Room Treatment Reviews

One of my favorite Charles Rodrigues cartoons, originally published in Stereo Review and reprinted in the book Total Harmonic Distortion (Perfectbound Press, 1988), shows a customer in the soundroom of an audio dealer, auditioning a pair of speakers. This is no ordinary soundroom: the floor, walls, and ceiling are completely covered with irregularly shaped boxes, apparently an extreme form of acoustical treatment. The salesman is saying, "Of course, you realize that it won't sound exactly the same in your living room, sir..."

The acoustic environment for music reproduction is easily the most overlooked source of sonic degradation. Many fine playback systems are compromised by room-induced anomalies that severely color the reproduced sound. When we live in a world of directional wire, high-end AC power cords, and $4000 CD transports, paying attention to the listening room's contribution to the musical experience takes on greater urgency.

"Bass—the final frontier," declared Captain James T. Kirk. I have no doubt: The biggest problem in nearly every listening room is getting the bass to sound right. Today, we voyage to the frontier of bass response.

A Brief History of Time
Because my listening room is also a mastering room, it has to be as accurate as possible (see photo 1). The floor is a concrete slab, with solid-block wall construction and a cathedral ceiling 23' high at the rear—there are no floor-to-ceiling resonances. A bay window hidden behind the curtains disperses the lengthwise room mode by varying it between 18' and 20.6'. The curtains tighten the stereo image and damp the subtle resonant chamber that would otherwise color the sound.

For a hobby based on science and technology, audiophilia has more than its share of unscientific elements. That's not necessarily a bad thing; not all of those elements are obvious snake oil, and there's more than science to creating—or re-creating—a musical experience. Still, for the more technical-minded it's a little disconcerting that even the most basic distinctions, such as why two CD players sound different from each other, are hard to explain using technical measurements and simple scientific concepts.

In the beginning, I had a room adjacent to my office—a room filled with bicycles, hi-fi gear, and assorted crap I'd never gotten around unpacking since our last move. Feeling ambitious, I thought I might turn it into a guest room, and emptied it.

One of the challenges I faced in optimizing the performance of the Thiel">http://www.stereophile.com//loudspeakerreviews/216/">Thiel CS7.2 loudspeakers that I reviewed in February 2000 was controlling and tuning their interaction with my listening room. Intuition, experience, trial and error—all came into play, as did several of the procedures and calculations covered by Jonathan Scull in his "Fine Tunes" column.

I anticipated the installation of the TacT Audio RCS 2.0 room-correction processor with mixed emotions—I already liked my system and room, and such a device threatened to make all my studied efforts trivial. What if one might use any decent amps and speakers, cables that were merely conductive, and no room treatment at all? And what if, on top of that, you could just put them wherever your significant other thought they looked right? What if all the magic you needed was contained in this box? Scary.