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Hotel Room Confessions - Best Sound at a Show?

I’m curious to know if line arrays and/or tuneable subs make speakers able to sound great in terrible conditions. Or can horns be the ideal hotel room rondevouz? A lot of people come up with a list of best sound, despite clearly terrible sounding rooms. They try to hear past what is assumed to be room problems.


I want to ask, if you have ever heard really amazing sound in a hotel room. Like, nothing needed to be made better, you’d be happy listening there forever. If so, what were the speakers you heard?

I've heard RELATIVELY stellar performances but I've never heard a hotel room sound even as good as my current, pitiful setup.


Have you? Did a line array, ESL or horn show how it could utterly tame the room and take you to heaven in a seedy hotel room with ugly carpets?
erik_squires
teo_audio
2,197 posts
 
We’ve won ’best room at the (given) show’ many a time.

But then again, the other half of Teo Audio is a specialist in room taming (Taras K) and has done the acoustics for about 60 major film and series/etc productions.

Given the tools that Taras may bring with him.... he can generally step blind into a space and generally tame it to the point that it is at studio quality. To do that with a hotel room. Not a big deal. Go ahead, record in the given corrected space. No problemo. We're still talking abut the hotel room, BTW.

Film work is a magnitude harder, in many cases.
roberttcan
248 posts
 
I think it is a huge sign of respect to your potential customers when suppliers do that, so kudos to making the effort. 
bdp24's avatar
bdp24
9,788 posts
 
Randy Cooley DOES get good sound at shows, as did Brooks Berdan (who won "Best Sound At The Show" at the first or second Stereophile Show in the 90's). The Sanders Model 10 ESL's sounded great at the last show I attended, Irvine 2014 I believe it was. They were placed diagonally in the room, with a single line of listening chairs running diagonally.
tomic601's avatar
tomic601
12,911 posts
 
Randy is a zen master and gets great sound adjacent to a yoga studio at his store in Santa Monica. I am a happy customer of his, and a select few other dealers w similar hearing, setup skills, and the attention to detail required to get that last 1% out of the system in the room. Glad to hear a few of us chase and try to better the sound he achieves. I attend shows, have helped demo gear at CES when it was at The Drake and do a bit of setup optimization around the USA, yes Eric 11 bands of bass EQ matter big time in a hotel room or better...,
bdp24's avatar
bdp24
9,788 posts
 

@tomic601, I too am a customer of Randy’s (I bought an ARC LS-1 from him, which I still have. It has a mode switch!). His shop is a half-block off Pacific Coast Highway, overlooking the beautiful Pacific Ocean.

I accompanied Brooks Berdan to the Vegas CES in the 90’s-early 2000’s (my gawd did that man snore ;-), getting a glimpse into the High End business. Like all businesses, I suppose; some cool guys, some not so cool. Bill Johnson was an old-world gentleman, Richard Vandersteen and George Cardas hardcore audiophiles, Harvey Rosenberg, Max Townshend, and Tim deParacivini eccentrically brilliant.

I witnessed Brooks being squeezed by the sales manager of a certain loudspeaker company, forcing him to choose between selling that company’s models, or the similarly-priced (and imo superior) models of a competitor. I also witnessed Brooks’ wealthy customers buying "bragging rights" electronics instead of the more modestly-priced Music Reference products (which Brooks considered better designed, built, and sounding). Money talks!

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