The importance of the room....

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studiotech

Re: The importance of the room....
« Reply #20 on: 30 Apr 2013, 03:10 am »
Is that you Greg in the 3rd photo?

Rocket_Ronny

Nope.  That's Aaron, the lead engineer at Phat Planet. The monitors are for him.

Alex Reynolds

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Re: The importance of the room....
« Reply #21 on: 1 May 2013, 09:15 pm »
I would submit to you that significant research has been done in this field several very talented individuals (not just Toole).  Their conclusion has been that the room contributes to the sound and that it's generally best to work with the effects rather than against them (by turning your listening environment into an anechoic chamber).  This has been my experience too... when using the right loudspeakers. 

http://www.amazon.com/Sound-Reproduction-Acoustics-Psychoacoustics-Loudspeakers/dp/0240520092

If you don't believe their research you can always resort to using headphones.   :)

Of course, treatment and placement and calibration can all go very far, but there's certainly more to the room than what a measurement looks like. My 10' x 10' studio measures wonderfully well, everything is at an acceptable decay time, its not overtly "dead" by any means - and sounds really great. But sometimes, it doesn't sound nearly as good as a decent sized control room, even if my studio measures better.
The room always contributes to the sound, but in a larger room, you simply have better modal extension in the low end, much more time for low frequency waves to fully develop, more room for the high end to naturally die out without sounding bright and needing to be absorbed, etc. A larger room just gives you a better slate to start from, and gives you much more to work towards. In small rooms you only have certain options available -> in a large room you have tons of different concepts you can use and treatment methods that just aren't possible in typical residential sized rooms. This is what they were getting at - not that a large room doesn't have problems. :)

studiotech

Re: The importance of the room....
« Reply #22 on: 2 May 2013, 02:59 am »
I would submit to you that significant research has been done in this field several very talented individuals (not just Toole).  Their conclusion has been that the room contributes to the sound and that it's generally best to work with the effects rather than against them (by turning your listening environment into an anechoic chamber).  This has been my experience too... when using the right loudspeakers. 

http://www.amazon.com/Sound-Reproduction-Acoustics-Psychoacoustics-Loudspeakers/dp/0240520092

If you don't believe their research you can always resort to using headphones.   :)

Yes, I'm familiar with Toole's work as well as others.  I've come to my own conclusion that less room is better than more if you're after what's actually on the recording.  I understand why folks like normal dipoles and planars and even omni designs.  They CAN add an additional sense of spacious to playback, BUT at the expense of the finer details that are actually contained in the recording.  If the recording has a lot of ambient cues from the original performance venue, then I would rather only hear those.  Early reflections can only smear these delicate cues.  On studio produced, multi-mic'd recordings the focus of the sound only gets more blurry.  And for live, stereo minimalist type recordings, you lose the outer edges and total size of the acoustic space trying to be reproduced.

The testing in that studio gave me the absolute best representation of my collection of music I've ever heard.  It really was more like what one gets from headphones, but without the image inside the middle of your head.  I'm not happy about that, because the speakers are now back at my house and sounding far worse than I know they can.   :(

Greg