If you have a nice system why do you really need room treatments?

Treatments consist of corner base traps extending up to the ceiling, a couple absorption panels throughout the room, a 20 x 20 thick wool rug and an assortment of furniture.

So I guess treating a room with acoustical panels Will provide a benefit. This is news. So many great enthusiastic people have led me to rethink my position. I thank everyone for helping me overcome my fear of adopting a more liberal view about acoustical treatments.

I'm in a room right now and all the tested curves look fine and I've done it all with out acoustical stuff except for corner bass traps.

Funny thing is, I've had people over and they say how come you don't have any acoustical panels and then they look at me really strange when I say I don't really need them.

That is rather confusing.

I am also confused.

1) the room largely determines how any system at any price will actually sound

2) those with a goal to get the best sound possible will care and others less so

3) some rooms may require little or no tweaks for acoustics and others may be a total disaster. I have measured and tweaked acoustics in 5 different rooms in my house and they cover the range from little or no tweaking needed to well short of a total disaster but some serious issues to address to make things sound their best.

4) trained ears may suffice in some cases but to get it right for sure it helps to measure what you have first before taking action

5) Everything in the room affects acoustics to some degree. Room modes in the bass region are the toughest issues to address completely but some combo of traps and DSP can be applied to make things better. Other specialized room acoustic solutions like panels, etc. might be used to address any issues that cannot be solved in a particular room otherwise. Start with primary reflection points on walls, floor and ceiling based on speaker and primary listening location, Dispersion pattern measurements for a particular speaker model can help determine how to best apply, if needed.

6) DSP including room correction features in your system are your best friend when it comes to tweaking any system as needed to correct for issues associated with room acoustics!!!!

7) These days vendors integrate DSP into hardware (example:miniDSP, Anthem, NAD, Arcam, others) and software (example: Roon).

8) Once that is done (addressing room acoustics) you might then take the next step and tweak the sound from there to personal preference. Or just forget about room acoustics and the complexities of addressing those properly and just DSP to personal preference away as needed, for example using graphic or parametric EQ capabilities in DSP like that available in Roon. Either way (done right) should land you in a better place regardless of how good or expensive your gear is otherwise.

@mapman

Outstanding comment above.

I have an AV processor and I use that for DSP that seemed helpful for all the various speakers.

For two channel listening I have roon and it’s tougher to use the AV processor to facilitate and measure the room and I guess I could insert mini DSP to do two channel listening measurements when I use my preamp but it’s very cumbersome.

Overall the original curve I got when I use the AV processor didn’t seem bad at all and then to use the DSP function within roon the concern is it would degrade the quality of sound. And then every single recording and music you listen to has different characteristics and there’s no way you’re gonna do a perfect DSP set up.

Just wish the user interface to test the room and provide curves for all those various tools was a hell of a lot easier to use

@emergingsoul

Thank you for the kind words.

TO measure rooms, take a look at Room EQ Wizard freeware you can run on a laptop. It’s fairly techy but worth the time to get a handle on. THere is lots of info on how to use it on teh internet. I’ve used it to measure then auto-create convolution filter files that can then be used in Roon DSP for room correction. There is a cookbook for how to do that out there on teh internet. ITs covered in Roon forums if you do a search there.