Anyone listen to Zu Audio's Definition Mk3?

>>From what I surmise from some of his writings, room acoustics, power conditioning, and wire are a waste of time.<<

This is not nearly a correct summation of what I think about these topics.

Power condition is difficult to prescribe. That is, the precise results in any given home and system are not strictly predictable. I use voltage correction, isolation, and on my sources, balanced power. All these have been helpful to me. I generally recommend large balanced power isolation transformers as the most cost-effective power "conditioning." But I've also heard installations where no conditioning sounded unmistakably better than any alternative. I can recommend balanced power unconditionally, but I can't predict exactly what method power conditioning will be best for you.

I've never written that cabling is not valuable. I have written that I have not found much correlation between cable price and contribution to sound quality. I've also written that I view cables as having distinct sound signatures -- that they are effectively "fixed parametric equalizers" -- and there are more important aspects to pay attention to if money isn't unlimited. The role of cables is affected by context. I prefer soncially neutral cabling that is also practical to use. That excludes most of the cable on the market.

On acoustics, I've written that room treatments tend to underperform though in some rooms, an acoustic dysfunction may be so egregious that correcting for that is indispensible. A friend has a room that without elementary treatment, it's first-order dysfunction simply builds cumulatively, like a figurative sonic Hadron Collider. Fixing that is worthwhile regardless. But most treated rooms end up overdamped and unnatural. My personal preference is to eschew dedicated listening rooms, keep the hifis out in the open living areas of my home and mitigate with room furnishings and placement. The rooms are to live in first, to optimize for sound second. Here's the thing: No matter the room, I can always hear the signature(s) of the gear through the prevailing acoustics, and that defines the actionable elements to what I'm hearing. But the room as an acoustic environment becomes just that -- environmental -- and easily forgotten. Put another way, no room has ever gotten in the way of me enjoying music, but much gear has proven too deleteriously distracting be enjoyed.

Phil

>>Question for Phil: do you have any addendums to add to your room philosophy in light of recent experience with Keith and panels, etc?<<

Keith has a severe first order acoustic dysfunction in a nearly square space. We couldn't take down his ceiling panels but Defs mitigate floor and ceiling effects much more than the speakers he owned when he had the room treated. So put that aside. But it was easy to remove his reflection-points damping panels. In that space, removing the damping panels had the effect I expected, but worse --- the room goes "runaway" -- a sonic Three Mile Island in the making. It also eats bass below 100Hz or so, like a grizzly romping through a salmon farm. The Def4 sub eq helps there. I've never chosen to live in a space that mandated a virtually square acoustic domain for listening. If I had a first order problem like that, I'd minimally treat it too.

But I don't. I have normal US sheetrock-on-frame aberrations: some rising bass response, a little slap echo, some excitable sheetrock glare when I run Duane Allman or Hound Dog Tayler a little hot. But the tonal integrity of the system and room is solid, and imaging is as good as it gets in a 14' x 21' space -- smaller than Keith's uni-room -- where I can't place the Defs far from the boundaries. Interestingly, aside from the differences in our respective rooms' sub 100Hz bass profiles, an iOS device-measured FFT analysis profiles surprisingly similar signatures.

My 2nd system is in a 12' x 22' space, on the narrow wall, but like the 1st, it is not fully bounded in an open plan house. That room presents different anomalies, none of which are practical nor actionable to treat. And anyway, that is a relatively near-field setup.

So net is, in rectangular rooms, I won't do anything acoustically that can't be mitigated by normal furnishings. If I had the severity of Keith's primary problem, I'd do the least needed to correct the 1st order acoustic dysfunction and live with the rest. Keith's room doesn't sound as bass-deficient nor as soft on the top end as it measures, and mine doesn't sound as bass-emphasized as it measures. What others do is up to them, but again, I don't advocate dedicated listening rooms. And I haven't heard one yet in 40 years of being exposed to them, that sounds natural enough to justify the work or the livability compromises. The best domestic room I ever heard remains that beautiful space in an Arlington house, so whenever I consider a move to a new domicile, I just look for as many attributes of that space as I can get. Anyway, there are guitars that need buying and playing, too.

Phil

Charles, I had the good fortune of buying a house with an unfinished basement and thus my dream of an engineered room from the ground up has been realized. It is not your typical room with panels and bass traps. The actual walls have been mechanically grounded (ala Starsound/Sistrum technologies). The end stage has been realized when my neighbor's Best Buy grade system sounded more engaging than my big rig.

Agear,
Congratulations on your sucessful results. Do you plan to post your system and pictures on this site?I`d love to see that.
Regards,

There is not a single system that doesn't benefit from at minimum treating first reflections and a bass trap or two. And it can be 100% hidden these days and has become a much bigger industry over the past 5 years as folks finally figure it out. So no excuse there either. Audiophiles imo are lazy and want to buy cables, vibration, racks, points, paint, contact solution, green markets, etc and ignore the room too often. Like teflon dialetric is going to make a bigger difference than the room. Please! Are there things about my room I would change? Absolutely--my diffusors on the front wall were costly and not sure how much benefit they really achieve.

Some people are lucky to have golden ratio rooms with higher ceilings- 99% don't. In fact, I honestly don't think you can be a true audiophile without working to achieve basic room acoustics. Put bookshelves in the back of your room to store records as well for one easy one.

While I have a squarish room that Phil noted has some definitive bass issues, any rectangular room not built in a golden ratio has just as many issues. Per my numerous demos, Phil's room in particular suffers from a small sound stage, lack of detail, and separation of instruments due to slap echo and lack of bass trapping that he mentions above. He chooses not to go down that path, but knows he has a compromise in place (that's he's ok with, of course). Some day I will toss a few panels in the truck to take over and play with for a few hours....it will be an interesting experiment.

The difference in sound with and without will be similar in any room. That's because you can't cheat physics.