At the upcoming Rocky Mountain Audio Fest, there will be four "Innovations" rooms on the Second Floor of the Tower. My company and James Romeyn Music and Audio will be hosting one of those rooms.
The mandate for the Innovations rooms is mainly to be educational and visitor-friendly. This includes encouraging and accommodating music requests, doing our best to fully answer any technical questions (without taking too much time), and generally being educational and not merely promotional.
The area we will be teaching about is, the psychoacoustic implications of reflections in small rooms... the hotel room obviously being a case in point! Briefly, reflections done right are generally beneficial. We won’t be set up to effectively demonstrate reflections done wrong, but in general early reflections tend to degrade clarity, and spectrally incorrect reflections tend to degrade the tonal balance. That leaves spectrally correct, late-onset reflections as being theoretically desirable.
Listeners will be handed a remote control unit that will let them toggle between a "normal" mode (actually the speakers will be more directional than most), and an "enhanced" mode, wherein a secondary array of drivers contributes some spectrally-correct, relatively late-onset reverberant energy. Obviously we hope this to be more educational than a boring lecture on the subject.
The psychoacoustic principles we hope to demonstrate are generally applicable regardless of whose speakers you use, and having experienced them first-hand, you can then tweak your own setup accordingly... or not, as the case may be!
For those of you more interested in candy than in classrooms, we'll be serving up four-inch voice coil woofers with a side order of Beryllium-diaphragm tweeters.
I don’t know what will be happening in the other three Innovations rooms, but make sure you don’t overlook the Second Floor of the Tower this year!
Duke
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