Our last house had an odd modern design which we loved. Part of the charm was the living room with its 25 foot ceilings and open space into other levels; rooms with half-walls and odd angles everywhere. To my joy it sounded very good! And my wife didn’t object when I cut through the wall to wall carpet and drilled through the floor to run my large diameter Transparent Reference cables through the basement! Here’s a shot from above which shows some RPG diffusers (Skylines) and several Room Lens Helmholtz resonators. I am sure the 250 pound marble coffee table placement didn’t help, but I had no cure for that. Once when my wife was out of town I put wheels on the couch between the speakers and wheeled it away. No real difference in sound, though there was a small bone of contention raised by that handiwork.

Terri did have a master plan, though, and it was to move us away from the snow of Minneapolis and into a warmer no-snow zone. After two years of due diligence – research and finalist city visits – we picked a lot in Austin and proceeded to have a home designed. Terri would get a swimming pool. Bob would get a listening room. (No, not a home theater – the TV was elsewhere.) From Minneapolis, if you drive south far enough on I-35 you hit Austin, Texas. It was about 60 degrees warmer.

At the time, Rives audio design services were touted online and elsewhere. I called Richard Rives, and after a short while, agreed to their tier 2 service – they’d design the room but not personally oversee its construction. I feared paying for top tier travel expenses involving FRONT of the airplane seating at high prices.

After consulting with the architect/builder for the home, we chose a rough room size and in no time Rives delivered a set of impressive blueprints for everything from electrical to carpentry, etc.

There was some back and forth: the $4000 line conditioner suggested was dropped. I remember it was an industrial model weighing in at 400 pounds! Also I decided I wanted some windows and natural light. Then, Richard assumed the rear wall would be shelves, bookcases, etc., and that wasn’t what I had in mind. I added doors to the outside. It IS a give and take process, for certain. As you’ll learn, the finished project was a blend of ideas. Power is supplied by dedicated circuits from a 100 amp box just outside the room.

The house was being built while we lived 1200 miles away. Careful instructions to the builder (and Rives blueprints) were given, yet visiting the site only every few months gave me little true perspective. Also, since the listening room would be special, it was to be completed last, due to the amount of custom work which would be necessary. Enter the builder’s brother, Max, who is the trim guy.

I kept Rives informed as best I could, and we actually moved in way before the listening room was finished, though the walls were up. In retrospect, I wish I had specified better soundproofing – not that I need it now, but it would have been so easy when the room was just studs. There’s a composite material which is thin, comes in rolls, and claims -30db attenuation. That’d be worthy! Eventually there will be homes built on adjacent lots and the construction noise will leak in. Thankfully, they don’t use hammers much, but air guns shooting nails.

I think the finished room looks quite good. Max says he’d never want to do THAT again. He put many many hours into this room, much of it doing things he never did before, like stretching fabric.

I was surprised that there seemed to be no problem with the non-parallel walls and rising ceiling height.

We put in enough A/C runs to cool the equipment closet as if it was running a 1500 watt electric heater. Later I sold my ARC VT-100MKII, my PS AUDIO P600 and P300. I went with Nuforce amps, then switched to a Classe CA-2200. Looking back, though, I’d advise overdoing the HVAC, because I realize now the air returns are outside the room so the room has to vent through the equipment closet as the windows are fixed and I seldom open the doors to the outside. That’s actually a nit to pick. I also wish I had the room on its own zone.  Someday I may retrofit it that way.  I hear no noise through the ducts even though we did no mitigation.  Note – I measured it – there IS noise… at about -40db.

The whole house has a 10Hz wave throughout.  After 5 years here, I found it!  It’s the always-hot hot water pump, circulating hot water fulltime throughout the house.  It’s in the garage in a closet, but vibrates the sheet rock just enough.

The ceiling has a large area inset into it into which are channels of 1 inch thick 12 inch square boards set into channels full of fiberglass.  One channel tilts at about 45 degrees one way, the adjacent one 45 degrees the other way.  I shot some pictures and sent them to Rives – the word came back (as Max groaned) to put twice the number of boards up there!

 I had the builder run pipe through the slab, to bring power and speaker cables to where I assumed the speakers would be – power, in case I went to monoblocks at the speakers, and a non-obtrusive way to get the speaker cables into the room if I didn’t.

My gear was set into the wall and the back of it was placed in a narrow closet with bi-fold doors.  The rack  just fit by a millimeter.  My idea was to get the rig away from vibrations, even though I use Aurios under the amp and source, a heavily modified  SONY SCD-1 player.  I’ve experimented with myrtle wood blocks and BDR cones but can’t hear any change for the better.

Later I decided to cover the equipment with a good heavy ¾” slab of leftover wood from a wrong sized kitchen refrigerator panel, and put in a clear and heavy Plexiglas ‘trapdoor’ over the preamp and CD player.  The plexi rests on foam weather stripping.  While aware that this whole surface could resonate more than without, to cause its own problems, it doesn’t seem to do so, perhaps due to the damping or the weight of the material.

There was to be a liberal use of fabric – covering the ceiling, the big absorber/diffusers, and the bass traps. Stretching that fabric was quite the chore, and getting it up without puckers was hard.  I held my breath many times watching Max struggle.  Rives suggested and we used vinyl pool liner as the membrane of the bass traps.

I ordered RPG BAD panels for the rear wall.  These would match the RPG flat panels at the points of first reflection.

The wood floor floats on plastic on the concrete slab; some is covered by a 12 x 15 foot rug on the thickest pad I could find.  Originally I had one chair in the sweet spot, but that’s just too lonely, so we went to three chairs for expanded guest listening (and also readjusted the speaker tilt for the different seating height on these chairs.

Just for fun I put bowed Plexiglas over the windows to kill more flat surface.

My Wilson Watt-Puppy System 7 was set up by the local Wilson dealer, Casey McKee. Owner of Austin’s Ne Plus Ultra audio. Subsequent to that, I discovered that moving the left speaker by about ¼ inch gave me much better imaging.

 SOUND

My first listen was disappointing. “Uh-oh,” I thought. I’ll bet many ‘philes have had the same reaction to some change – your change takes everything a step in the wrong direction. The system sounded correct to Casey, but to me it wasn’t as open or clear as it had been in Minnesota. I realized I had some work ahead of me. After extensive modding, tweaking, and equipment replacement the dynamics, imaging, and clarity have greatly improved. I believe, in my case, that the new room allowed me to expose the weaknesses inherent in my system synergy.

I now have new ICs and Speaker wire (Audience AU24). My preamp has been modded by GNSC to their reference level. My SCD-1 also had the level 5 Mod followed by Jim Ellis’s BOL mod. My ARC VT-100MKII was replaced by NuForce 9s, upgraded to SE, then V2 status.

Casey, as a Rives associate-dealer, came back to measure the room with a special microphone, computer, and software specially put together for this task. It’s a very quick procedure once the mic is in place – a swept tone, some noise… done! Then another mic position, repeat, maybe twice (I was out of the room.) The report came back from Rives… “At the listening position there is a bump at 27 and 104 Hz, this is F1 and F3 of the width and the length is close. . There is a bump in the psychoacoustical graph just above 200 hz. While this is F5 of the width mode and could cause this at this frequency we should also make sure there is nothing actually resonating at that frequency. It’s unlikely there is as I could not see any resonance in the 3D graphs so I suspect everything is okay but would like to be sure. “ He suggested I move the speakers forward a few more inches and farther from the walls, but I haven’t, because I like what I hear.

I took it to be “close” with some predictable problems at certain bass frequencies. He also said he thought the room was a bit more “live” than optimal, “The RT-60 times in the upper midband are just above 400 ms. Normally I would like to see those just below 400 ms.” which is why I put up 3 BADs stacked in front of the doors, also adding drapes, but the liveness never bothered me. The drapes we found looked good and I had those 3 BADS left over so why not use them? I’m sure it’s sub 400ms now.

Remember Q sound? When I had one of those discs there was one track which, when everything was setup just right, seemed to make a telephone ring in my bedroom, rooms away! I theorized that when you get the holographic sound to work right, then you also have the stereo set up right. Although it’s only a theory, now, on certain ‘normal stereo’ discs, if they are produced that way, I hear sound in about a 270 degree arc stretching around behind me on the sides! Several times the illusion was so real, I thought maybe something had fallen off a shelf or the dog was up to no good, only to discover the sense of reality is that palpable.

We got a nice bonus, too! I said to the builder, why don’t we put a deck on top of the listening room? And today we have a 400+ square foot “star deck” onto which we do to watch the heavens. There’s always a nice breeze and it’s very private!

Terri doesn’t choose to join me very often but I DO use the pool! Such a deal!

If you go this route, my advice is to insure great communication between you, your architect and the builder. Finger-pointing after the fact is too late! Consider extra soundproofing. Put in more outlets than you anticipate using. Don’t forget to discuss A/C and heating issues. Beware pipes within the listening room walls, an unanticipated noise source (and later, for us, a leak!) Finally, if your room is more integrated into the house routine than mine, realize that open doors or windows change the volume of air which can change resonant frequencies.

I do voicework as my job. I record on a microphone in the listening room to take advantage of its hush. The recording computer is at the other end of the house.

 I hopped off the upgrade path after becoming satisfied. I did swap the Transparent cabling for Audience Au 24. I also have one of their Teflon power conditioners. Porter and PS Audio outlets.

The Sony SCD-1 has been upgraded again and again… and again. I sent my ARC LS5 MK III preamp to Great Northern Sound for their Reference upgrade. I tweaked with Walker extreme sst (nano-silver). I did a shoot out for various power cables and settled on a boutique brand which, sadly, I can’t remember. As part of Rives’ deal, he sent a rep to measure the room, who turned out to be the owner of local Ne Plus Ultra – a high end Wilson dealer who also positioned the speakers for me (Watt/Puppy 7s.)

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