Do NOT Blow Your Entire Budget on Two Channel Audio

Welcome to EVERY TOPIC ON EVERY AUDIO FORUM!!!

What did you do @kota1 ?  Did you upset someone annointed?  We covered Toole and room treatments in the Amir bashing thread. Toole has not done much research on room acoustics in real rooms and critical listening. He did some basic preference work, limited dataset, and similar limited dataset in an anechoic chamber. Nothing for multichannel either. Drawing any complex conclusions (like Amir did) is flawed. No one is forcing anyone to do anything. @kota1 is excited. At least he is excited about something real.

Getting so wrapped up in it to the point where one says "Toole has a room like mine", when it’s the other way ’round, and posting shots of recording studios that one has copied doesn’t make them one of the big boys of audio but just someone who now has invested so heavily into it he needs to have validation in his choices by forcing them on others as there’s comfort in conformity and herd mentality.

Last year I and teenage daughters moved into a newly built house with the good fortune that my wife waited to move in ten months later. I immediately put together a Sony/Anthem/Emotiva/Klipsch/Hsu 11.1 Atmos theater where family members primarily watch movies, Korean/Japanese Dramas and YouTube. The next nine months I carefully put together a two channel room. I have enjoyed watching concerts in the theater room and do enjoy watching dance/music performances, but prefer listening to most music in my two channel room. I must admit that I would never be able to afford an 11.1 Atmos system which was the equal of my two channel system. It never occurred to me to listen to music without video in the theater room, but then again I consider my theater room components to be good, but not nearly as satisfying without the video. I should admit that Magic Dragons performance of Arcane’s opening song “Enemy” is incredibly in 11.1 Atmos.

To summarize, I can’t afford theater room component which perform at the same level as my two channel room.

@britamerican

Really happy you joined the conversation, nice to see you in this thread, welcome. As for Dr. Toole he didn’t set that up all by himself, Kevin Voeckes tuned and calibrated it and I am sure Harman provided all the resources he needed for the setup. In Dolby’s guidlines the MLP is setup toward the back of the room. That wasn’t the best setup for my room. I was lucky as all get out to get advice from Anthony Grimani, Wilfried Van Baelen (auro 3d founder, owner of galaxy studios), and Marti Humphries (owner of immersive audio studio The Dubstage). Wilfried was adamant to have the MLP equidistant between front and back walls. He also recommended ceiling treatment and bass traps on the ceiling. The aurlex geofusors you see on my ceiling are back filled with polyfill and double as bass traps. When Marti saw my pics before doing any treatment he said all of the wood paneling and dry wall were terrible for acoustics, gave me some tips, and also introduced me to Wilfried. Anthony Grimani couldn’t have been nicer and more supportive in responses to my e-mails. It was AFTER I did all this I saw Dr. Tooles and Abbey Road studios layouts were basically the same style I ended up with. We all use an equidistant MLP, use monitors mounted high as height channels, use a center height, wide channels and VOG channels. Dr Toole uses 4 subs, Abbey Road has subs on the ceiling. I compromised and used 3 subs and the one on the back wall is mounted high on the wall instead of the ceiling. The people in this professional community really seem to care about the end user and were happy to help.

@vonhelmholtz

That’s a great post, thanks and you budgeted according to your preferences, all good. If you are going to get another atmos concert bluray kraftewerk 3d: the catalogue is the best one I have tried so far. I’ll get the imagine dragons, thanks for the tip. The Firestick/Firecube is the only streamer I know that does both atmos music and hirez/ultra-hd AND the firestick is cheaper than an ATV4K or a shield. The voice search feature works pretty good too.