Your advice to speakers designers

inna,

I wasn’t being mean. Notice I was making a joke, and then asking you to explain further how you listen.

I agree imaging isn’t everything (it’s down my list of priorities, though I like it).

But obviously it’s usual for audiophiles - e.g. those who inhabit a forum like this - to sit and listen critically to music. It’s almost the feature that defines people in this hobby.  A careful placement of speakers relative to the room and listening position is also how one realizes the potential of most loudspeakers, timbrally as well.  So when someone says he doesn’t often sit down and listen that suggests you listen to them as background music and that seems rather unusual given the context of a forum like this.

I in no way begrudge your listening habits. After all, I spend plenty of time listening to just the speakers on my iphone and actually enjoy it. But I wouldn’t spend lots of money on a 2 channel system if I weren’t regularly paying real attention to it, which usually involves sitting in the room with the speakers.

I've done it all before.  I built a ton of bass traps and combined with some digital eq I had the bass response +-1 decibel in my concrete basement.  It had been +-15 at least.  I wouldn't go through that again.  Getting the bass to have a perfect frequency response caused more problems than it solved in my opinion.  I had to make big cuts at the worst resonance frequencies and this killed transients and just didn't sound right IMO.  

The ideal amount of absorption is subjective and depends on what you're listening to.  If studio recordings that are very damped you'd want less absorption than if you're listening to live recordings where you want to hear the live atmosphere as it was rather than the sound of your room over top of it.  Unless that's not what you want, it's about personal preference to a great degree.

Michael Green once said that if your system and room were done right you would rarely need to touch volume control. This sounds good to me.
Michael tunes studios and concert halls, at least he used to. 
Another question is do we want to somehow correct the not so good recording or have it as it is? I am much closer to the latter but not fully. 

I'm curious about the room treatments that are all hidden, built in to the structure of the room in a way that no one ever suspects to be room treatment...

can you post more info?

maybe put some pics up in the system area?

Hi randy,

I had an extensive "build thread" on AVS for my home theater/2 channel room reno.  It's still there but unfortunately all my pictures were hosted on a site that moved from free to paid hosting, and since I didn't pay eventually all the pictures disappeared.  There's only one picture (for some reason) at the very beginning of a "room description" thread you can see here:

http://www.avsforum.com/forum/29-what-s-your-system-configuration/1259917-rich-s-variable-image-size...

The sofa is massive and soaks up a lot, but much of the treatment is hidden in the ceiling, which simply looks like a build-down structure to house lighting, add architectural detail etc.  But it's actually using a tensed brown felt fabric treatment stretched across the ceiling of the build-down, which allows a whole lot of absorption to be hidden at strategic areas.  Overhead the speaker area it's like a giant bass trap.
There's also absorption built invisibly into the wall corner area on either side of the screen.   Further, there are various types of curtains, of various thickness, that can be pulled to anywhere on the walls to cut down reflectivity as desired.  (For instance, there is a cover for the reflective fire place area).   So I can go from a more lively or less lively sounding room, depending on what suits the speaker.  The fact that the room is open to the hallway on one side also seems to relieve bass node problems.

You can see just part of the ceiling build down at the top of the photo.

No one ever recognizes it as room treatment because it just looks like architectural or decor detail (and the rest is hidden).   But, to my amazement, one of the most common comments I get, even from non-audio people is "This room sounds good" even when we are just talking in the room.

It was a very tough set of criteria to balance in that room and we did quite well all things considered.

Cheers!