I sometimes wonder if we aren't all spending way to much effort choosing our gear based on how it sounds in our rooms vs fixing our rooms to give us more accurate sound from the gear we already have. For example suppose we go out and buy a speaker that has a very nice flat frequency response only to find that it sounds way to bright in our rooms so we take it back and try another brand that people tend to say is less bright. This helps but its still not what you wanted so you sell of that bright sounding amp and buy a HK for its warmth and finally add some MIT interconnects to help tame it down even more....
This occurs everyday on the online forums with people asking for recomendations on products that are brighter or warmer sounding to fix what is actually a room issue. I'm not saying that we shouldn't choose gear that will help rooms one way or the other just that maybe we should be spending more attention on the source of the problem rather then a quick fix. I realize that for a lot of us treating the room is more difficult due to asthetics or lack of knowledge but IMO there should be more attention placed on educating people about acoustics then simply recomending a different peice of equipement to band aid the problem.
Lets take a subwoofer as an example. As most people know subs are very placement sensetive with corners providing the most gain but also the most boom. We can tweak a subs placement for the maximum sound quality and volume but even then we're likely to have some peaks and or valleys in the response that we can't fix without something like the BFD. In this case we've taken the room as far as we can then tweaked it with the BFD rather then simply dump the sub in the corner and then tried to correct the response even though we've had to add in some very large gains to compensate the huge hole at 45 hz that weren't there when we moved it out a foot or so.
In this case we needed to use both the room's acoustics as well as some additonal gear to get the optimal sound but in some cases a bright speaker could be made to sound better by changing its postion or adding a rug in front of them if the floor is a hard reflective surface. Maybe adding some drapes to the window beside the left speaker would help...
There's a parabol about a bath tub that is over flowing because the taps were left on. You walk into the room and try to scoup the water out of the tub with a small cup but its still over flowing the sides...you can stop the water flowing onto the floor by getting a larger cup or you can simply turn off the water at the tap. To fix the problem look at its source...
Thoughts?
This occurs everyday on the online forums with people asking for recomendations on products that are brighter or warmer sounding to fix what is actually a room issue. I'm not saying that we shouldn't choose gear that will help rooms one way or the other just that maybe we should be spending more attention on the source of the problem rather then a quick fix. I realize that for a lot of us treating the room is more difficult due to asthetics or lack of knowledge but IMO there should be more attention placed on educating people about acoustics then simply recomending a different peice of equipement to band aid the problem.
Lets take a subwoofer as an example. As most people know subs are very placement sensetive with corners providing the most gain but also the most boom. We can tweak a subs placement for the maximum sound quality and volume but even then we're likely to have some peaks and or valleys in the response that we can't fix without something like the BFD. In this case we've taken the room as far as we can then tweaked it with the BFD rather then simply dump the sub in the corner and then tried to correct the response even though we've had to add in some very large gains to compensate the huge hole at 45 hz that weren't there when we moved it out a foot or so.
In this case we needed to use both the room's acoustics as well as some additonal gear to get the optimal sound but in some cases a bright speaker could be made to sound better by changing its postion or adding a rug in front of them if the floor is a hard reflective surface. Maybe adding some drapes to the window beside the left speaker would help...
There's a parabol about a bath tub that is over flowing because the taps were left on. You walk into the room and try to scoup the water out of the tub with a small cup but its still over flowing the sides...you can stop the water flowing onto the floor by getting a larger cup or you can simply turn off the water at the tap. To fix the problem look at its source...
Thoughts?
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