What's the size of your listening room and/or ht?

Rives:

Can you tell us little more about your walls or sources for information on benefits of your approach? Looking at Everest's Masterhandbook of Acoustics it seems somewhat unclear. He calls the benefit "nominal" and says "splaying walls only introduces unpredictability in listening room and studio situations."(p.281-2) I ask because I'm soon to build and have considered a similar approach. For now though, my cell is only 6x8 and they won't let me change very much.

Sincerely
I remain,

You may find it interesting to check out Martin Logan's website. They have a section that describes the construction of their reference listening room, in which they performed the final critical listening in the design of the Statement E2 system, as well as the Prodigy.

Clueless: This is an area that I disagree with Everest's reference and a number of other references regarding splaying walls. In fact, if you look at most of the literature in this area, most discuss parallel walls and how to do all the calculations from this. It is FAR more complicated to design, model, and engineer a room without parallel walls. The results are predictable (contrary to Everest--but I think he knows this), but the effort is pretty great. I think Everest is clearly very smart in this area not to discuss it because it makes all the math very complex. Instead of using simple algebraic equations you have to do everything with integers and differential equations--it gets pretty ugly pretty fast. There's no way he could cover it satisfactorily in his book. It really just about requires a book unto itself. It doesn't make sense to do it in small environments, but when you get into larger environments that support longer wavelengths it is very beneficial in the bass region by reducing (or virtually eliminating) room modes when designed correctly. There's a lot more too it, such as designing the angles to reduce slap echo and even minimize the amount of diffusors used (they are almost always still needed to some degree). I know I haven't fully answered your question, but I think my fingers would wear out before I could really answer the question completely. I'd be glad to discuss it sometime and try to take some of the mystery out of it.

Rives, I've always enjoyed and respected your threads. Perhaps you could share the exact dimensions/proportions of your project?

My room is 15DX25WX8H, and it is fabulous. I got lucky.
When I ploted the graph recommended by Robert Harley in his book; it was obvious why, there are almost no reinforcements of any of the frequencies from 20-20K. Also since my speakers have the woofers far apart, they are quit immune to many of the room/bass problems.

Still, I would love a bigger room. But, I live in SanFrancisco with one of the highest real estate prices in the country; so I'm realistic and happy with what I can afford.

Richard