How important is it for you to attain a holographic image?

Things are never what they seem. Let’s take SONEX for example, the common grey nicely articulated acoustic foam panels oft found covering the walls of recording studios and frequently used by audiophiles. Newsflash! The problem with SONEX is that even though it appears to be “acoustically transparent” it hurts the sound. A panel cannot be “acoustically transparent” and still be able to absorb or otherwise change the acoustic waves striking it. In the case of SONEX even a panel or two diminishes sound quality, making the sound “phasey” and unnatural sounding.

After spending many thousands of dollars on equipment over the years, I found it hard to believe that room treatment would improve the audio in my listening room significantly.

When people who had the most expensive rigs began to seriously tout "room treatment", I began to take notice; not because they had the most expensive rigs, but because they were the most serious "audiophiles". I know some people take the title "audiophile" as snobbish; I take it as descriptive.

If you haven't learned by now that logic is useless in HEA, just keep hanging around. "How can tacking some stuff on the wall give improvement over spending thousands on equipment?" That's not "logical".

Here's a link that lets you know how complex this subject really is;


    http://pages.jh.edu/~virtlab/ray/acoustic.htm


Although I started out as being skeptical in regard to the degree of improvement that could be achieved through room treatment, now that I'm enjoying that improvement, I'm a leading proponent of room treatment.


Back to the specifics of holography; I would define it as a highly refined sound-stage. While we can get a good sound-stage with "mid-fi" we will not get "holography"; that requires HEA, but even here, the first stage of development is the "sound-stage".

If you have holography, "all" of your records will sound better.

By the way, to clarify, I’m not suggesting that room treatment is not very important. But in order to actually get the best results, care must be taken to optimize whatever room treatments one decides to employ. Whether it’s acoustic panels, or tiny bowls or Helmholtz resonators or those Shakti Hallographs, or Mpingo discs, or whatever, it’s best to apply these things slowly over time, with the help of test CDs like the XLO Test CD to make sure speaker placement is changed to account for better room acoustics as one goes forward.

It’s also very helpful to use a test tone and SPL meter to establish where in the room standing waves, reflection points, echos, etc. exist. Guessing by trial and error, especially when the number of devices in room grows high, can have rather bad results sound wise. You will be lulled into a false sense of security. And your fate will be sealed. 😝

I’d rather devote all that time and effort listening for the musical message rather than the sonic message.

It's impossible for the "musician's message" to be revealed until all is made neutral and clarified; that encompasses all the improvements required to clearly reveal the musicians message; however, to do this requires "work".

rvpiano, I interpret your post as stating; "I would rather listen to what I got than work to make it better."