I am professionally trained critical listener.
Without a proper room to listen in, total waste of training IMO.
If you want to get "schooled by Toole", check out his room. Why would you want to go there when you have SO much to learn yourself? I can see why you keep coming back here though, because you NEED it :). The Kota doesn’t even charge you a name tag fee like ASR does, sweet!
I consulted with the founder of Auro 3D, Wilfred Van Balen on my room treatments, and the Kota and the Toole both groove on Auro 3D (that's how REAL critical listeners roll Amir). If Dr Toole saw your room he would take your certificate in listening away and send you back to school:
"I choose to add moderate up-mixing to most of my stereo music, finding the adjustable Auro-3D implementation in the SDP-75 to be quite pleasant."
The following is a panoramic photo of the room (geometric distortion included) showing seating in the conversational mode. The equipment racks are on the right, under the projector opening - in what was a fireplace space in the original house.
The room was configured in 2000, as a 7.1 system. The front wall was deliberately constructed as a low-mid frequency sound scattering surface using display niches and other depth variations (including spaces behind the fabric covered doors) to alleviate the boundary effect for that wall. Two of the subwoofers are hidden in those cavities.
This became a huge advantage when I recently decided to wall mount the inverted Revel Salon2s to reduce their visual dominance - the huge loudspeakers retreat into the background visually, but remain firmly in place acoustically. The other loudspeakers in the room are clearly visible, which would be a deal breaker in many households. In this one, I am fortunate to have a wife who has long tolerated my hobby/profession, admitting that the audible rewards are enough to offset a certain amount of visual loudspeaker clutter. This system may have exceeded even those generous limits :-)
An in-ceiling loudspeaker is used as the Voice of God. Others could have replaced some or all of the elevation speakers. But, knowing that the direct sound has a dominant effect on timbre/sound quality I decided not to compromise, and used high quality bookshelf loudspeakers in custom mounts, aiming them at the prime listening location as shown in the following floor plan.
