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Room treatment-I was afraid of this

There I was with a dedicated room-not ideal being nearly square and a less than 8' ceiling-and barely adequate music, not awful but the system had sounded better. I tried moving things about some with differing results but nothing satisfying. Part of the problem was moving from a 30x35 foot room with an 18' ceiling. I was used to the speakers being well out into the room, far apart and sitting pretty far away. I used the odd integer matrix method promoted by Vandersteen but hadn't considered either placing them closer to the wall or moving near field. Nick at GIK recommended both, as well as some furniture rearranging that made a very pleasant difference. That was all the encouragement I needed to order bass traps, 1st and 2nd reflection panels and front and rear wall treatments. Installed them by about 4pm Monday and listened until 2 am, back at it last night from 3pm-1am. It's just as so many have said, this is a serious component upgrade. It is matched in scale only when I went from Vandersteen 2CE's to Chapman T-77SE's. Not a single aspect of the listening experience that isn't enhanced. So now the problem; I suppose a lot of the glowing stuff folks make of cables, power cords, fuses, and on and on also make significant differences. How long can it be before I'm off and running on that stuff?
wideload
nonoise's avatar
nonoise
11,088 posts
 
It's sounds like you're pretty well set after all the work you've done so I'd not second guess yourself with tweaks just yet. 

What you need to do is get some long term listening in to familiarize yourself with your set up and then experiment with cabling. Power cords can add more presence and authority than speaker cables or interconnects (in my experience) so I'd start there first: improve the foundation and it'll be easier to proceed from there.

Also, make sure your furniture is optimal and be ready to discard it, even if it's one of your favorites. I say this because I recently got rid of my overstuffed sofa and went with a set of Barcelona chairs and the improvement was more than subtle. I thought that the highs would improve some but it was the mids to bass that got better. Go figure.

All the best,
Nonoise
gdnrbob
4,485 posts
 
+1 for nonoise.
Going from such a large room to a smaller room is sure to give you problems you never imagined.
IMHO, I think you are now listening to the speakers directly, rather than having sound reflected (-which I love, Dr. Bose was on to something). 
Your new room may force you reevaluate how you listen to your system.
wideload's avatar
wideload OP
151 posts
 
Thanks for the responses. Yes, going down to 15x19 was an awakening. I have since removed all furniture except my listening chair. I did experiment with a half dozen IC's and SC's a couple years ago, but that was before the move. Running Grover Huffman. Just never pulled trigger on power cords. Mojo Audio Mac Mini and Exogal DAC have external power supplies so I didn't think cords mattered. Could stand to do something about the mismatched generic cords on the Hypex blocs though. Will take nonoise's advice and live with things awhile. Crazy happy with GIK treatment. Really an ear opener. 
erik_squires
16,592 posts
 
I kind of don't care about cables at all. :)  However, one thing is that great acoustic treatments will often outlast all your other gear. You can listen to a much wider range of speakers for instance, so things you might previously not have tried now make more sense. 2 way speakers with 6-7" woofers that sounded too light may sound unbelieavable and larger rull-range speakers won't sound as bloated as before.

Best of luck!

ERik
randy-11
1,913 posts
 
+1 on all the above

I have the opposite problem - a very large room with lots of glass picture windows and speakers near one wall, with an open space near the other speaker... so it could be worse, eh?

(Note the "eh?" --  I am practicing my Canadian...)
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