Building a dedicated listening room

First, I want to thank you all of guys for chipping in with your own experiences and advice.  This is what I had hoped for when I began this thread.  I also hope that others building a dedicated room will find the information here helpful.  

In discussing (many times) this room with our builder he told me he wanted me to be directly involved in the entire process of building my audio room.  Amoung many aspects of the room we discussed, I told him about the dedicated lines using 10 gauge "cooper" wire and he said no problem, he only uses cooper wire throuhout the homes he builds, just not 10 gauge.  He then suggested using a sub panel for the audio room and maybe a whole house electrical filter.   

Though I have not settled on the type of wall and ceiling construction all of your input has given me food for thought.  If you are wondering the room will be on a concrete slab.  

Finally, for everyone beginning a project like this I cannot encourage you enough to do your research.  Over the last three months I have spent several hours pouring over every aspect of building an audio room and Mike, I read your article...twice.  Your pictures really helped me see what is possible not just for acoustics but ascetics too.  It is a beautiful room and I would love to visit you.

One final note.  My wife has always supported my hobby and she enjoys the music just not as much as I do.  She is not only a supporter but a meaningful contributor too.  You should know she is a quilter/sewer/stitcher and will have her own 500+ square foot room...on the other side of the house.  

Keep this ideas and suggestions coming.  

@bipod72 Good post. I much agree with your point about making a comfortable space. I will also be using my new dedcated listening room as my den/office.

I've had two dedicated listening rooms and I'm presently building the third. The first one I designed from scratch for a new house, and the second is in my current house which is a repurposed bonus room. I'm building a new house now so I have the opportunity to design and build my third dedicated room.

My current listening room is fairly large (35 x 17 x 8.5) but its dimensions are far from optimum. It's upstairs so it has a floating floor. It has wall to wall carpet and no specialized room treatment. The walls and ceilings are standard construction. I have my components on racks spread against the front wall and the speakers sit out in the room 6' from the front wall. One wall is Ikea bookshelves full of albums, books, and tchotchkeys. My CDs are in several dowel racks that tilt each row of CDs up (good diffusion). My desk and computer table are in the back of the room along with other furniture. I have a leather listening chair, a turtle shaped leather ottoman, and a leather couch. There is a coffee table, lamp table, egg chair, and other furniture. I haven't put up system photos on Agon because its so cluttered and messy that I'm embarrased when I look at other member's rooms that look like they came out of an audio magazine ad.

The reason I'm going into so much detail about my current room is that it sounds fantastic. I've had a few other audiophiles listen to my system and they all have been very impressed. The guy who sold me my Thiel CS6 speakers told me that if they had sounded that good in his system he wouldn't have sold them. The overall point I want to make is that this room defies most of the conventional wisdom about listening rooms but it sounds wonderful. In fact, it sounds better than my custom built listening room from my previous house that had all sorts of specialized construction details like stand-off brackets for the drywall and sat on a concrete floor. I had treated the room with absorbtive panels as well.

For my new project I decided to relax and not worry about audiophile listening room "wisdom." The floor is standard, the walls and ceiling are standard, and I'm going to cover the floor with typical carpet.. The one area where I will do some heroic things is the electricity where I will have a dedicated 100 amp service and several 20 amp circuits just for this room. The room is 19 x 29 x 9 so I've got quite a bit of room.

My plan is to decorate the room with stuff that will provide absorbtion and diffusion. I'll keep my CDs and albums in the room and I will put my desk, computer table, sideboard, and other furniture in the back of the room with my stereo equipment and a TV monitor in the front. Basically the room will have a lot of stuff all over the place which will provide natural absorbtion and diffusion and serve to break up standing waves. If I end up with sonic problems I will consider commercial sound treatment as a final step.

In preparing for this project I've read quite a bit of material and watched more YouTube videos than I care to admit. I've seen several audiophiles report the they built a new room using audio construction techniques and their rooms sounded horrible when they were done. Then they had to spend large amounts of money on commercial sound treatment to get things right.

I don't want to oversimplify things but the single best indicator of your listening room is the slap-echo test. Clap your hands sharply (once) and listen for the reflected sound and the decay. Do this in several places in the room. If you do this in a variety of rooms you will get a good feeling for how this defines the room's acoustics. If the echo goes dead immediately then the room is likely too dead. If the echo goes on too long the room is too live and will muddy the music. You cal also listen to how defined the echos are. A well defined machine gun echo will be a problem.

In summary, I have come to the conclusion that how you decorate and furnish your listening room will have a bigger effect than it's design and construction. Basically, fill it with furniture and tchotchkeys until it sounds good. Take the money you save from not using fancy drywall and exotic construction techniques and buy a nice big couch. If you make the place interesting and comfortable good sound wlll likely follow.

I accidentally bought a house with an outstanding audio room. My dealer says it is one of the best two he has ever heard. He has been in the high end business for over 20 years and installs many megabuck systems in custom rooms. It is about as irregular as possible. You can get some ideas from my photos.

Broadly it is a big Z with the audio located at the bottom of the Z. Broadly speaking the Z is about 45’ by 40’. There is a bar, hallway, and more than one nook in just the bottom leg of the Z. A bay window and fireplace offset to the left at the top of the Z. There is hardly a 6 foot wall segment uninterrupted anywhere other than behind the speakers. Even the ceiling is more than one level. The speaker wall and left and right sides are underground… completely dropping the noise floor to mid 20 db. Cement slab under carpeting.

There is no special wall material… or fancy / expensive audio construction. My audio treatments are heavy thickly woven wool wall hangings (oriental hand woven carpets) also, there are bookshelves and record racks I put up without thought to location only convenience.

It is also located downstairs and on the opposite side of the house from the major bedrooms. My partner is disabled and sleeps during the day. I can crank up the volume and she will never hear it.

All this serendipity, made for one in hundreds the perfect audio room..

So, I think if I had thought about building an audio room a couple decades ago, I would have researched the perfect three dimensions. I would not do that now. I would look at the whole house… the whole floor and think of a very irregular open area away from the rest of the house… below ground with halls and irregular walls everywhere to define an open audio area with lots of space and irregular short wall segments to deaden and prevent reinforcement.

@8th-note Your room sounds like a well-lived-in, well-loved audio space which is a big, non-quantifiable, aspect of its musicality. I like a room to look as if people live in it vs. a space that is antiseptically designed for one task that must be enjoyed in a certain aesthetic way.

My current room is the open-plan living room/kitchen area of our current home and it's not what anyone would consider audiophile-worthy. That's ok. Most of the time I'm playing music over the speakers as background music. There is furniture and all sorts of family stuff about. But it sounds better than my last space which was more isolated from the house. My wife likes listening to music as background music and can't wait for me to have my own space for my books and music. Primarily so she doesn't have to look at it. So I'll wire the house with wi-fi speakers for streaming background/wallpaper.  And my space will be where I'll spend some time on dialing things in but, like you, will take a laid-back approach to "treatment" because ultimately I want to spend my time listening and enjoying music vs. spending my gray years tinkering with the room. 

I’ve built multiple dedicated audio rooms in my latest custom houses. The best room was a room inside another room to get the ideal dimensions. The whole house had closed cell spray foam insulation (the attic in the south during the summers never got above 70 degrees), and the room within a room had acoustic insulation in its walls. Had 4-20 amp runs put in the room. The ceiling was 2” thick cedar tongue and groove. Door was behind the listening chair. Still incorporated audio panels and diffusers in the room from ATC and GIK. Speakers were 9’ out from the front wall and the listening chair was about 9’ from the wall behind it, and 9’ from the speakers to the chair.