I can prove your room is bad

Some people have a James Brown room its SUPER BAD!!

@erik_squires The room is essential gear.

In my world my girlfriend is the ultimate Essential Gear.

Yes the room is horrible.  Absolutely, system can be improved.  But I and girlfriend enjoy it still.  As liberal as she is there are many things stereo wise I will not get away with.  Moving furniture around is one of them.  Hell will be paid if I move the speakers out into the room.  Temporarily, okay.  Been there.  Done and tried that.  Permanent?  Even with admitted "sounds better", NO.

@wsrrsw , perhaps Acoustic Art Panels may be spouse acceptable.  Just make sure it's art that you can live with - mother-in-law pics may drive you out of the room.

@kingsleuy   Hell will be paid if I move the speakers out into the room.

What is there about women and speakers being too far out into the room? I think there must be universal something in their heads that just snaps and makes them a little crazy, at even the thought...LOL...Jim

@three_easy_payments 
While I'm a huge proponent of applying smart room treatments I don't believe the room should fail to influence the sound at all. That's what's implied by suggesting the best sound you can get from your room is benchmarked at extreme nearfield listening. Yes, get bass adsorption, yes get good diffusion, and eliminate wretched slap echo --- but it's OK to hear some influence by the room! We don't want to be listening in an anechoic chamber. It's pleasing for a little liveliness to enter the sonic picture...and yes, you can certainly overtreat a room.

Thanks, I couldn't have said it any better myself, so I just copied and pasted.

I went through it my self. I treated my room, went too far and had to back off a bit, until things finally sounded right, at least something close to a live performance - minus the ear shattering volume. Now, to me, it sounds good, whether, standing, setting or on or off axis. A little closer to or a little further back - still sounds very good.

Listening to music in an anechoic chamber, it is completely dead and lifeless and sounds nothing like what you hear in a music hall, theater, lounge or chapel.

I understand where Erik is coming from - at least it's a place to start. Each room and system is different and sometimes takes a bit of work to get things right.

@erik_squires Roy Allison and others would have argued: What is it with these lame ass speaker designers who don't design their speakers to be up against a wall where they belong?? 

WOW! I hope my wife doesn't read that. It took almost two years for her to except that 4' out is where they belong....Jim :-(

Listening to music in an anechoic chamber, it is completely dead and lifeless and sounds nothing like what you hear in a music hall, theater, lounge or chapel.

when did you try it?

Some one marked my comments about Roy Allison as offensive.

Show yourself, scoundrel.  :D :D :D

@kenjit
About 22 years ago at a sound studio in LA. How about you?

Is a great tool for mixing, editing or picking out nuances in the music; not so much if you just want to enjoy a musical performance. 

Jim

About 22 years ago at a sound studio in LA. How about you?

Whats the name of it? How do you know it was the room? more likely the speakers were not tuned to your ears!

I have umteen acoustical panels and bass traps, but until I bought a DBX Rackdrive 360, I could never get the bass balanced the way it should be. Sounds great now. BTW I have two JL Fathom 113’s
Having said that, I have said many times-you need to think of your room as a separate component. 

@kinjit
If listening to music in an anechoic chamber is your thing, have at it.

No wonder you hate all speakers....Jim 

Gang, of course my post was a thought experiment.  It was meant to invoke some cheap (as in free) experimentation we could all try, and some of us could learn from.

Of course there's no one answer.  EQ, room tuning and speaker dispersion all matter and affect what we hear. :)

Hope those of you who have tried this found out something new.

Best,
E

I have umteen acoustical panels and bass traps, but until I bought a DBX Rackdrive 360, I could never get the bass balanced the way it should be.

Absolutely common.  Room tuning + EQ can be miraculous. 

If you can't have both, do what you can.

@handymann ....+1, but here a Behringer 8024....since the late '90s'. *G*  Steep learning curve, but the $ then (and certainly now) made the improbable possible. *S*

Always helped make 'miserable' into tolerable...;)

"Bad Room!  BAD room!  Go to your.....corners...😒....oh, forget it..."

The fact that you can diminish the influence of the room by close listening does not mean your room is bad. It means your room is influencing your sound. And the further away you sit the more the room comes into play. And as you can't have a room without acoustics (an echoic chambers don't count) it is worth paying attention to the acoustics of the room. Creativity and DIY can be your wallets friend here by the way.

Here’s an interesting perspective from acoustician Matt Poes, who does room design and installs acoustic treatments for home audio and professional studios and venues:

"A speaker that has controlled dispersion does basically the same thing you’d expect an acoustic panel to do, but it does a better job.”

Interesting coming from an expert in the field whose commercial interest is in acoustic panel sales, but not in  speaker sales.  [Disclaimer: I have a commercial interest in speaker sales.] 

Duke

@erik_squires ,.....That and driver integrations, or perhaps more accurately the lack there of.

"A speaker that has controlled dispersion does basically the same thing you’d expect an acoustic panel to do, but it does a better job.”

Absolutely true.  The more controlled, the less treatment.  This is why ESL's can rock this test. 

should have included dipoles in general

This method does not demonstrate a need for you to improve the room. You pass.

FWIW, I've used the Classic Audio T-3s in a variety of rooms and I can safely say that in all of them- and without treatment of any kind- the speaker has *always* sounded better at the listening chair than from 2 feet or the like.

The YT link I posted hints at a possible reason why- the speaker's total room energy is such that it will do well regardless of the room. I'm just pointing out that this aspect really needs attention- if as Dr. Toole is saying is true, then a lot of speakers need work in this area, as in many systems I've heard the speaker does sound better close up than further away where the total room energy is more of an influence. Dr. Toole points out that the on axis response might be great, but the room energy being off will cause the system to be less than it could (IOW, cause it to suck).

In my experience and experiments, active acoustical controls are very impactful....Most people think about passive materials, absorbing or reflecting sound waves....

But active way are very powerful for modifying  the acoustic dimension: Helmholtz bottles, Schumann generators, resonators of different size and materials from bucket to tiny resonators.... I use them and vouch for that....