Anyone listen to Zu Audio's Definition Mk3?

>>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.

>>There is not a single system that doesn't benefit from at minimum treating first reflections and a bass trap or two.<<

A system will benefit, but the room may not cooperate if its primary purpose is living in it. I'm completely supportive of the idea that music can be a first priority but audio might take a back seat to functional or aesthetic priorities of a primary living space. Put another way, I'm not replacing an original oil painting or a limited serigraph with a damping panel at a first reflection point, regardless of the sonic benefits. And bass traps present their own problems. I have yet to see one that's invisible, which is not the same as "hidden."

>>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.<<

I can always hear these allegedly smaller influences through the room, regardless of the room compromises. The acoustic context and the electronic delivery chain have distinctly different influences and effects, and one can be improved without improving the other, to very good result, compared with doing nothing. There's a limit to everything. Does a $10,000 rack make sense? Not often and not for me, but somewhere there's an audiophile who thinks so and it's not because they're lazy. On the other hand, changing my turntable mounting made transformative improvements that no amount of room treatment can duplicate. These other electro-mechanical investments help in ways the room cannot.

>>In fact, I honestly don't think you can be a true audiophile without working to achieve basic room acoustics.<<

If by this you mean there is such a thing as an audiophile absent interest in music -- lover of sound for the sake of sound alone -- sure. Then I'm not an audiophile and neither are most people here. A musicophile who wants to have convincing sound through audiophile means can draw his or her own lines. By this definition, one can't be an audiophile without also committing to a dedicated listening room because anytime hifi is placed in open living spaces where living functions make audio considerations secondary, "basic room acoustics" will not be optimized. Putting audio absolutely first is the primary disease rendering hifi irrelevant and arcane to the larger population.

>>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.<<

I don't agree in this sense: My sound stage is as big as is appropriate for the room. Particularly since Def4s have been added, the soundstage is, when the music warrants, the full width of the acoustic space, and the full hieght, too. It shouldn't be bigger. It's not small compared to soundstaging in a smaller room. But it's not as large as a 25'x25' space either. In such a space, I hear some sound images as bigger than life, and I don't want that either. I hear no greater separation of instruments in similar treated room systems like yours, but then I have lots of experience listening through my room, so nothing to adjust to. I have yet to hear any detail on Keith's system that I can't hear on my own *though the presentation of detail is differrent* for many reasons, ranging from the space itself and placements, to sources and intermediate electronics. I've already said I don't think detail is under-represented in modern hifi -- it is mostly over-detailed, especially in digital. My system mitigates this in meaningful ways, and it's not the room doing it, but the system is more highly resolved in texture, finesse and tone.

>>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.<<

Let's see.

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

The actual sonic results are reduced in rectangular rooms. Physics of acoustics notwithstanding, just as measured results of gear don't anticipate how important a characteristic will be to perception of it, I've never heard a rectangular room go runaway, but I have often heard this in square or nearly-square proportion rooms. Our rooms don't sound as deviated from "flat" response as they are, and rectangular rooms are more forgiving of the physics violations, as we actually hear them. Guess what -- every performance you ever heard live was compromised acoutstically, too. And so was every recording. Ever been in an acoustically perfect recording studio? Ever been in one that is highly imperfect? Robert Johnson recorded in a hotel room and his musical influence continues to be cumulative. He sounds vivid and ultra-present on those deeply flawed recordings. Sun Records was far from an acoustically perfect studio. The realism captured in a legion of acoustically flawed studios before multi-tracking and out-of-control multi-mic'ing became the norm is stunning to hear against contemporary context.

Phil