Even big rooms, such as concert halls, have issues, but because of their sheer size the problems are different in nature from those that beset a small room.And by a small room, I mean virtually every space that most of us actually live in, unless you reside in Buckingham Palace or the dining hall at Hogwarts.High frequency issues, such as excess reverberation or even more serious problems such as sound bouncing off tile floors or one or more walls of windows, can be hard to treat.
But they can minimized though not always in a domestically acceptable manner. If you love that open, full-wall view from your 50th floor Manhattan penthouse, hanging heavy drapes might be followed by divorce papers. Youll find no shortage of help claiming that this sort of room isnt a problem, and if you only spend gobs of cash for the right speakers, which theyre only too ready to sell you, the problems will go away. They wont. Some situations will be intractable unless youre willing to accept that youll need to add acoustic room treatments of some sortor move. Problems in the bass, roughly below 400-500 Hz, are different. They arise largely from reflections between adjoining walls, setting up standing wave patterns that interact to produce peaks, dips, and even nulls in the response. These cause the bass response to vary in different parts of the room. Software Audyssey Microphone Calibration File Free Of ThemSome rooms have fewer such problems than others, depending on their shape and dimensions, but few of the rooms any of us are likely to live in are totally free of them. The most obvious treatment for these bass issues is carefully and tediously repositioning the speakers and the listener to positions that minimize these modes at the listening position. You cant have the screen on the front wall, the main speakers on the left side of the room, and the listening seats on the right Thats one among many reasons why separate subwoofers, which are non-directional up to a point, are useful; they allow the main speakers to be located where they have to go while putting the subs wherever they perform best. But positioning subwoofers for the optimum result (and more than one are desirable for reasons beyond the scope of this blog) is a major topic in itself. Physical room treatments that can deal with bass, such as bass traps, are generally too large to be practical in a home situation. But electronic equalization, or room EQ, is a friendlier solution, though not a perfect one (theres no such thing as perfectionin audio or anything else). Various types of manual- or computer-adjustable graphic and parametric equalization exist, but require considerable skill and test tools to use properly. You cant do room EQ by ear, though that hasnt stopped fools with graphic equalizers from trying to do so over the years (including me, at a more nave age). But there are three popular forms of room EQ available to users with at least minimal technical skills: Dirac Live, Anthem Room Correction (ARC), and Audyssey. The first two require a home computer of some sort, but Audyssey doesnt. There are other room EQ formats as well, but theyre generally either proprietary, such as from Yamaha and OnkyoIntegra, or found in crushingly expensive products from the likes of Trinnov and JBL Synthesis). I have no experience to date with Dirac Live, and limited experience with ARC in Paradigm subwoofers and Anthems premier 2-channel integrated amplifier (the latter reviewed recently by editor Al Griffin and by yours truly in the July 2018 issue of Stereophile. But the new AV8805, now in my system, offers it as well, together with a new feature allowing the user to limit the top end equalization to any preferred frequency. Even then, however, the before and after results differed little above about 1 KHz (which is why the results depicted below only show the results up to that frequency).
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