help as much as bass traps but a cement slab floor would normally require you to add even more bass trapping to reduce bass problems.