Dedicated listening room design

One man's overdamped...

Personally, I've been in several highly-damped rooms and don't like them. For me they suck the life out of the listening experience, although I agree you can focus on the individual sounds since you don't have to be bothered with all those pesky ambient cues.

Anyway, after reading the Geddes book it was most helpful to learn that some reflections can be good (taste-dependent of course) and can enhance the listening experience if, like me, you like to hear those things. That's why I'm going with bare walls and was planning on diffusers on the side walls and absorptive stuff behind the equipment -- not sure what yet.

Problem - I really want dimmers and recessed lighting. I'm running dedicated lines and my builder is recommending LED lights, so I'm hoping that will somewhat mitigate the effects of a dimmer if I can find a good one. No? Do LED lights come in 120V, and are those the ones to get? Too many options sometimes.

I'm concerned about getting the junction between the ceiling and walls right since my builder isn't well-versed in these things and it could really screw up the works (I'm also concerned about his workers short-circuiting the hell out of my resilient channels as well).

This is exciting, but it's also more than a little frightening since a lot of these decisions can't be easily (or cheaply) reversed. Ugh.

* your wall-to-wall carpet will absorb much high end energy so you will need to pay attention to how you treat your room's surfaces so as not to create a dead sounding room with low reverb time for middle and high frequencies. Try using reflection (i.e. bare wall) and diffusion for middle and upper frequencies and absorption for bass frequencies.

Hi Kevin, I liked all your suggestions but might slightly disagree with the above.

The best room I ever heard was a room that I "didn't" hear. ANY, and I mean ANY reflected sound is a distortion to the original signal.

Go into the best movie theaters built (I have a lot in my area) and they are sonically DEAD. I have a huge MANN here in Westwood and if you arrive early you will sit in sonically dead silence, sans the conversations that go on around you which are now MUCH MORE clear because you don't have echo, reverb and reflection.

It is a nasty rumor/myth that acoustically dead rooms don't sound good when the Music or Movie is playing. Unless you need reflective surfaces for Dipole Speakers to function better, it is my opinion that the sound will be MUCH more accurate, clear and certainly less phase/time distorted when reflections are reduced or eliminated.

Just my opinion of course.

Yes, I have spend thousands of hours listening in near anechoic conditions, which is the question I often get. While a SUPER DEAD room sounds strange when no music is playing, (as it should) when the music begins, the purity is unbeleivable.

This is also true of LIGHT. If you have a front projection system, the LESS LIGHT and Reflected Light you allow in the room the more accurate, clear and precise the picture will look.

Hope that makes sense and maybe begins to dispel some of the incorrectly held beleifs about "using" reflected sound to pump up a specific frequency range. Distortion is never a good idea, and reflected sound IS distorted sound to the original signal or sound from the speaker.

For my tastes I don't want to listen to either reproduced or live music in an acoustically dead room. Theaters are different because you've got multiple surround speakers creating reflections and ambiance you'd normally hear naturally in a lightly or untreated room. To each his own as usual.

Streetdaddy - if you have GIK D1s laying around then sure go ahead and place them at your side wall 1st reflection points to see if it makes it 'less dead' sounding. If you don't have them, then try a sheet of plywood angled so that lateral reflections are sent upwards to the ceiling or sent behind you to preserve the mid/high freq energy.

Summitav - I would agree with you that any indirect reflection is a corruption (e.g. temporal or spectral) of the original direct signal, so as such, may be labeled a distortion. If your mindset and taste is for purity of sound reproduction then you ought to consider listening through headphones. Even in a well damped room such as you enjoy you cannot absorb the low bass frequencies unless it's a huge room where the first modal frequency is below auditory threshold levels. So even an absorbent domestic room will only be absorbent across a limited set of frequencies skewing the reflections you wish to absorb fully. Reflections at glancing angles won't be absorbed so yet again indirect reflections persist.

I like to think in terms of limiting the bad sonic effects of a room while leveraging the positive sonic effects. Get the room working for you not against you, so to speak. Hence the suggestion that not all reflections are bad and those that are should be absorbed or diffused and those that are good should be left alone.

Like I mentioned previously, sonics are as personal as your taste in music. There is no one right way.

For my tastes I don't want to listen to either reproduced or live music in an acoustically dead room.

Hi Soix, There is NO ARGUMENT with taste and or preference. I prefer to use the term "acoustically neutral" rather than DEAD since what I am referring to is hearing the original sonic information without the distortion of reflections. I should also make the distinction that this DOES NOT apply to LIVE VENUE performances where natural reflections become part of the actual performance, and not distortions.

Theaters are different because you've got multiple surround speakers creating reflections and ambiance you'd normally hear naturally in a lightly or untreated room. To each his own as usual.

Again there is NO disputing personal preferences, but in two channel reproduction overlaying "your" rooms echos and decay times on top of the original venue's same will not produce accuracy. That said, again it is often not the goal of the user to be accurate. In fact most often is is produce a "prefered" sonic.

As far as HT (which is what i thought you were looking for) my main thrust was to know that Acoustic Isolation, (of the room) and Acoustic Treatment for accurate sound, are two distinct and different goals.

In my case, I am far more forgiving of Acoustical Accuracy in a HT since virtually ALL of the sound heard in films is manufactured in post production sound studios. Foley, voice dubbing, musical scores, and sound effects are all less critical to me than attempting to recreate a LIVE recoreded musical event in my space, without allowing my space to intrude upon it with its own sound stamp.

Good luck with your project.