need opinions on argent roomlens

I agree with tswhitsel at every point. I don't exactly have Argent Room Lenses, instead I have homemade copies--easy if you can drill 2 3/8" round holes and make a base for PVC tubes. They look positively nice, according to my wife, who manages to regard them as a form of modern sculpture. I put them in my listening room long before I added all the acoustic treatment I have now, and they made a nonsubtle difference, as Tswhitsel said. I wish I knew HOW they work.

I have been very pleased with mine and have a 16x24 room with an open archway at one end.

thanks for all of the responses! very helpful indeed.

The room lenses are damped Helmholtz resonators. The set up a resonating column of air, absorbing some of the sound energy in the low/mid-bass region, and diffusing the rest of it. If you homebrew your own, don't forget to stuff some acoustic fiberglass material down the tube, but keep it near the top. Without it, the lens is tuned to a very narrow frequency range; with the fiberglas, the resonance is damped and the tube becomes effective over a broader range of frequencies. Poke around at http://230nsc1.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/waves/opecol.html#c1 to get some clues as to how the Room Lens works.