When 1/2 the total sound is the room (and that may be a low number). I disagree with you 100% I've NEVER heard a room that didn't need treatment.
BTW I never worked in a hammer mill either.
Vibration control just like decoupling is very important. BUT no room treatment?
Blanket statements like this are what new people should not pay attention to. There is not a speaker design around depending on the
location of the speakers that some type of treatment wasn't or was added to make it SOUND correct. The wrong treatment can be
worse but not by much.
I've met a lot of people that built speakers, I've never EVER heard that statement. "A SPEAKER THAT FIXES THE ROOM".
It has always been my experience that room CORRECTION via mechanical passive materials, was where to start. How do your speakers
work in my room or anyone else's for that matter. What an arrogant statement to say the least.
Now there are Magic Speaker Designers too?
It's like saying chainsaws are worthless, Then someone STARTS one and YOU say what's that noise?
It's obvious you don't listen to other systems to make a reference like that. WOW.
No room treatment, I know I wouldn't be listening to it for long. You like Yoko Ono by chance? Please post your last hearing test.
and lay
off the magic mushrooms.
Yes, it is the speaker and not the room, unless you are accustomed to place a speaker in a public lavatory.
If your family and friends sound perfectly normal in a room then a speaker should as well. I will admit speakers usually do not. But yes, it is largely a speaker problem.
In fact if you have an instrumentalist play his instrument in a room, it is the deadened room that will alter the expected sound of the instrument, not the untreated one.
So why is this? There are two aspects to this, the LF behavior of the room and everything else.
Just to show you I do not have treated walls, here are a couple of pictures of my room.
The LF problems are a function of room dimensions, and due to reinforcement and cancellation of reflected LF waves in the room. This effect is to a very large extent affected by the dimensions of the room, and room treatments do not help this much, unless the treatment was severe and would be a very bad room. This is primarily set by the ratios of the room dimensions. Since this is a new home, I was able to set optimal ratios of the room dimensions.
The speakers however do have a hand in this. Most speakers are resonant by virtue of their LF tuning. Even sealed speakers are resonant, but by carful design and DSP in the speaker design this can be minimized and actually now controlled in active designs.
There is a design which I have long favored that can be built and designed to be essentially non resonant, and still have very good and extended bass output. That is the aperiodically damped transmission line speaker. This can be damped to the point where this minimizes this room effect by reducing the Q of the speaker below 0.5. This can be determined by the impedance curve. This occurs when just enough damping is added to the pipe to suppress one of the two peaks of impedance. At that point the LF roll off will transition from fourth to second order. The weight of particular damping materials required to achieve this can now be precisely calculated after the model of George Augspurger. He has allowed me the privilege of hosting his design program on my
web site free to all. The take home is that this critical damping reduces reinforcement of these problematic reflections.
The higher reflections are a different issue, and actually required for realistic reproduction and contribute to everyday life, and make every day sounds recognizable, especially voices you know well and easily recognize. So why do speakers have a particular and serious problem in this area?
The reason is actually simple, and it is due to sever aberrations in the direct sound of a speaker from the reflected sounds from the walls of the room. This severe defect is present in the majority of speakers unfortunately. It is caused by the off axis response not mirroring the on axis response. Our brains detect this serious defect and do not like it. This is where reducing room reflections helps but is far from the total answer. The correct solution is better speakers. If the off axis response closely mirrors the axis response our brains are happy. If not they cry foul. This defect can not be corrected by equalization. As EQ will alter both the axis and off axis responses and they will never match!
Here are the axis and off axis responses of one of my front right and left speakers.
Here is the center channel speaker, which is a coaxial design to give good uniform coverage to the whole listening area.
Now the room curves. I should state that my speakers are active, and the baffle step compensation is readily adjustable to voice speakers to the room. This is something that active design allows, and in a passive design is limited essentially to just two settings and as far as I know not available in commercial designs. JBL have, or did, have and expensive active design with adjustable BSC. (Baffle step compensation)
So here are three total system room curves. No Audyssey or Eq programs are in use and nor are they required.
This is the MLP at the center seat second row. The lowest trace is the impulse response and you can see all speakers are perfectly timed to the MLP. Obviously that can only occur at one position in the room. You can see there is slight room gain due to LF reflection reinforcement, but it is not severe and listening test show this balance is actually optimal.
Front row center.
Rear row center.
As you can tell, this room sounds very good indeed. Hanging dampening material about would only spoil it.
I should state that I now have 68 years experience building speakers and learned the art in the proverbial world of hard knocks. I started early and built my first speaker when I was seven years old.
