I was going to put together my system details but I keep coming back to how all that stuff fits and works in my room and since I pretty-much view the room as an important - maybe the most important - part of my system, I'll start by detailing it.
My listening room is a 12.5' x 23' x 7.5' below-grade, dedicated room that started with some good basic ingredients and didn't require too many family compromises, so I built it out with some fairly extensive room treatments. It's absolutely 'old-school' textbook, passive, analog, dinosaur technology, built with a little science, planning, and DIY elbow-grease quite some time ago - pretty much before digital room correction for the masses existed. I fully understand that I may be missing out on the possibility of going further by converting everything to PCM digital, applying DRC in a little computer then converting back to analog with a DAC in-that-box, but I'm just fine with staying in a (mostly) analog world, and this room lets me do that.
It works very well to my ear now when I play a record (through an all tube system to a passive crossover and old alnico drivers) and it works just as good when I play digital down the same path from the pre-amp inputs. Analog is my gold standard and with this approach I enjoy vinyl to a pretty high level, and as digital catches up, well, the room is already there.
When we went looking for a house several years ago, I tried to get something with a room having a favorable W x L x H ratio and solid construction to support decent bass and isolation from the rest of the house - and maybe got a little lucky. It's in the basement (where the family is OK with it being dedicated to audio), 12.5' x 2' and has a 'visual' 7.5' ceiling -visual because there is a lot going on behind that black cloth that extends that height in places.
The floor is laminated wood on poured concrete with drywall over concrete block on the 4 side walls and it's proven to support very solid bass. There is 1 door, 2 short windows high on a side wall and a small bulkhead, so not much to get in the way of tuning to a simple rectangular model, which I think made planning easier and the results more predictable.
I started by burying myself in Everest's Acoustics texts (fantastic books for this!), then playing with the numbers in a spreadsheet where I tried different materials and combinations of diffraction and absorption techniques to get to a reasonably balanced reverb time (copy of spreadsheet below). I tried not to overdo absorption in the mid to high frequencies (it's very easy to go overboard there as most acoustic treatments only work there) and concentrated absorption in the first reflection points.
Doing all this planning in Excel was extremely helpful as I could just adjust the areas of various treatments or construction materials and see the theoretical effect on reverb time, balance, etc. I think going through this phase in software saved me a lot of time adjusting and changing things after the fact and the results seemed to nicely match the sims - at least to my ear. I have not measured anything in there yet, can get past just listening.
The ceiling treatment is notable in that it uses some tuned bass trap sections and some open areas to expose the floor-joists above for some strategically placed diffraction ("scatter" according to tomlinmgt) and absorption. This was all done using black grill-cloth covered plywood panels so it looks like a flat ceiling, but has bass-absorbing perf-panels in the corners (tuned to the problem frequencies) and the open areas (diffraction and absorption) over the listening position at the first reflection points. The drawing below shows how I distributed these mixed ceiling panels and how I worked it into my initial equipment layout. The rear wall (behind the listening chairs) is mostly taken up with an Expidit rack for storage of records, CDs, equipment, etc. which is pretty randomly loaded so provides a decent level of dispersion. I also have 2 of the wall panels at 45 degree angles back there in the corners.
My original plan was to use curtains for absorption to add a level of adjustability to the space but I fell into some free office partition panels (heavy MDF panels covered with mineral wool) which work very well as substitutes. These combined with a carpet and the open absorption area of the ceiling, cover all the first-reflection points, but I use more of them in there and move, add, remove these panels to 'tune' the room. If I remove a few, reverb goes up and the space becomes more lively, adding some makes things a little darker, intimate and smokey-good like a small club. It's pretty immediate and cool to play with this but in the end I've found a sweet spot that suits most of my listening (leaning towards intimate) and I pretty much stick to that configuration.
Also worth noting is that when I had the ceiling torn down, I put in 2 dedicated circuits back the breaker panel for audio using 12ga romex with hospital grade outlets. I also keep all the digital on its own circuit - not sure if this has much of an effect on things but since I can, I do, and the more I isolate noisy switching-mode digital PSs from all the analog, the better things sound to my ear. I currently stream digital over copper so have a few 1G Ethernet connections into the room from my switch & file server in another room.
Some recent additions to my system have really enhanced what this room is capable of - like 'helper' woofers behind a big SS amp and some digital EQ - but this space was put together to let my simple SET>high-efficiency speaker system perform at it's best and I think it's pretty effective at that. In this house, I'm pretty much done on the room front.
My listening room is a 12.5' x 23' x 7.5' below-grade, dedicated room that started with some good basic ingredients and didn't require too many family compromises, so I built it out with some fairly extensive room treatments. It's absolutely 'old-school' textbook, passive, analog, dinosaur technology, built with a little science, planning, and DIY elbow-grease quite some time ago - pretty much before digital room correction for the masses existed. I fully understand that I may be missing out on the possibility of going further by converting everything to PCM digital, applying DRC in a little computer then converting back to analog with a DAC in-that-box, but I'm just fine with staying in a (mostly) analog world, and this room lets me do that.
It works very well to my ear now when I play a record (through an all tube system to a passive crossover and old alnico drivers) and it works just as good when I play digital down the same path from the pre-amp inputs. Analog is my gold standard and with this approach I enjoy vinyl to a pretty high level, and as digital catches up, well, the room is already there.
When we went looking for a house several years ago, I tried to get something with a room having a favorable W x L x H ratio and solid construction to support decent bass and isolation from the rest of the house - and maybe got a little lucky. It's in the basement (where the family is OK with it being dedicated to audio), 12.5' x 2' and has a 'visual' 7.5' ceiling -visual because there is a lot going on behind that black cloth that extends that height in places.
The floor is laminated wood on poured concrete with drywall over concrete block on the 4 side walls and it's proven to support very solid bass. There is 1 door, 2 short windows high on a side wall and a small bulkhead, so not much to get in the way of tuning to a simple rectangular model, which I think made planning easier and the results more predictable.
I started by burying myself in Everest's Acoustics texts (fantastic books for this!), then playing with the numbers in a spreadsheet where I tried different materials and combinations of diffraction and absorption techniques to get to a reasonably balanced reverb time (copy of spreadsheet below). I tried not to overdo absorption in the mid to high frequencies (it's very easy to go overboard there as most acoustic treatments only work there) and concentrated absorption in the first reflection points.
Doing all this planning in Excel was extremely helpful as I could just adjust the areas of various treatments or construction materials and see the theoretical effect on reverb time, balance, etc. I think going through this phase in software saved me a lot of time adjusting and changing things after the fact and the results seemed to nicely match the sims - at least to my ear. I have not measured anything in there yet, can get past just listening.
The ceiling treatment is notable in that it uses some tuned bass trap sections and some open areas to expose the floor-joists above for some strategically placed diffraction ("scatter" according to tomlinmgt
) and absorption. This was all done using black grill-cloth covered plywood panels so it looks like a flat ceiling, but has bass-absorbing perf-panels in the corners (tuned to the problem frequencies) and the open areas (diffraction and absorption) over the listening position at the first reflection points. The drawing below shows how I distributed these mixed ceiling panels and how I worked it into my initial equipment layout. The rear wall (behind the listening chairs) is mostly taken up with an Expidit rack for storage of records, CDs, equipment, etc. which is pretty randomly loaded so provides a decent level of dispersion. I also have 2 of the wall panels at 45 degree angles back there in the corners.
My original plan was to use curtains for absorption to add a level of adjustability to the space but I fell into some free office partition panels (heavy MDF panels covered with mineral wool) which work very well as substitutes. These combined with a carpet and the open absorption area of the ceiling, cover all the first-reflection points, but I use more of them in there and move, add, remove these panels to 'tune' the room. If I remove a few, reverb goes up and the space becomes more lively, adding some makes things a little darker, intimate and smokey-good like a small club. It's pretty immediate and cool to play with this but in the end I've found a sweet spot that suits most of my listening (leaning towards intimate) and I pretty much stick to that configuration.
Also worth noting is that when I had the ceiling torn down, I put in 2 dedicated circuits back the breaker panel for audio using 12ga romex with hospital grade outlets. I also keep all the digital on its own circuit - not sure if this has much of an effect on things but since I can, I do, and the more I isolate noisy switching-mode digital PSs from all the analog, the better things sound to my ear. I currently stream digital over copper so have a few 1G Ethernet connections into the room from my switch & file server in another room.
Some recent additions to my system have really enhanced what this room is capable of - like 'helper' woofers behind a big SS amp and some digital EQ - but this space was put together to let my simple SET>high-efficiency speaker system perform at it's best and I think it's pretty effective at that. In this house, I'm pretty much done on the room front.
