Room Treatment (Split from Owston thread)

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Nick
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#1 Room Treatment (Split from Owston thread)

Post by Nick »

I t might be useful to measure that room as I don't think we have ever made speakers sound as good as they should in it.
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#2 Re: Owston 2019 - Listening Impressions

Post by chris661 »

Sure, happy to.

FWIW, my lounge has a +10dB peak at 40Hz, which makes small speakers sound big, and big speakers sound ugly. The lounge goes through to the dining room and has a staircase, so there's actually quite a large volume of air that could be considered acoustically coupled. Smaller spaces will push the peaks and dips higher in frequency, so you'll have problems over more of the musical range.

EQ can help at one listening position. I'm quite lucky in that all the seated positions on the sofa tend to have a fairly similar response curve, so EQ can help all of those quite well. I don't know if that will apply there, but we can find out easily enough.

I've been toying with the idea of portable acoustic treatment for breaking up hard reflective surfaces (my sofa is flat against a wall, with the stereo against the opposite wall - the slap echoes are annoying), so if I've got anything to show for that, I'll bring some panels.

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#3 Re: Owston 2019 - Listening Impressions

Post by Nick »

The room has a bunch of GIK panels and corner traps, but its still hard to get speakers to actually drive the room (if that makes any sense).
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#4 Re: Owston 2019 - Listening Impressions

Post by chris661 »

I kind-of know what you mean, but it's difficult to put into words...

Guess I'll hear it soon enough.

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#5 Re: Owston 2019 - Listening Impressions

Post by The Stratmangler »

I wouldn't call it a room, it's more like a bunker.
An enormous semi subterranean bunker.
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#6 Re: Owston 2019 - Listening Impressions

Post by Nick »

No bigger than most of the rooms at Munich and they had some good sounds.
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#7 Re: Owston 2019 - Listening Impressions

Post by izzy wizzy »

Nick wrote: Sun Jun 09, 2019 3:47 pm No bigger than most of the rooms at Munich and they had some good sounds.
Munich's rooms are a lot of glass and relatively thin walls' possibly quote live and virtually transparent to the bass. The "bunker" will have very different wall construction and will absorb/reflect sound, esp the bottom end in a very different way.

I remember an artcile someplace that examined speaker preferences vs house construction in the various countries. Japan, very thin walls, Oz/NZ not too disimilar to USA, Europe a lot of solid walls by in large, UK a mixutre of both. If the bunker is plasterboard over block or some such, it could have very effective bass traps/absorbers built in making it difficult to drive? Just a guess.

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#8 Re: Owston 2019 - Listening Impressions

Post by The Stratmangler »

I'll wager that the rooms at the Munich Show didn't have boxed in girders supporting whatever's above the ceiling like the bunker has.
They probably didn't have an enormous space adjoining with a stairwell and seating area either.
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#9 Re: Owston 2019 - Listening Impressions

Post by Nick »

Ao what do you suggest Chris? We should throw our hands up and accept a poor sound, or try and improve things?
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#10 Re: Owston 2019 - Listening Impressions

Post by The Stratmangler »

Hanging some heavy curtains across the stairway aperture might have the desired effect.
It'd be a starting point.
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#11 Re: Owston 2019 - Listening Impressions

Post by Nick »

Yep, Thats my point, I am sure there is stuff that can be done to improve matters.
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#12 Re: Owston 2019 - Listening Impressions

Post by The Stratmangler »

Coving where the walls meet the ceiling might help.
Extend that to where the boxed in girders meet the ceiling too.

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#13 Re: Owston 2019 - Listening Impressions

Post by Nick »

Maybe. I am tempted to create and move this to a room treatment thread.

Chris may have a view, and I can ask GIK, but I can't see coving being that visible to the wavelengths in question. Of course without measurement, we don't really know what problem we are trying to solve.
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#14 Re: Room Treatment (Split from Owston thread)

Post by ed »

Nick wrote: Sat Jun 08, 2019 10:09 am I t might be useful to measure that room as I don't think we have ever made speakers sound as good as they should in it.
just rambling

imo you cant do anything much without measuring first...otherwise it's expensive guesswork.

But what is it you actually want to achieve....i.e make the room have an average natural response or make the room dead(no influence whatsoever). Then what's average and what's natural......you need somebody present to monitor sanity levels

if, after measuring, there are detectable gains or nulls at certain frequencies in certain locations many audio gurus suggest:

alphasorb - to absorb high frequncies
bass traps - to reduce low frequncy build-up at certain known frequencies
RPG skyline or auralex - to reduce or stop flutter echo that occurs in larger rooms with parallel reflective walls. These things break up the parallelism and reduce blurring/smearing caused by delayed echo.

this is where I've been in the past, but thinking may have changed more recently, and it mostly holds for studio situations so I don't know really how this spills over into passive listening.

just sayin

edit: Re Stephen's mention of glass, the absorption coefficient of glass is considerably better than plaster on brick, so Munich stands to have sounded pretty good in comparison ...glass 0.1 - 0.3 .... plaster on brick 0.01 - 0.04 as average examples.
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#15 Re: Room Treatment (Split from Owston thread)

Post by chris661 »

I think it's worth trying to measure what's going on. An obvious one is floor bounce, which usually leads to a big dip in the lower midrange or upper bass - that'll take the "punch" out of anything. Given the frequencies that occurs at (ie, difficult to put enough absorption down), the only real solution is to have the drivers responsible for that range spread out a bit on the vertical axis.

IIRC, there's a rough rule of thumb that says an object will show effects when it's larger than 1/10th of a wavelength. Coving won't do anything at 50Hz, but would start to do something at 500Hz. Whether the effect is beneficial or not is a different matter.


It's difficult to define "drive the room", but if something is sounding gutless, my bet is there's a major reflection (floor bounce being an example, the ceiling could be another, side-to-side not being such a problem as there are multiple sources along that axis) that's adding a large cancellation.

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