Noise floors

My room is insulated by 6” to 17” of rock wool. 
It’s semi anechoic.

If you have too much ambient noise from sources external to your audio system, and if that bothers you, then you have to fix your room. It is that simple, and you don’t need a huge budget to do it.

There’s a perceptual aspect to this. Having lived in NYC for 45 years, I’ve been trained by my environment to simply tune out a lot of stuff. There are fascinating studies that show how selective our brains are at deciding not only what to hear and what not to hear, but how our brains substitute sounds that aren’t really there, because our brain somehow expects them to be there (this phenomena is mostly related to language, but it’s a short distance to see how visual stimuli can trigger a phantom sound in the brain, and so on).

But I digress.

While in lower Manhattan in NYC, I had a lively room: tin ceiling, brick walls, very large glass windows, hardwood floors. And a fire station around the corner with false alarms daily, and a noisy open air club/bar/restaurant directly across the street.

The wife and I moved to a small city in the Hudson Valley 4 years ago. We restored/renovated a 3.5 story brick townhouse so that it very nearly attains passive house performance standards.

My home studio/office/and audio room is in the attic. My architect is a friend and classmate from our Cooper Union years. He has a masters from Harvard where he also studied acoustic engineering.

To get the energy performance we aspired to, we used rockwool to insulate the walls (6”) and ceiling (17.5”), and restored historic windows with very tight interior storm windows that together equal the performance of triple pane. There is also 8” of rock wool between the joists underneath the floor boards.

My architect said “I’ve known you for 40+ years. You’ve had this hobby since you were 14. Yet you’ve never heard your system sound the way it is meant to sound.” He told me to cover the walls and ceiling with fire resistant burlap instead of sheet rock. He said that if I did this, I would get recording studio acoustic performance from the room for the amount of money we were already spending anyway for thermal performance. We would get a semi-anechoic room. And my audio system’s capabilities would finally be fully revealed.

Sure enough, when I have guests over for the first time, the first thing that they notice is not my 3,000 book library, nor my 6,000 LP library, but the quality of the sound in the room: “I don’t hear any echo! I don’t hear any sound from outside!”

And my perception of the stereo (that’s what we called it in the 60s/70s/80s) system’s performance improved by a whopping 50% mas o menos.

The adage is true: your room is 50% of your system, maybe more.

Fix your room.

As for the ambient sounds coming from your stereo:

I once had to report to an executive creative director who must have felt that his job description was to go into a panic-driven tirade at any misstep. He would come yellin and screamin at me at the slightest thing. I’d wait for a minute or two for him to blow it out of his system and then I would say “The time you spent acting hysterical is time not spent addressing whatever problem that you are concerned about”.

Similarly, noise floors being elevated by poor cable routing, failure to isolate mass-conducted vibration etc you all know the score here, is energy going into distortion instead of into the accurate reproduction of the source signal. Identify the issues and correct them.

Best - ML


theaudioatticvinylsundays.com

Thanks unrecievedogma, you get it. Have you measured your typical ambient noise floor? This article mentions typical recording studio ambient noise levels are mid 20db and explains the importance of ambient noise floors. https://mojodigitalmusic.com/-13.0.8.13.3-t1--9.53.44--61.79--XVONuIZx=Z9IcFWdHahOo7-/blog/our-blog-...

SNS, thank you for that link. Very interesting, perhaps a bit more detail than I need but very cool to read.

I was being a little coy in my comment above.
In my view, the room isn’t half of the audio system, it’s a third. The other third is our brain itself, and what it brings to the listening experience.

Listen to Poppy Crum’s (chief scientist at Dolby Lans) presentation here.
https://youtu.be/BYTlN6wjcvQ

more later. 
Best - ML

theaudioatticvinylsundays.com

A lot there, having been a sociology major in school, I've been long aware of bias, misperception, etc.  And so I agree our brains should be considered as a component of our audio systems, taken together with listening room easily should get as much or more attention as the equipment itself.

Unfortunately, brains and rooms can't be rotated in and out of our systems as the equipment is. Many listening rooms require compromises for all sorts of reasons, and minds are generally not easily changed. The quest for obtaining that perfect mix of equipment is what occupies the mind, the room and training of mind not so much.

The goal of an audio system imo, is to both maximize resolution and minimize the need to ignore the bad things, a point where analytical listening melds into musical enjoyment, one moves past the point of analyzing the sound long term. The ambient noise level of my listening room during daytime is by far the weakest link in my system at this point Anything above a constant 30db or so is bothersome for me, at mid 20's I'm content. Still, I'd like to hear my system at something less than mid 20's, wonder how much more low level info I may be missing.
One more thing to add, at late night listening I'm generally 80-85db peak listening, I can always turn up volume to hear more low level info, but 80-85db is my comfort zone for a lot of music.