Room with glass windows as a walls.
My daughter moved from first floor townhouse apartment to 42nd floor skyscraper apartment and fifty percent of her apartment walls are actually glass windows from floor to ceiling now.
I helped her with setting up her system at old place and the sound was pretty decent however new apartment acoustic wise is total disaster.
Of course I did put her system together at new place but sound is terrible. She actually understands all my explanations about acoustic issues at new place, but she doesn’t take it seriously. My daughter actually listens to a lot of music, sometimes for hours however I wouldn’t call her audiophile, probably just a serious music lover and I understand that she will have listening fatigue pretty soon at her new place.
Acoustic treatment probably would be limited or refused due to esthetic and design incompatibility. Has anyone experienced setting up a system in such conditions, any advice?
Many years ago the acoustics company I worked for was the 4th company to try to put in a sound system in the newly built Crystal Cathedral in So. California. Clearly it was an impossible job and our Lead engineer said they would have to put in satellite speakers behind every seat. Well that was to expensive but ultimately concessions had to be made to the look of the interior to get the RT60 to something close to intelligible. Sometimes you just can’t win?
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In extremely reflective envrons there seems to be only two solutions, both mentioned here. 1) dampen the hell out of it (heavy curtains like theater curtains- very expensive) , 2) distributed low level nearfield playback that doesnt energize the room enough to hit the reflective surfaces (Donavabdears post). Also complicated and expensive. Narrow dispersion can help but it has its own problems of being beamy with a very small sweetspot that is hard to find in both planes (vertical and horizontal). But if you can find it, that can at least provide some measure of enjoyment. For most, rooms like this are usually a long process of experimentation and money that usually ends as "cannot be fixed". The Crystal Cathedral story is a great example: still sucks after hundreds of thousands invested. Glass heavy rooms are the one case where being an audiophile and fussing over sound quality doesnt work out well. @winoguy17 is right! |
