You can promote a speaker without marginalizing your audience.
... (if this is directed to me)...
No way!
Please be a room treatment evangelist!
I've my share of room problems too. I've never being able to give left and right completely the same balance and have great stereo at the same time.
The merits of room treatments are well advertised, but you rarely encounter a room that has been "treated" for good audio (save for some voodoo patches or curtains on the wall -no wife!-). I never followed up to my plans to make a diffusor, I guess electronics are much more sexy to me.
In the end the acoustical room correctors make a lot of sense in a stereo setting where we aim for identical response. As I learned from the better part of the video speaker placement has a large influence in the sub 300Hz area. No way that is going to be the same for each speaker in a real untreated room.
regards, Coen
The low end is also what I was aiming for. No way I like room treatments... that's why I restrained from it all these years, trying all kinds of tweaks to avoid them. Yes at present it does look imposing, but luckily its a dedicated room, so not much heat from the wife
There is really nothing sexy or exciting about room treatments. These huge items are suddenly occupying space in the listening room imposing their presence...
The idea was to tame the bass (which was not too bad + 6-8 dB in the upper bass, otherwise flat to 20 Hz), and the acoustic specialist argued his way into the diffusers, and I obliged. And this is where it gets interesting .... ofcourse bass was increased without smear, but more importantly how things changed with the mids/highs. Diffusers add some critical benefit in the frequency, spectral/power and time domain. Any micro/nano inconsistencies with the mids and the highs which affect image localization, temporal resolution, group distortion, timbre recognition, flutter echoes are reduced to a point below threshold. All of a sudden the system is flying. Bugatti on a race track vs a back country road with potholes....
Therefore the proposal for the new finding is as follows:
" Reflections are fine and dandy for non-critical listening, or systems with lower SNR (I don't know the threshold) ... maybe (-)96 dB. For the extreme detail provided by the Phasure DAC, these reflections actually are very detrimental. Adding acoustic treatments -- for the first reflections will greatly decreased room associated noise, not only bass, but also mids and highs. This also allows for listening at much higher volumes before it gets too loud, or loss of musicality"Evangelized yet?
