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has anyone heard the arp reflective boards?

i've been in hifi for years, lastly coming on board with room acoustics; maybe it should have been one of the first things i worked on. as my system has evolved (yes, many many times)it's finally come to a point where the sound of the room has become very apparent to me. for years we were taught egg crates, foam, carpet pads, carpet, rugs, which now, as i've turned all my focus on the room, i just don't believe in anymore. i attend much live music, much, and one thing i noticed in the best of halls is not a lot of damping, rather, wonderful wood. great old shiny wood, and old plaster. not overdamped rooms. concert halls are not designed like recording studios. why should people try to do "that" to their rooms? i basically have a room, 14by15,with wide openings to the right and rear, that is like a concert hall. wood floors, lots of wood in the room, high ceiling. so i started to emulate a hall in st louis, the sheldon, close to perfect sound. i pulled the area rug out, installed solid wood shutters over the 3 windows, and began to listen. my system consists of the new welltempered amadeus due out soon, a dynavector drt xv-1s, dynavector L300 preamp, EAR 890 amp, and shahinian arc speakers, wire the new dnm. typically you hear shahinians need damping, especially behind them. not so, i say. they now radiate, they breathe. no harshness, no slap. the final touch to the room has been in choosing the right reflective surfaces. i bought some arp -acoustic reflective panels, from a bright chap in st louis who has been basing his panels on the charles altmann reflective panels, now out of production. altmann's theory was to use a wood that behaved like a musical instrument, spruce. and then to top it off, he used a varnish that imitated the old masters. Bill beilstein has outdone himself in recreating the panels from scratch, using natural glue and a special varnish made of larch. they're sold in groups of 3. after putting them roughly behind each speaker and the center, it only convinces me more that a good reflective surface is key. i can take them off and on and hear an immediate change. my next project is to buy more and put them on the ceiling over the speakers. i see there are lots of other panels out there made of various substances. i think these all spruce panels are the way to go. if anyone has had any experience with such products please let me know. i've since bought some of the larch and have been redoing every wood surface in the room to amazing results. covering the plaster walls with the arp panels has been the initial key that started it all. let me know.
chashas1
chashas1 OP
596 posts
 
thanks, that's something worth pondering. maybe i do have a unique situation.....it's just every time i think back to rooms i've heard that are so overdamped, or maybe it's wrongly damped, all i can think of is dry, sterile sound. it's like they want to take the room out of the equation, which i don't think you can, course there's always headphones...one other interesting outcome of this, i found there is a huge difference in what you treat your wood with, starting with standard poly, natural varnish, and then ending with larch colophony. amazing stuff. available from sinopia.com
kr4's avatar
kr4
3,678 posts
 
I have yet to see/hear an untreated domestic listening room that would not benefit from proper treatment but the panels you propose cannot resolve any of those issues. Perhaps you just like the certain sound of your own room to which you have become adapted and these accentuate what you like about it.

As for the varnish differences, I fail to see any valid reason or evidence for their effectiveness in this application. Now, if you were building violins..........................
don_s
271 posts
 
Chashas1 et al,

Bonehead English 101

Paragraphs, the pause that refreshes.
chashas1 OP
596 posts
 
well, kr4, you are probably right. i love my room's sound. i have 3 other rooms downstairs and this sounds the best, so i'm starting with better than average already. i've had many people bring their guitars and whigout on how good the room is.
as to the varnish, i am trying to understand how a room can effect sound; i have a lot of wood regardless of the added panels, and anyone that's been over can tell the difference in the varnishes.
it's not that i like the sound of my room, per se, it's that i like the sound of live music. this treatment has made my stereo make the music coming out of it more lifelike.
thanks, donald, i always need corrected, probably in my room treatment and hifi as well.
no one seems to undestand what i'm striving for, one exception being a kind audiogoner listed on the virtual systems who is relishing his mbls in his wooded larched room.
end of topic.
rives
953 posts
 
The MBLs are a different animal altogether. They are voiced in a way and use 360 degree radiating pattern that necesitates an almost untreated room. When we do acoustical designs for MBL it's entirely different than for other speakers.

It would be interesting for you to have the room measured. Find out what the frequency response and reverberation times across the frequency response (or 200 to 10k) are. Measure your other rooms that don't sound as good too. You may discover that while the RT is very high in this one room it is far more uniform than the others and thus more pleasing. I've heard and measured rooms that were treated, but the problem was they were treated in a particular bandwidth giving them a very unbalanced RT across the frequency spectrum--the result while the Sabiens for the room were "appropriate", the room sounded horrible due to this imbalance.
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