always start with the room! so long as you have some nice gear then you will hear everything it has to offer in a good room. like an old friend said to me, if you have great speakers & a poor amp & source, you will at least hear the best they have to offer. if you have poor speakers & a great source then you are destroying the sound of your source. The same applys to the room. you can have the best gear but if you can't hear it you could have got away with an all in one from the local electronics store.
@@snap7749 If you drop ~$200 on a couple packs of Roxul S&S and 1x8s, spend a weekend building and installing, you'll be glad you did. If only to improve the 1khz+ range... broadband absorption at first reflection points goes a very long way. I took some recording classes in college many years ago- my professor had decades of professional experience under his belt. He couldn't say enough good things about Roxul Safe & Sound. Absorption and diffusion is a gamechanger, and it doesn't cost much at all. Less than a cheap pair of studio monitors. Room treatment should come first. Your system is only as good as the room it's in. The room has far more of an impact than some esoteric DAC/amplifier combo, let alone cone materials. Don't get me started on fancy speaker wires, bahahaha.
On my mediocre headphones sounds better without the treatment. With treatment is More narrow and focused (sound stage) with a little more detail. Voices are like going near or through some pillows. I usually like some reflections... To me nature sounds, real voices, live concerts have a certain degree of reflection. So if it is too focused it sounds a little strange and muffled. Bass sound a little tighter, just a little I have no perfect years and not an expensive gear, plus RU-vid compression, so don't take my word :D Very good comparison and setup!
This is one of the best audio videos I have seen. If this does not convince someone of the importance of room treatment nothing will. You have probably both improved the listening experience of your viewers significantly and saved them a whole lot of money since room treatment is a lot cheaper than electronics and speakers. Well done.
@@Newrecordday2013 do you plan to ever make any more videos on acoustics? I really enjoyed you exploring this topic; it was an eye-opener. Are there any other things unrelated/related that you want to explore in the future? you have an amazing way of documenting that brings feelings of importance. The depth you go into with your videos is extremely captivating!
Have just finished watching the five videos over two days and it's inspired me to crack on with making some improvements to my "music" room which has turned into a multi-purpose space and includes my wife's desk & PC and nearly all of my fly fishing gear! Thank you for all the effort you put into making the series.
I did not take any of the work that you did here as an attempt to show off or be prideful. I truly appreciate the dedication and information that you have shared. Please continue to keep up the good work and sharing the knowledge.
This series has been wonderful. I decided a long time ago the room, treatment of it and placement of speakers within it was ~80% of the audiophile equation. You are helping other folks understand that. Kudos!!
I’m in the process of treating my room. After years of reading, watching videos and procrastination I’m finally ready to start implementing what I’ve learned. I’ll definitely be referring back to this series as I go along. Thanks for taking the time to do these
Yea, the final treatment is amazing. I've got a small room and it's heavily treated. I love it! Thanks for this series - it must have taken forever to film and edit all this. It paid off, this is an awesome outcome.
Best audio series ever!!! The changes are brilliant and even the last tweak of absortion is noticeable!!! Thanks for taking the time and work to post this.
This video proved to me how important room treatment is. It's amazing how much more detail you hear when you get rid of all the miscellaneous reflected sound and resulting echos.
This was done superbly! The tiered demo adding one more treatment at a time was brilliant as it clearly demonstrated that any room can achieve "better" with incremental steps allowing anyone, on any budget, to slowly improve the soundstage in their listening space one step at a time. Well Done!!!
Hey mate. Just wanted to say your previous video is the best one I've seen about the benefits of good diffusion. Most videos and articles are just telling you why it's beneficial.
Tiny differences between the last two acoustic treatments. To my ears, the biggest improvement came from a few bass traps and difusión in a furnished room. Room correction can help quite a bit with bass and lower midrange too.
As someone who just finished building a dedicated room last weekend (10'x15'x23') and just put on the floor, against the wall, about 15 acoustic panels (many problems left to tackle), THANK YOU for this series! I can get a much better understanding of the impact of each type of treatment. The timing is really great, it's perfect! Will probably steal your idea for the floor to ceiling corner bass traps... ;)
Wonderful video, thank you so much. My takeaway is - why aren't open baffle speakers more popular than they are? It seemed to me that switching from box to open baffle speaker immediately did the job of a ton of room treatment. Anyone else?
You are perfectionist, Ron! I love this as I am too. And when it comes to music, hell yeah - perfectionism matters. Thank you very much for helping thousands through your amazing relentless effort. Top notch!
Again - thanks for this amazing series. This is the first time we can follow the effect of various treatments and how tthe effect adda to the prior. Fantastic! And congrats to a great listening room!
I only have a small amount of treatment but I did add another thick rug on top of another rug because I had no where else to put it and thought it made it a difference. Ever consider adding more to the floor? Also, what are your thoughts on correcting things with Dirac Live vs room treatment. It obviously isn’t as good but Dirac really improved my system. I’m a Home Theater guy and really believe that you should experiment and do as many things correct regarding placement, room treatment etc…. and let things like Dirac do as little as possible and this compromise has kept me happy in my journey. Lots of us can only dream of a setup like yours, well done sir!
The final treatment OMG. That was audible difference especially second song. To me using very expensive headphones and Dac i could enjoy it now. Reverb was minimal.
Very good series of video. I worked with a small acoustic company last year to measure and propose various solutions. I added Bass traps in the corners and ceiling corners, ceiling traps, diffusers on the side and special curtains to cover the TV. It made a significant difference. It's not cheap but before someone considers a $5,000 equipment upgrade (could be less if you DIY approximately or a lot more...), this makes a very nice improvement even if my room was not nearly as bad as the empty shed. For this video, even through the crappy sound of RU-vid, there seems to be better definition, tighter bass and less echo.
Ron, while I definitely heard the improvements through the original series of treatments, I really could not hear a difference with the last addition. Probably because of the cheap headset I use at work. Props for all the due diligence in creating the "Shed"!!
Thank you Ron for these excellent insightful and educational videos. Someone earlier mentioned the importance of titles and organising these videos in a way that makes them easier to find. This is like an educational series on room treatments. I for one will definitely want to revisit these multiple times when treating our room down here in Australia. 👍😎 Your humility and sincerity is obviously and of course appreciated
Very inspirational series. I fell in love with room acoustics many years ago as a teenager when I "treated" my dorm (cork and carpet on the walls and ceiling) and I "saw" what the "treatment" did. Now I got my own dedicated 20m2 listening room/mini home theater and I always try to get the best of it based on info I find in the net, info provided by articles, lectures or channels like yours. Keep the good work and I am eager to see upcoming videos on acoustics. Sorry for my english if I did some mistake as english is not my language.
The last room modification made a very important improvement in The clarity of the sound, making the listening experience effortless. Especially the female voice is now without boomy resonance and has at last turned bearable to listen to😊
So true! I remember buying an expensive 5.1 system that sounded amazing at the Bestbuy Magnolia room but then it sounded half as good at home, I was so disappointed and frustrated. It happened again when I purchased a set of stereo speakers for my desk at work, they sounded so damn nice in my cubicle that I decided to take them home and placed them on my glass desk, again, disappointed, the sound was not the same at all. Room acoustics is a priority. 😉👍
I agree with "better" being the goal. One thing I would say is I'm not a fan of diffusion facing diffusion, front to back. I would hard absorb behind the speakers and diffuse from the sides and behind listening position, but I'm coming from a studio mixing perspective. I really want anechoic as possible from behind my sound source.
Thanks for the quick cuts through the progression of the room. It makes a huge difference when trying to recognize the improvements. Each stage was glaringly different, though I really couldn't hear much change at the end. I will chalk that up to lousy earbuds, and we all know it's way different in the room. But what a bitchin series!!! It has convinced me to take small steps, attacking the most obvious sound issues first, rather than implementing a variety of dressing, in hopes that reducing that issue is enough to be all the change I need. Great stuff, mister!
I googled acoustic panels and ATS was one of my choices that appeared on my phone and I decided to go with ATS and I was surprised at how nice the fit and finish is and how much difference they made in my room because the room in my basement is the worst choice to do any objective listening because 1. It’s 10’ long x 7’ wide x 6’ high 2. Walls and floors are made of concrete 3. And the louder the sound the harder it gets to hear what you’re doing But suppressingly the panels on the front and back walls and bass traps and a 1” cloud above has made it so I can make adjustments to my music and understand the difference If you want to know how bad your room is play any music fairly loud and tweak the bass, mids and highs then repeat with headphones and that’s how much work you listening space needs I have a recording studio in my basement, wish me luck 🍀
I really enjoyed this series and it has definitely given me a lot of food for thought. And while I am certain that my room with all its issues can more than benefit from treatment. I am a bit put off by the cost associated with some of this stuff. Those diffusion panels for instance are 1K each. And just one is not going to do much. I certainly take this worthy effort as aspirational at this stage of my journey.
Awesome result, I bet it sounds incredible in person! You're right about aiming for better and not necessarily a huge project like yours. I have a crappy bedroom just a couple feet shy of being a cube. It's covered in inexpensive foam which isn't anything fancy, but getting rid of those reflections is awesome. I just enjoy sitting in that room even with no music playing because it is so quiet and peaceful. It won't win any measurement tests but compared to bare walls there's no question. The progression of treatments shown in the video illustrates this well.
This just goes to show, it doesn't matter how expensive a system you have, you still reuse the same strip of blue painters tape a hundred times marking speaker location.
Great work. I completely agree with the angle to correcting our rooms. Have a look a sub placement behind the sweet spot. Solves a lot of standing waves and bass problems.
Sweet Shed. Great series. I'm glad you said you're not done. The more you make improvements the more your ears learn and thus... the more improvements you can find. Once you identify any given acoustic issue (noise, bad reflection, resonances etc etc) it is very hard to unhear it, so it must be fixed... cheers.
Although I DO AGREE that this series is very, very important, and probably your all time BEST video production ever, with incredible thought and execution....Your ALL TIME BEST AND MOST IMPORTANT video has to be L.O.T.S. Combine both and the universe is totally aligned, literally 🙂 😊 😉
Hi Ron… A truly fascinating adventure, watching your journey towards reaching an acoustic listening Nirvana. I’ve become a disciple of your channel and therefore have subscribed. Best wishes KCB.😁👍🇬🇧
Fantastic job RON !! GREAT VIDEO !! This is by far the best video on Room Correction influencing the audio reproduction. Pre and post modification comparisons were excellent. While others keep rambling, Ron you did the work and showed us the results. I have been thinking about the room acoustics for a while now. When I buy a house, I will implement what you did. Can’t wait to watch your next video. Great work 🎉
Ron, I agree that these are some of the best videos you have ever done. The superiority of this series lies in its 1-2-3 punch: 1. You TEACH in a calm, organized, non judgmental matter. 2. You allow the viewers to HEAR for themselves the improvements each step of the way. Sort of like "a picture beats a thousand words principle." 3. You back up any subjectivity objections with MEASUREMENTS and graphs. These three punches satisfy the novice and the experienced, the hearing focused and the measurement crowd. Well done. As somebody who cares about the audiophile community, may I humbly offer up a suggestion? Could you better package this series with a general heading of your choice combined with subheadings for each video. This series is too good to be hidden or only viewed in partiality. Right now I find the videos too disjointed from each other by titles. Having a main heading and sub headings with each video develops a continuum that helps people identify it as part of a series and in what order. An off the cuff example might be the following: Room Treatment A to Z. Part One - Untreated Part Two - Adding Room Furnishings Part Three - Bass traps Etc, etc. This simple step will generate more views, which is what I would like to see. Having a main title and subtitle with each video will also make it possible to add to this series in the future as you see fit as it develops into a master class. Frankly it's approaching that already, certainly from a RU-vid perspective at the very least. Lastly, I hope you round off your series with some dsp additions. There's still a bit of voodoo surrounding that topic, at least for me. Thanks again Ron.
I am noticing less reverberation in the room with the latest treatments you’ve done, but at the same time I think it can be taken a little too far where you lose some of the detail and mid range. I think you’re getting really close to where it should be at least to my ear and through these recordings. Well done as always Ron and thank you for these great videos.
First thank you for this video. Difference is very noticeable. It will be interesting to see effect on RT60. Maybe it is a bit too much on highs and some range limiter could avoid this. Probably it will start discussion about tastes on more or less liveness for the room.
So for me the bass was more relaxed, a little less impact.The highs were smoother and the imaging more transparent. But only slight differeces for my ears and not with every track and speaker.
Average gear can sound really good in a properly treated room and high-end gear can sound flat out disappointing in a non treated room. I’m probably apart of the 99% of us in this hobby whose living room serves the dual purpose of 2 channel listening and home theatre/entertaining guests and the sad truth is that you can only make a living room so good. There are odd angles in the ceiling, a fireplace, a set of French doors to the backyard, big openings into the dining room/kitchen and hallways so getting a living room area acoustically perfect is nearly impossible especially if you have a wife and kids. So like he says early in the video, just make it BETTER.
Excellent stuff! Thank you very much for this. I haven't tried this with my hq headphones yet but my first impression is that you might have overdone the absorption on the final treatment.
I have Spatials. Had them for 2 years. Kept altering speaker positions. Never satisfied. Then had them point at my ears and …. bingo. This, after reading in several places that having them point straight out into the room is best. Now I think that their positioning is only partly about how they are engineered, and also how it interacts with the room. So that two of the very same speakers will be optimally positioned differently depending on the space.
It was interesting to hear difference in the completed room. It seems to be the upper midrange wherer I heard the biggest difference. It was more like an open space recording than something in a box. Very interesting. The ability to discern the difference between products you need to take the room out of it!
Ron, this is a great video. Very impressive with your hard work. Great series of vids! Not wearing headphones so I cannot say I hear much of a difference between the two final treatments. Using my TV setup they were pretty similar. My listening room is my living room so I can only go so far. I do have reverb. I just can’t take down my wife’s room decor. She does enable me to put any gear I want in the room and for that I’m immensely grateful.
This series has been truly excellent. Each step of your journey has shown clear improvements. I know that you have not undertaken this as any form of one-upmanship but I'm still kinda jealous. I have some cracking good kit but my room is far from ideal. My room is quite small but as it's an old 17th century cottage has pretty good absorption in the form of 2' thick walls. Unfortunately the addition of any further room treatment would result in divorce papers. Oh well. The addition of the additional panels made a surprisingly big difference. The vocals seem more focused and the bass more nuanced. There was also a marked reduction in a general hash that eminated from the sides and above. It was one of those things that only became apparent by its removal. Oh. And those Spacials are so much better than the CCS.
In the forthcoming video/s you mentioned, will you cover how you chose your listening position and/or how adjusting your listening position can affect your experience? I posted a question in the comments of video 2 about listening position so if you answer either one, please ignore the other. Thanks for the videos.
I noticed that for the ported speaker the previous treatment was better than the final treatment. There was a bass issue that was very noticable. For the open baffle speaker the final treatment was slightly better. The bass issue that was bad for the ported speaker was barely noticable for the open baffle speaker.
Yeah I keep telling people, to spend time with their speaker setup and room treatment with measurements. Most don’t listen. Oh well… We listen to our room and speaker setup mostly. Speakers and gear come in way way later. Give me a $1000 pair of speaker and a killer setup any day over $10000 speakers and a very bad setup. Yup you heard that right. That big of a difference. I spent a TON of time on speaker setup and treatment experiments etc. and I STILL keep trying different things with my room and speaker setup. Great vid
In my system, the room accounts for 2/3 of the sound. My 2 channel system drives the room and I listen to the room. Changing my room treatment, I can make my system sound too bright or too bass heavy. The room is completely sealed and pretty air tight. Its like being inside of headphones. I use the word soundspace instead of soundstage because I am consistently put in the original space the performance was recorded in. Diffusion is all that is used. Absorption is not. The floor is carpet over cement. Here's a trick I found that really helped create the illusion of a soundspace. Take a small rigid 3"x3" piece of plastic or some other rigid reflective surface and place it in the upper back corner of the room where the walls intersect the ceiling. One tile each in the respective upper left and right rear corners of the room. Point the tiles at the listening position. This will take some jockeying to get it focused, but you can do it with the flashlight on your phone and look for the reflection on the tile. The size of the tile may vary depending on room size. Try it. I'd like to know if another hard core listener finds it as satisfying an experience as i did. Note: Put the flashlight in the center between the speakers about half speaker height and look for the reflection of the flashlight in the tile at the listener position.
Illustrative and informative, thank you for this video! I am looking forward to what comes next. I also would like to ask that, if time and logistics allow, for the possibility of a nearfield desktop (computer desk) analysis down the road. I feel that the practicality and daily consumption of this style of setup is an underserved sector when it comes to data of this granularity. Regardless of the outcome, excellent job!
I really loved this series of video on acustic treatments: I've been preaching for years to my audiophiles circles that before spending thousands of dollars on gears they should think to the first ring of the audio chain: the room. It seems though all my preaching fell on deaf hears (pun intended!). Anyway, one thing I'd try would be to use absorbtion behind the loudspeakers in order to attenuate the first reflection. But a rabbit hole I'd really love you could jump in is using Helmoltz resonators tuned on the longitudinal standing waves of your room to improve the bass response. Cheers from Italy :)
Keeps getting better! Is there no limit? I can still hear the roominess a little, but it's sounding great. The dummy head microphone is a great way to portray the effect over headphones. Excellent work. Gotta buy a dummy head.
You know it's interesting, I listened to these comparisons on my big speakers when I got home, and I guess the sound of my room masks the sound of your room to a fair degree, so they actually sounded better! ?? The bass seemed to have been contoured in a rather interesting way by going through the double transfer function of both speakers and both rooms, and it sounded really punchy. This isn't the first time that I've noticed that a recording of speakers in a room can sometimes be more compelling in certain ways than listening directly to the recording. It's like a light reverb effect, especially when the room has been treated well enough that it's not a harsh and hollow sound.
Very good results, i got to 150-200ms with only furnishing my living room, but its small, so it makes sense you need more stuff in bigger space. My biggest problem was crazy reverbs on lower bass, from 50 to 15Hz, but i contained those by carefully chosing the crossover and applying EQ on the subwoofer. My living room has more depth than width and my main speakers are close to the side walls (in the front corners), but luckily those are pretty directive (KIlipsch Heresy III) so by toeing them more in i eliminated the side reflections from the mid and high freqs. I used REW+UMIK-1 and also some audyssey
Oh, also those lesser reverb time helps on the listening fatique, brain does not need to make so much calculations. Of course people can go wrong and over dampen their rooms too.much
Dang, you did nailed it, almost, because you might not be done yet, tuning the room. Bring in the guitarist from the beginning and shoot a sound clip! For me, not bias at allllllll. Your best was the XLS encore, that got me into real hifi and questionable questions from wifey about over seas shipment, taxes, toll and VAT. 😅 Love your attitude (John Darko 😂) to all of this.
Been great to follow this journey Ron and I look forward to seeing more of what is to come! I've pretty much just stuck to the "common sense" approach when it comes to furnishing and treating my listening room, but I have to admit I am curious to grab some measurements to see what the room looks like on the computer after watching this series.
With the side panels, the midrange and topend are definitely more intelligible (detail/clarity), while the bass is more articulate and less prone to enter into the realm of boominess at certain low frequencies. I know you said to listen via headphones, but I listened using a Cayin Soul 170i tube amp and a pair of Q Acoustic Concept 500s. Even listening to the different music through either the Titans or the Spacials, the difference in sound quality with and without the side panels, was lierally a night and day difference, so definitely keep the side panels. Recommendation: Listen to Shotgun Clown (feat. Eels) by Sharpton Mann. It's a great track to get the midrange and topend correct. It should sound highly revealing through the midrange with a good amount of air on top, while the male vocals should be extremely clear and easy to locate, with great harmonic texture as well.
wow .. this was such an emotional ride.. what a great fantasitc wonderfull series .. goosebumps :D i tip my hat to you sir !! Fantastic. i almost was going to replace my speakers again .. but now i am looking at diffuser panels for the room :D
Unfortunately all I have are a pair of cheap earbuds. The difference was slight, but noticeable. Less reverb and quicker decay of high frequency is what I noticed.
