REGISTER NEW USERLOST PASSWORD? WELCOME, Logout

Room treatment

Paul's Posts — 21 August 2012

By

Room treatment

This will be the first of a few posts on room treatment, so big is this subject I will be writing about.

When we first started this series of posts on the setup of your system I made the point that the room is a critical component in the chain we call the stereo system.  Without it you haven’t anything useful and with it you have a bunch of headaches.  It’s a double edged sword the likes of which can be very frustrating.  But treating the room as a friend and working with its issues, in the same way you might treat an older piece of kit you value, is the right approach and we’ll be best served working with the room and not against it.

Working against the room might have us using absorptive panels throughout to try and deaden the reflections giving the loudspeaker pair clear dominance over the audio in the room.  That would be a bad idea because we want the reflections and we need them – we just need them where and when they make the best sound quality in any given room.

One of the most basic of concepts for room treatment is something I shamefully left out of the first part of this series, so sure I was that everyone knew this little tidbit.  Whenever possible we want to point the speaker pair into the long part of the room (if it’s a rectangle) rather and the short part.  I shouldn’t make such assumptions so to those of you that followed the setup guide to a tee and now realize you have to redo do it going into the long end the room please accept my apologies.  Others know this rule and yet haven’t any choice given the WAF or just plain practical limitations and to those folk I know you did your best to get the best under trying circumstances.

Everything we’ve done so far has been in an effort to use the room to our advantage and place the loudspeaker pair where it interacts in the most favorable way with the area we have to work with.  Now it’s time to perform a little magic to take advantage of everything we’ve managed to dial in so far.

The first subject I’d like to approach is your seating position – it is now dependent more on the room than anything else – and also offer a gentle reminder that the seat itself is really important.  I hope during this setup procedure you’re using a single seat so it’s easy to move around.  If you’re using a couch or small love seat, it’ll work but it’s harder to move around.

The process I use is simple to start with – as my reference tracks are playing I move myself back and forth, up and down ever so slightly to see where the best seating position is to maximize everything I’ve been doing.  You may find that even a few inches makes all the difference in the world – this is proper and good.  Should you find that getting your seating a little higher or lower is beneficial you can tilt the speakers back or down if you can’t adjust the seat height (we discussed part of the yesterday).

So get your seating position right where you want it and then mark the position with the same blue painter’s tape as we did the loudspeaker pair.

Tomorrow we’ll find the point of first reflection.

email Room treatment Forward to a friend and help us engage more readers

Get new and fresh stories like this each morning by joining the folks reading Paul's Posts. Click here

Related Articles

Serving it up Rolling it off What’s all the fuss about? Young turks

Share

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.

(2) Readers Comments

  1. Soundminded

    August 21, 2012 at 4:52 am

    High back chairs will block reflections from behind you from reaching you. In concert halls seating is raked, each successive row behind you is higher than the one in front of it. Whether occupied or empty but upholstered lateral reflections from behind you will be absorbed., There’s more to it than just improving lines of sight. Concert halls with unraked seating usually exhibit poor bass response in the direct field starting just a few rows back. This is because those seated in front of you absorb bass. This can be mitigated if there are strong bass reflections in the reverberant field.

    In a home hi fi system with poor treble dispersion, the first high frequency reflections you hear may well come from behind you. They’ll be blocked by a high back chair. Not so with most actual acoustic instruments.They propagate their high frequencies fairly uniformly throughout the room. As a result you’ll hear early high frequency reflections from the side walls and even from the wall behind the musician, the front wall. Sound absorbing material applied to the front wall and sound reflective material to the rear wall, the dead end live end concept has the effect of absorbing mid frequencies from the front of the room to balance the lack of high frequencies directed at them and to enhace high frequency reflections arriving from behind you. This flattens overall system FR. The lack of early high frequency reflections from the direction of the walls in front of you to balance reflections at mid frequencies is one of three geometric distortions to the field created by conventional contemporary speakers I’ve identified. I call it “spectral reflection distortion.” Far better IMO to engineer the speaker to accomodate the room than the other way around. The price you pay for wide high frequency dispersion is poor imaging. Modern speakers place far more importance on imagaing than they do on accurate reproduction of tonality. Since most people (customers) have little direct familiarity with what real musical instruments sound like, this probably doesn’t matter much to them. They hardly notice it at all. For me….it’s the first thing I notice. For me, if the recordings of the instruments don’t sound like real instruments, there’s little that can be done to redeem the equipment. Tonality is one of the four basic elements of music. Imaging is not.

  2. johnalgodones

    August 21, 2012 at 11:17 am

    Don’t overlook the advice to move the chair at the listening position up or down. Two inches up in my room and everything suddenly snaps into focus. Easiest is to find chairs with seats about 1″ higher or lower than the usual chair and try the higher or lower location for a day or two, although in my case the 2″ difrference was immediately obvious.

Leave a Reply