Room Treaments - Where To Begin...

Wow! these delays with GIK are huge. There was nothing like this when I bought my GIK panels. It was really quick back then, but that was a few years back. It seems like GIK are now victims to their own success, and unable to scale to accommodate a larger business volume.

If we spend as much time jerking with the room as we did looking at new audio gear, we would have already developed a sense of intuition about room acoustics. 

I think most of us who don't have a dedicated listening room may never know how good our systems can sound with everything in its right place. But I also know, having been in a few listening rooms, that sound really doesn't care if you have a dedicated listening room. You can tilt your living room in the right direction with very smart choices in decor.

Rugs, absorbtion and diffusion panels are great but the ceilings are also important. The best rooms I've been in had great ceilings.

Got a room with a flat ceiling? Got all the usual stuff done? Focus on the ceiling.

Haven't started thinking about acoustics? Focus your first efforts on the front wall and the side walls, ceiling and floor that extend 20-30% toward you. This is the most critical area. Softening this area will sharpen the focus. Everything else is also important but start here.

That's just my intuition.

Appreciate all the responses thus far. Thanks!

Room Treaments - Where To Begin...

Beginning is not at placing acoustic panels or analysis of room characteristics. First thing you need to do is to seal all possible acoustic leaks. Imagine that your room is the vessel filled with water, then try to understand where the water could leaked out of the vessel, find that leaking spots and seal it as good as you can…we talking about AC or water pipes walls entering points, cables or electric outlets, windows and doors gaps etc.

OP: I have read countless comments that the best thing you can do to improve the listening experience is to acoustically treat the room. But where does one gain the expertise to do so? There are so many products/options out there. I have no clue where to begin (or if I even need to do it)

Already told you how to gain the expertise: clap and listen. Use your ears. That simple.

What I left out is you don’t even need to do that. By far the best thing you can do is simply fine tune your speaker placement. By fine tune I mean use a tape measure to get them precisely symmetrical and equidistant. Next take everything apart, clean all the contacts, and when reconnecting this time take care to route all the wires keeping them away from all the other wires, and off the floor, and for that matter off of everything. No more tangles of wires right on top of each other.

A big reason so many audiophiles think the room is important is because they haven’t isolated anything and so are transmitting a huge amount of speaker energy straight into the floor, walls and ceiling. If you energize every surface of your room this way then of course your room is gonna be a huge problem. Duh. Effectively isolate your speakers and other components on Nobsound springs and this will eliminate a lot of that. More and more are catching on.

Between the clap test and the tape measure and the springs you will have spent an afternoon and about $100 and achieved results that with GIK would take $1500 and 3 months. Also you would have learned an incredible lot about sound, vs learning how to stick expensive panels on a wall.