Best room treatment

@soix wrote:   

"I highly recommend reading “Premium Home Theater” by Earl Geddes that I believe is now only available through download.  By far the most approachable and helpful thing I’ve read on creating a good-sounding room.  I’d go so far as to say delay making any room treatment purchases until you’ve read what Earl has to say.  Best of luck. "   

Outstanding advice.  

Here's the link, the whole book can be download for free. Some of the video system information is outdated but virtually everything else is STILL well ahead of the curve: 

http://www.gedlee.com/Books/HomeTheater.aspx  

Duke 

Again many thanks for all of your excellent advice. I definitely need some more knowledge before taking out my wallet. 

I will also add an encouragement to read and absorb the excellent book by Earl Geddes.  I had already spent a good bit of time and effort attempting to self educate on room acoustics and psychoacoustic principles before finding the Geddes work.  As I recall, the book resulted in several "Aha" moments.  It is good enough that I have reread much of it several times. 

For those of us who are not in the business and have no formal training in room acoustics, we are trying to achieve enough understanding of the relevant principles to successfully reduce those principles to practice in a single application--our own listening room.   Most of us have jobs and families and have limited free time.   It can be hard to justify spending that precious free time self educating on acoustics rather than listening to music.  There is a reason why I remained clueless on room acoustics until I retired and had an abundance of free time.  There is also a reason why people like Jim Smith can make a living out of helping folks set up their rooms optimally.  There is a reason why a lot of serious audiophiles will just turn the decision making process over to GIK or RealTraps.  

The maxim, "knowledge is power" applies here. In my case, I can tell you that the efforts I have put into understanding small room acoustics has made me a better listener.  It has transformed that frustrating "something is not quite right here, and I don't know exactly what it is wrong much less how to rectify it, so I will spend $5000 on a new preamp and hope that fixes it" feeling to "this deviates from a live performance with respect to XYZ, and I should change ABC to rectify that change."   Five years ago I had a room full of really good equipment that sounded like crapola.  Now that same equipment sounds as good or very nearly as good as set ups I've heard that cost as much as 4x the cost of my system. 

5 years ago almarg offered the following comment on my systems page.

Speaking of the back wall, though, meaning the wall behind the listening position, a point which might eventually prove to be significant is that reflections from that wall will tend to produce a dip in frequency response at frequencies (in Hertz) in the vicinity of about 281.5 divided by the number of feet between that wall and the listener's ears. So if that distance is around 3 feet, as appears to be the case, reflections from that wall will cause a suckout, to some degree, in the vicinity of 94 Hz or so.

The 281.5 figure, btw, corresponds to 1/4 of the speed of sound in typical indoor environments, in feet/second. Rear wall reflections at a frequency of about 281.5 divided by the distance to that wall in feet will arrive at the listener's ears exactly out of phase with the direct sound arrival. The resulting suckout can be quite pronounced IME. 

In two paragraphs, Al completely changed the trajectory of my audiophile experience by  applying his knowledge to my particular application.   His guidance wasn't opinion or personal preference, it was science based fact.   Happy listening!

Hello ronboco,

     You’re getting some excellent advice from some very knowledgeable experienced audio guys and I agree with most of it. But I’m concerned that you might be getting a bit overwhelmed in the process, kind of like taking the advanced level courses before you’ve taken the basic level prerequisite classes.
     Looking retrospectively on my 45+ year audio hobby journey, I know that reading and education were equally as important as listening, selectively purchasing component parts, experiencing and experimenting while building progressively better a/v systems over the years step by step. There’s a lot to learn in this hobby and I think we progress only at a pace that our natures are comfortable with. My main concern is that being fed well intentioned audio advice at a fire hose intensity level may not be the most constructive way to assist you.
     I think your own statement, that " I definitely need some more knowledge before taking out my wallet, may be the best approach to take at least for a while. But I realize you’re probably also anxious to get started and make some immediate system improvements while you’re gaining knowledge and developing an overall plan.
     I think this is possible and a good idea. For example, after you read the referenced Geddes material you could then begin your system improvement attempts by applying his proposed solution to what he considers one of the most difficult aspects of attaining good quality home audio, which is getting the bass sounding right in the room, through the utilization of multiple subs.
     I agree with brownsfan that learning and utilizing REW would be very beneficial in general and that the $3K Audio Kinesis Swarm 4-sub complete kit distributed bass array system is a very effective and simple complete package solution for attaining high quality bass throughout your entire room, no matter its quirky dimensions.
     However, I believe you’ll get very similarly good results utilizing the ’sub crawl’ method (google it) and you’ll begin to gain the benefits of multiple subs, even with just 2 properly positioned and configured subs, although the good bass performance will be restricted to a single designated listening seat and not equally good throughout the entire room.
     I use an AK Swarm type 4-sub system in my room, here’s a link to an Absolute Sound review that contains a very accurate description of what to expect. Unfortunately, 2 subs are not capable of providing this level of bass performance.

https://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/audiokinesis-swarm-subwoofer-system/

Best wishes and keep learning,
Tim

Hi Tim. It is quite a lot of info to take in. I’m reading Earl Geddes article right now. Thanks for your advice. I was wondering if a swarm system would eliminate the need for at least some bass trap panels therefore saving some money.