I'm sorry to hear about this Gene.
That Winer chap is wrong about pretty much everything.
Dr Floyd Toole is correct. In addition Saul Linkwitz is on record that making rooms too dead is a major factor leading to poor reproduction.
I think that most room treatments are put in to tame bad speakers. I have never felt the need to treat any room I have placed a sound system in, in any of my homes.
Winer's room is a total mess and he must be insane to post it on the net. His speakers are a case in point. They are the
Mackie HR624 Mk II speakers.
They would sound awful in most rooms as they have a
terrible off axis response, and very bad tweeters. The woofers are low budget Vifa's. The alignment is 6th order using an ABR. 6th order is ported alignment that requires active EQ as part of the tuning. It was used by KEF briefly. It does extend f3, but at the cost of driver excursion limitation. I assume he crosses it over at 80 Hz at least.
The major problem is that the
off axis response of those speakers is really awful.
Now we expect a lot of reflection from the room. This is absolutely required for proper spectral and frequency balance at the listening position. If the off axis response is poor the end result will be poor.
So this bloke is just proving the point that if you are daft enough to select speakers like he has you end up having to kill the room reflections to even make them listenable.
I suppose some rooms need some bass traps, but as I have often stated this bass boom and ooze is also very much a speaker problem in my view. If the speakers are low Q and non resonant the will be much less likely to excite room resonance. In my room there are no bass traps and yet the bass is tight and well defined in all listening positions. Transients are done in 0.5 msec.
I don't know which SVS sub he is using. I have to say tough I'm yet to hear a commercial sub I find really pleasing.
In his video the Winer chap comes across to me as a deluded lunatic. It seems his business ethics are in the basement.
