1. "I have some DIY treament on the wall behind my chair. And large bookcases on one wall offer diffusion.
But what I really need to do is build a dedicated listening room!"
2. "Carpeting for the first 20 feet, from front of the HT to back of the seating area, followed by 15 feet of tiles.
Sound absorbing ceiling tiles throughout.
Sound is great but the room is not soundproof and when my wife is in the house, must turn down the sound."
3. "It's an uphill battle for several reasons. High end audio and the community they cater to dismiss it mostly and go the tweaking of everything else route mentality.
Secondly, unless you have your own listeing room that can be treated, it will never happen in other rooms that family and guests use .
Not as easy to do as replacing components Takes more knowledge."
Wow! What a wide variety of responses to our "Do you have acoustic room treatments?" question. And the answer is....every one of you guys is correct. Room treatments don't have to come in a box labeled "room treatment". All room furnishings affect the sound in one way or another. Whether they're reflective or absorptive is the question. We just try to get the proper proportion of reflective to absorptive treatments, critically positioned, to turn the acoustic experience at the listening position(s) into one which allows us to hear further into the soundscape.
Read my second short review of of the Denon/Audyssey 5805 system to see what I mean. Take a well done room, like Denon's show HT was and even with slightly overdamped acoustics the listening experience goes past the characteristic sound of particular speakers and into being able to quite easily discern what the sound mixer was doing.
I can't remember ever reading a review in a home theater print mag where the reviewer could hear so far into the mix. I heard the same sort of clarity with the Lexicon V4 EQ room correction circuitry, optional in the MC12 prepro. That mini-review will come out in a day or two. Some of the cleanest, tightest and most accurate response below 250Hz I've heard with a passive crossover loudspeaker. And in a very lightly treated demonstration room at the Rennaisance Hotel at CES.
And Rip, you're going to get you wish too. Part 4 of The CEDIA Seminars covers Room Acoustics; Room Isolation. Steve Haas of SH! Acoustics revealed the only ways to truly isolate bass frequencies from the rest of the house. It ain't cheap as you'll see...
