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The last link

Paul's Posts — 23 August 2012

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The last link

As you can imagine, every room and every system and situation are different.  It is nearly impossible to give good all-purpose advice that’s specific to anyone’s stereo system and what we’re trying to do in this series of posts is give you some generalized understanding of how everything works and interacts so you can tweak your system to best advantage.

In the spirit of understanding I’ll share with you today what I do in my main system to give you an idea of this one setup and what results I am getting by taking these steps.

The main PS Listening room is about 22 feet long, 15 feet wide with a 10 foot ceiling – your basic rectangular room with a high ceiling.  In the room I have a pair of Magneplanar 3.6 panels for the main speakers, two Martin Logan Descent subwoofers and an original pair of Magneplanar Tympani 1D bass panels for a bit of midbass fill.  You can see in this picture the source equipment is to the side of the room so we can easily access it and the amplifiers are in the rear behind the Tympani bass panels.  One long pair of XLR balanced interconnects tie the PerfectWave DAC to the power amplifier in the rear and behind the Tympani’s.

The last link

You will also notice the forrest of white tubes that line the walls.  These are DAAD’s (Diffusion Absorption Acoustic Devices) that our friends over at Avalon loudspeakers distribute.  What you don’t see is that between the rear DAAD sets are also 4 RPG diffusors as well.

The DAAD’s are great – but very expensive – and the RPG’s much more affordable and, frankly, nearly as good.  When we go to a show I usually bring only the RPG’s to place behind the loudspeakers.

I spent several weekends rearranging everything using the exact same guide I have presented to you in this series of posts to get this to sound right from both a tonal standpoint as well as imagining properly.

Perhaps the single biggest improvement I made was the careful placement of all these diffusors.  Without this forrest of acoustic reflecting traps, or at least a few of the RPG’s in the room, the sound is not remarkable at all.  Add them into the mix and then there’s magic where the music just floats, the tonal balance is nearly perfect and I can hear any subtle changes in cabling, amplification etc.

This is, after all, both a pleasure den as well as a working lab where we test all manner of changes to our equipment before it goes out for sale – so it is important that small changes in even the tiniest of areas be obvious to anyone listening.  But more to the point of this guide, how does it sound?  I think everyone that’s heard this system finds it to be a real jaw dropper.  The music is effortless and completely divorced from the loudspeakers themselves.  The soundstage goes back beyond the rear and side walls and instruments have a fulness and naturalness of timbre and tonal correctness that always puts a smile on one’s face.  It’s a real treat to hear this system.

To set this up I always remove every piece of room treatment, as I mentioned in the first article in this series.  I then first add the side traps you see in the picture – which is the first reflection points we discussed yesterday.  I next go one by one attending to the rear wall and going through the tedious process I described before: how does it affect the single vocal?  Better or worse?  Get that right and placed well, then check with the more complex orchestral piece – paying particular attention to tonal balance of the instruments and the space around them.  Then start adding more, less, whatever seems to get me closer to the ideal – but absolutely being rigorous and methodical in the process.

I think it is this methodical approach that, at the end of the day, gives any of us the best chance at getting it right.  Take notes – either mentally or physically – and learn what moving this, changing that, adding this and deleting that do to your test pieces and over time you’ll know your system really well.

I hope you’ve found this series of value.  If I can help you in any way let me know.

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About Author

Paul McGowan

Paul McGowan is the CEO and co-founder of PS Audio Inc. a Boulder Colorado design and manufacturing company of high-end audio products and services. McGowan has been designing and building high-end products for nearly 40 years. Hobbies include skiing, music, hiking, artisan bread baking, kick boxing and cooking. He lives in Boulder Colorado with his wife Terri and his 4 sons.

(13) Readers Comments

  1. Soundminded

    August 23, 2012 at 2:55 am

    The last link or the last straw? Sorry to seem negative but….people who have spent a great deal of time, money, and not to be dismissed, effort building what they feel is the best sound system they can, sometimes regardless of cost, sometimes to what to others seems like absurd extremes often claim they can close their eyes while listening to a recording and swear they’re at a live concert. I’m going to pose the question the other way around. When you are at a live concert, can you close your eyes and imagine that you are in your listening room hearing those same sounds or something very similar coming from your sound reproducing system? Always? Sometimes? Or never? If the answer is always, congratulations, you have all the equipment you need. There is no reason to ever change it. You’ve succeeded. After all you are not aiming at a moving target. If the answer is sometimes, then most likely what you need to do is seek out recordings that work to achieve this goal. In a sense, you’ve still arrived at your destination. The flaw when it doesn’t work is in the recording, not the equipment, the setup, or the room. If the answer is never, then the next question should be whether or not there are other people with other equipment who do it better and can achieve that goal? What are they doing that you aren’t? What piece or pieces of equipment, what setup technique have they got that you haven’t? If the answer is still no, then it’s time to ask the ultimate question, is there something wrong with the equipment or instead with the whole idea behind it, the strategy itself? If it’s the strategy, then you have reached the last straw. You have to accept that there is nothing further you can do with this strategy, no amount of swapping equipment, tweaking, changing ICs or loudspeaker drivers, or capacitors, no amount of nudging speakers around the room, no cables, no absorbtive, reflective or diffusive panels that will matter. They may make things different, but you will get no closer to your goal for your efforts. You are engaged in something futile because it cannot succeed. Something to which some people have devoted their entire lives. If you come to that conclusion, congratulations, you’re at the point I was at 38 years ago.

    Others have come to this same conclusion, some a long time before I ever did. They’ve tried lots of different strategies. Some of them are called binaural recording it all its variants, quadraphonic sound and its extrapolations to even more recording/playback channels, ambiophonic sound, 3D sound, ambiosonic sound, wavefield synthesis. There are probably many others I’ve never heard of. It strikes me that most, even all of them use variants of the same basic strategy which is; capture,store, retrieve, reproduce. If it is a live broadcast or feed replace transmit, recieve for store, retrieve.

    The question I then asked was, what is the room at the concert doing to sound and what is the result of it that my sound system doesn’t do and what is my sound system doing instead. If I can figure that out, is there a way to do the same thing without building a room three quarters of a million cubic feet in a one hundred million dollar building by some other means? The strategy resulting from my analysis, record, store, retrieve, and reconstruct. My conclusion, most of the sound I hear live is missing, it never made it on to the recording. What little did is not in a usable form. And even if those flaws weren’t problems enough, the equipment isn’t designed to retrieve, separate, and reproduce it. Does my strategy work? I’ll just say results so far are encouraging and leave it at that. BTW, it’s not easy. On the other hand, by audiophile standards it’s not particularly expensive it terms of money. The real cost is often in the exasperation factor :-)

  2. alan

    August 23, 2012 at 6:59 am

    Question: Is there any room treatment other than what is shown in the picture? For instance, is there any behind the listening seats?

    • August 24, 2012 at 5:53 am

      Yes and no. There’s nothing behind the listening position but there are multiple RPG’s behind the main speakers you can’t see.

  3. foconnor

    August 23, 2012 at 7:57 am

    Paul,
    Thnaks for the many articles and the straightforward way that you introduced the subjects. I have been playing with this studff for years and just kept changing the set-up till it seemed good. but following your articles, I’ve found even better sound and its great.
    deep up the excellent entertaining writings.
    Fin

  4. emfoods

    August 23, 2012 at 9:21 am

    Hi Paul,
    This was a great series! I spent the last 2 evenings rearranging my listening room/theater. It is set-up for 5.1 and 2 channel vinyl. Your suggestions really motivated me to take a look at what I’ve done and why. I started by clearing almost everything out of the room and starting fresh. I’ll spend the next week or two adding in furniture, room treatments and such once I get the final position of everything-what a great way to kill a weekend.
    Thanks,
    Emery

    • August 24, 2012 at 5:55 am

      Let us know how it goes. I’ve always found that by clearing the room and starting fresh you do well.

  5. HankMallard

    August 23, 2012 at 9:44 am

    I would like some more information as to what type of RPG diffusers you used and why you picked those out of the many available types they sell. Loved the series!

  6. dr.goodears

    August 23, 2012 at 10:25 am

    Hey Paul,

    Love the passive coupling concept of the Tympani 1D panels, (i’m assuming these are passive, yes?) lets petition Wendell to offer up an industry accommo on a new pair of 3.7s for ya, significantly enhanced musical transparency when compared to the 3.6.

    happy listening!

    • August 24, 2012 at 5:59 am

      No, they are not passive at all and require a big hefty amplifier to drive them. I have an entire Classic 250 PS amplifier on these bad boys and they are great! Best midbass panel ever made IMHO.

  7. oliver T. Finch

    August 23, 2012 at 10:01 pm

    Over the years I gathered a lot of information about room setup from high end audio magazines both American and British.Based on this information which was in unrelated bits and pieces I finally ended up with a setup which is so good that now I listen for hours without ever feeling that I need to improve anything and I play both audiophile and non-audiophile records the latter mostly because of their greater sense of spontaneity. Now that I think about it I did most of the things you suggested in your posts but all of these were done by ear. This was many years ago. To see them put so succinctly is commendable. You would have made a good teacher.Thanks and congratulations for a very informative series of posts.Regards.

    • August 24, 2012 at 6:00 am

      Thanks Oliver I appreciate it. Nice when your system is so pleasing you can simply relax and enjoy!

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