What would be reasonable, intelligent, and defensible is to say the room is as worthy an element of a sound system as anything else. No more important than the AC line, the speaker cables, the cartridge, or any other component in the chain. But that for some reason is the last thing certain people will admit.
Your remark point to a TRUTH a very important one: all matters in audio experience, all details, working with an audio system...
BUT, there is a BUT, most if not all ordinary room even those dedicated to audio, if they lack passive adequate treatment and ESPECIALLY active controls , unbeknownst to the owner, ESPECIALLY if his electronic gear is very good and costly, all ordinary room will give only a fraction of the S.Q. the audio system could have given...
I listened to hugely costly gear that sound horrible in what seems a minimally treated room.... And trust me i know that the problem is NOT the piece of gear at all.... It is not normal that my 500 bucks system sound more musical for me and on par with details.... The problem is the room unbeknownst to the owner is not up to the task, and my room is....It is the reason why i am proud of my room, not so of my gear even it is well chosen one and even if i love them....
Past a certain point in quality, which is NOT at all very high in dollars, few thousand perhaps, ALMOST ALL, if not ALL upgrade will never rival or compare with a very effective passive AND active room treatment in S.Q. increase...
You said it yourself visiting Mike Lavigne Room, almost anything will sound good there...
For people owning an AVERAGE good system like mine, the room acoustic control is the royal road to S.Q. without necessarily investing money, thanks to the fact that in a small room active controls, using many tools but especially Helmholtz method, can transform totally all system in a better one.... But i will repeat for the slow learner that nothing will make a bad system a good one, nor transform my average system in the best in the world....
But i prefer my actual system in my room, to a 100,000 dollars one in a bad room....
It takes me 2 years full time to get my room right.... Nobody teach me how.... Sellers of acoustic treatment sells too costly for my purse then i was in the obligation to improvise all passive treatment using my ears and what is at hand.... But the greatest upgrade come one month ago with the Helmholtz method which i developed designing my own mechanical equalizer with 24 discarded pipes and tubes and various types of Straws.... It take me 50 hours to tune it relatively well, fine tuning the speakers response of the tweeter wavefront in one speaker with the bass wavefront in the other speaker making the two ears synchronizing able to better locate the FIRST wavefront in the room...The mechanical equalizer did not work like an electronic equalizer with a tested response frequency for a microphone andfor ONLY a very smal location in millimeters but with a relative large bandwidth of sound for all the room, 2 main wavefront from the left speaker driver and right speaker tweeter, to each one of the ears by direct wave and a reflected different one for each single ears...The timing of the early and late reflections and their reverberation time is the key.... The tubes and pipes created an ACTIVE room, or activate the room so to speak, adding to it more different pressure zones which are designed for some frequencies and modify then the resultant timing and content of the wavefronts for each ears...
This method make me able to balance these 2 acoustic factor, the ASW the source sound width and the listener envelopment factor LEV... these 2 factors are related by some tresholds in the timing wavefronts....This make me able after that to experiment with the Schumann generator grid effect on the LEV factor....Disconnecting completely or partly the S.G. grid decrease the LEV factor...This with my experiment with shungite and quartz on the capacitors reveal to me the physicality of the effect induce by the Schumann generator grid....
Without active controls i will have never been able to test that acoustic aspect of the S.G....
My best to you and to all.....
