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the Listening Room

Many of you may know us, we design listening rooms. While we offer fixed prices for different levels of consultation, no two listening rooms are the same and some vary wildly. I am interested in hearing what you all want to get out of your listening room. I have my own biased opinion, that the listening room is often the most important component of any system (and unfortunately frequently ignored to a large degree). Let's suppose that you could get an acoustical engineering group like ours for free, but you still had all other constraints. You could a great deal on materials to impliment the design but you still had whatever other considerations you have in your life (I don't have space for a dedicated listening room, I can't have ugly acoustical treatement in the room, I can't move walls in my house). Try to be qualitative rather than quantitative. I'm not really that interested in hearing about the specifics of rooms--I'm more interested in hearing about end result goals, such as: I need sound isolation (I like to listen loudly at night and don't want to wake up my wife), or my room sounds dead--I feel like I have a head cold when I walk into it. The other aspect that would be very helpful, at the end of the post, please put a percentage of 2 channel vs HT or multi-channel you listen to. You may even be in the camp: "the room doesn't matter much, I like buying new pieces of equipment instead" That okay too--I'd like to hear from you as well. Some people may not understand the importance of room interaction on the sound, that's okay too--if you had free consultation what would you do or ask in order to get a better listening room.
rives
dynasys
5 posts
 
Rives:
I am building a house and i purchased the house specifically because it had a gameroom upstaris taht could be truned into a dedicated room. Now for me dedicated might not be the same as the real audiphiles since i do want the room to be used for entretaining and I would like to make it into a comfortable room were you can listen to music, watch a movie OR talk with friends. The look of the room should be inviting and I would not like for it to look like a HI FI store. Having said that, I am very willing to put "nice looking" (whenever possible) room tratments to take the best of my equipment. So, in conclusion, looks do matter to me but the performance is ultimately the most important.
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unsound
7,341 posts
 
Rives, if the consultation was free then I would ask how I could make my room acouticaly neutral, child,pet proof and easily maintained for as little money as possible. Cost, safety and inconvience would be concerns.
duanegoosen
355 posts
 
-Dedicated room, all 2 channel
-Would like to get thorough analysis of room acoustics and see some component placement recommendations.
-Would have a hard time getting the wife to allow door, window, or wall rebuilding.
-Visual asthetics be damned, I usually listen in the dark.
rives OP
953 posts
 
Thank you all for your responses thus far. Some of these response are a little bit what I expected--some are not. I would like to comment on a few. First is aesthetics. Room acoustics do not have to be ugly. If you have an existing room and you want to do it very inexpensively, the ugly treatment will get you there. But for really, very little money, acoustical treatment can virtually disappear. In new construction, there is never a good reason to show acoustical treatment, as it can be less expensive and often work better when it's built in. The second issue is functionality. This, so far, has only come up a few times but I feel like it is tremendously important. When designing (or re-designing a room) you really have to take into account total functionality. Will the room be used to entertain, do you have children or pets that like to play with those knobs and chew on the hose like stuff coming out of the back of the speaker. These are very important real world issues and any acoustical engineer that is designing a listening room for the home needs to be attentive to these things. Unfortunately, many think they are designing a room for a studio. The home environment is not a studio. The one that can be very challenging, and came up twice is the open floor plan. This can be difficult particularly if you have a situation that has a lot of "hard" surfaces and little way to cover them without harming the aesthetics. These rooms take a lot of time to figure out, but we have had some result in stellar sound that was better than some of the small rooms we've done.
Again, thank you, this is all very helpful to me and please continue with more rooms.
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