Does a listening room help or hinder?

Personally, my listening room is crammed with stuff. I've got a computer and desk in there, listening chair, leather couch, CD racks galore, and a separate, small HT system in one corner. On paper, the room should sound like crap, but everyone who's heard the system and the room has commented on how great it sounds. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that all the furniture and stuff in the room is providing a lot of diffusion--which, in audio terms, is usually a good thing. My advice is to bring the computer back in to the room--but obviously turn it off for serious listening. I seriously doubt it will hurt anything acoustically. In fact, it might very well help. Some of the worst listening rooms I've ever heard have also been the barest.

Sounds to me like you need some new music to explore. Hard to seriously listen to music that has become mundane or boring.

Lots of people treat music as a religious experiance(and it often can be). They hear good sound for the first time and are suddenly off to chase the Holy Grail of audiophilia. After years of buying and selling diferent peices of equipment, gradually improving their system in ever smaller increments, trimming the poorly recorded fat from their music collection, they reach a point of either satisfaction or neurosis. Friends stop making music recomendations because they know it couldn't possibly be recorded as well as your coveted ten or twenty "perfect" recordings. The loan audiophile sits alone in his dark basement with only the tubes of his $5,000 preamp to keep him company.

Get your office back into the listening room before it is too late! Get some buddies who listen to "boom-boxes" over to have some beers and talk about the sport of choice(while listening to something that completely rocks on your system). Save the serious listening for the recording engineers and just enjoy the fruits of their labor.

Good luck!

How can you say that you are "listening" to music if you are doing something else, such as working on a computer?

I have a listening room and use it for listening. When in another room (office, kitchen), I use the listening room system to supply "background" music, but then I am not really listening (more like "hearing"), so it isn't really important how good the system sounds.

There is no such thing as "multi-tasking" when it comes to music listening.

Bob P.

I definitely think there are different levels of listening--primarily critical and background. As mentioned above, I have my computer in my listening room, and I can certainly listen to music while playing on the computer, just not critically. In fact, sometimes listening to music this way ("background") is more enjoyable than listening critically, because I'm not worried about all the audiophile minutiae that so often gets in the way of enjoyable listening. When I want to listen critically, the computer and lights go off, and I do the audiophile thing.