It’s the time of year for saving money!
What’s the most expensive and
least mutable element in your sound reproduction system? The music? Your turntable? Nope, as the title of the
Blog indicates, it’s your room.
How many times have you
heard audiophiles talking about their rooms? Sure they’ll obsess over VTA or
the right combination of cabling for optimal neutrality, but how many carry
that level of rigor over to the dimensions and sound corrections for those
dimension’s inevitable sonic issues?
Some people, including
myself, feel that even early in the upgrade path when the total system cost is
under six figures, money spent on room correction is the most cost-effective
sonic improvement you can make in your system. Correct a room’s primary sonic
issues and you won’t have to rely on clever speaker placement or heavy-duty
signal processing to fix them later.
We humans have the ability
to selectively filter what we hear, which is why audiophiles can “hear around”
a bad room if they’ve spent enough time listening in it. But my own experience
indicates that a majority of high-end audio equipment out in the world is
laboring in less than acoustically benign environments. Dude, you wouldn’t need
a pair of 18″ monster subwoofers if you had bothered to ameliorate your room’s
50 Hz suck-out with a bass trap…
I have a modest proposal,
next time you need to ask one of those inevitable audiophile questions that
begins with, “What do you think about (X)?” please include the precursor, “My
room is…” because that’s the component that everything else in your system has
to be built around.
