Room Acoustics

Sogood is right..do the bass first (www.realtraps.com) and look at treating all the first order reflection points which are left, right, ceiling, floor. The purpose of the first order reflection points (using either absorption or diffusion depending on your room) is to prevent the delayed echo from reaching your ear. This will clean up the imaging in a huge way. Unfortunately the rives cd test sweap has big gaps and is useful for basic idea but you really need to use something like EFT to sweep a frequency in small increments.

Most "mild" room treatments utilizing thin layers of foam and / or "stuffed" cloth materials, etc... are actually very non-linear in their absorption of frequencies. I commented on this many, many years ago in the Agon archives and posted links to actual absorption curves for commonly used devices. I did this after someone inquired about purchasing some of these devices and told them that they would actually be creating more of a problem. In plain English, most of those types of devices are a big mess.

If you want to treat a room and end up with results that are actually better / more linear than what you started with, rather than just shifting problem areas to different frequency regions, you have to treat the room as a whole. Once again, i recommend that folks pick up and read some books by F. Alton Everest BEFORE spending money on products that you can do a better job of buildng yourself and impliment them in a manner that is more suitable to obtaining optimum results. Not all rooms are the same, nor do they require the same type and quantity of treatments. If they did, they could design speakers that worked within those constraints and did so perfectly. Sean
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Sean, have you played with room correction electronics (e.g. the TacT system)? If so, how would you rate their performance over standard room treatment approaches?

Finally - to everyone - why is there such a bias against such systems?

Thanks,

No bias here. Room treatments that get over-all freq. response with-in even 6-8db is very good in most rooms. These room correction devices can only help even more if used correctly.

Between speaker placement, seating placement, room treatments, and some mild room correction you should be able to smooth things out to a great degree.

Another nice feature of some of the correction devices is the fact that you also get an active digital X-over with many settings.

Dave

Dave,

First, cool system! Love it. Second, that's what I see: room treatment is - at best - shotgun accuracy; contrast that to what these RCS systems can do (rifle accuracy) on the linearity of the response! On paper, amazing.

I'd love to compare a spectacular system (e.g. Mike L's or Albert Porter's) before room treatments with RCS and after room treatment (or construction, in Mike's case) without the RCS.