An interesting read on setting up your equipment and your room.

[John Holmes]

http://www.decware.com/paper14.htm

I'm not sure how many would have the room to try this (I do not). It does make a good read for all. Even those with great sounding rooms.

Enjoy!




"I came here, to chew bubble gum and kickass. And I'm all out of bubble gum!!!" My DVD's

[Burke Strickland]

Interesting reading. Thanks for sharing that John! I knew I was going to enjoy the article as soon as I read the beginning of the third paragraph: "It's hard to stomach the fact that so many audiophiles concern themselves with connectors and power cords and all the fancy tweaks when these at best pale in comparison to the effect of room acoustics." Of course, we need good quality connectors, and it is difficult to operate our AC powered equipment without power cords, :>) but a lot of folks lose sight of the fact that careful speaker placement / room arrangment can yield very significant advances in the sound quality of our systems.

The author takes a while getting rolling with his story about his "new" room, and his one year auditory memory, etcetera, but that is actually good background for what follows. However, I disagree with his blanket statement: "In an ideal setup you would want to hear only the direct energy with none of the reflected energy." I have heard a $500,000 system in a purposely acoustically "dead" room (IOW, it was engineered to have NO "reflected" energy) and it sounded terrible. I think the rest of his piece gives the lie to that statement anyway. It is the way the sound is reflected that matters; taming the reflections rather than totally eliminating them is his real goal.

Another article discussing room arrangement and speaker placement which provides some very useful info is by George Cardas of Cardas Audio: http://www.enjoythemusic.com/magazin...02/cardas.html

Burke

[John Holmes]

Hey Burke,

I'm glad you found it as enjoyable as I did. While I do not agree with most of it, there were a few basics that he touched on. Like how a bad room is just that. And how important the room is to the equation of bad/good sound.

I also didn't understand how he came to the need of direct sound only. There are just too many great sounding speakers which thrive on reflected sound. Now, had he (like you stated) stuck with taming the reflected sound, then it would have made better sense.

Thanks for the link to the Cardas site. Jon Marsh actually turned me on to the Cardas site about yr or so ago. I use the "rectangular room" formula for my speaker set-up. I'm happy with it's results though, I'm not quite sure where the proper seating postion falls within this rule. So, I just used what gave me a good distance from the speakers and the rear wall as well for the seating position.

Oh I almost forgot.

"It's hard to stomach the fact that so many audiophiles concern themselves with connectors and power cords and all the fancy tweaks when these at best pale in comparison to the effect of room acoustics."

This one hits the ball out of the park! 8) I believe in wire, cable, etcetera making a difference. But, it took a long while for me to accept this. It took even longer to swallow the room acoustics part.




"I came here, to chew bubble gum and kickass. And I'm all out of bubble gum!!!" My DVD's

[George Bellefontaine]

Thanks for the interesting articles, guys.




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