In-Room responce measurement with Legacy Focus SE speakers

I am sure most have seen this video series, but just in case I thought I would post.

I found this very useful to hear 'before and after' from his space....yet played thru my fathers system and echoy room--so it's VERY obvious the echo/reverb.

 

Want to make a few points here:

1. One major reason we have trouble hearing a room is the ear/brain mechanism is actively filtering, which takes actual energy (i.e. the consumption of carbohydrates) and is tiring. Try recording your speakers and then listening that with headphones, or a friend’s voice in the room. You’ll be amazed at how much of the room reaches your ears but which your brain filters out in order to process the meaning of the words which were spoken. Do t his a few times and you can develop the skill to turn the filtering on and off. Takes a little practice.

2. IMHO, the Audioophle consensus is wrong about first reflection points. They matter but only if you already have a controlled acoustical environment. That is, you need a certain critical mass of absorbers before the 1st reflection points can make a perceptible difference. I’m not saying first reflection points never matter but that you shouldn’t get tunnel vision about them. Given a choice between an overall well treated room with controlled reflection time but no panels at 1st reflections and a room with only 1st reflection points treated the former will absolutely win. For this reason, do both, and don’t be disappointed if you place 4 panels and don’t hear a big difference.

3. Don’t forget the AM Acoustics Room mode simulator which in your case could be a real life saver. It will help you place your speakers and listening location more ideally, which you should do before considering 1st reflection points.

@erik_squires
1) "Try recording your speakers and then listening that with headphones, or a friend’s voice in the room."  THAT IS A BRILLIANT IDEA!!!!  He has a very good headphone amplifier and headphones, so this would be a perfect exercise.  I can play a couple of his favorite tracks and use my Zoom H4N stereo audio recorder: it is mostly very good at accurately recording full tonal range and area, not a specified ' directed lobed area of recording: should be very similar to the human head and sphere of hearing. 

2)  That is exactly why I had started by placing those absorbing panels DIRECTLY next to the speakers--to help him hear the 'opposite' extremity, before the sound even reached at least the side walls and front wall.  Even then, from the sitting position if you snapped your fingers you can hear it vibrate and almost echo.  I look at speakers like a semi-directed rock-being-dropped-in a-pond with square banks.  The sound radiates in ALL directions, at varying intensity and  phase: some frequencies cancelled, some reinforced, some refract and reflect, some gradually fade away.  It makes complete logical sense for most to grip onto "first reflection points".  It is insanely complex really how we try to reproduce a 3 dimensional musical performance with two speakers, who project dominantly from ONE dimension---so that first reflection is a very simple spot to lock onto "fixing" issues this audio-problem creates. 

He doesn't have nearly enough to really properly make effective changes, but I think I can present enough of a positive shift that he will like what he hears more, and will follow thru with getting a nice series of absorbers/diffusers to help him really get the most the system is capable of creating.  He's insanely lucky that he has NO true oddities or issues like bass booms that can be very difficult to remedy.  He just needs to break up and absorb things mostly. 

Happy Easter! (and thanks for continued help and idea!)

~alan

  He's insanely lucky that he has NO true oddities or issues like bass booms that can be very difficult to remedy.

Don't be so sure, yet.  You can't hear bass problems because you can't hear bass.  Once the mid-treble issues are dealt with these may become apparent and need to be dealt with separately.

@amtprod The problem with rooms that size is you start to get into echo problems. That echo gives away the size of the room. You want to hear the acoustics in the recording, not those of your room. You wind up in the wrong venue. The solutions are to break it up with a wall or barrier, a lot of sound absorption and speakers with tightly controlled radiation such as horns, dipoles and line sources. In a room that size I would want to see at least four 15" subwoofers. My room, is 16 feet wide and I use eight 12" subwoofers. Getting out below 30 Hz at volume takes a lot of driver. Speaker specs are very misleading. We do not listen to our systems 1 meter from the speakers and they never mention the room. A speaker is going to sound different depending on the room. Another thing a room that large might benefit from is a line source. A full frequency line source needs to be 32 feet tall or stretch from floor to ceiling. Line source speakers project sound better by an order of magnitude which is why you see them at big concerts. Sound Labs would make you an electrostatic speaker 40 X 118" With four 15" subwoofers you could have one h-ll of a party.