You ain't the only one, buddy!
You know I have the Revel Salon2, Linkwitz Orion, and KEF 201/2 speakers, and I'm EYEING the KEF Q900!
Great speakers measurements on HTMag.
Stereophile is coming out with the Q900 review/measurements too. So if the measurements also look great on Stereophile, the Q900s will be even harder to resist.
You confuse me, Acu, you really do
Please take this in the spirit in which it's intended (which is lighthearted)...
You seem to enjoy seeing professional measurements of speakers - those measurements seem to have at least a slight influence on you when it comes to which achingly expensive speakers you decide to try next (you lucky bastard
).
And yet, you pooh-pooh the measureable effects of room treatments!
I'm just so confused by that
All of those lovely speaker measurements are either conducted in an anechoic chamber or in as close to an anechoic scenario as possible. Stick those same speakers into any real-world room and take a measurement from the seating position and they won't look anywhere near flat.
I dunno, perhaps you're just used to your room's acoustics and you prefer those acoustics over a treated environment. But I just find it bizarre that you're willing to shell out large quantities of cash for some of the coolest speakers out there, but then say to "not spend a penny" on acoustically treating your room!
I think it's totally fine to prefer your room's acoustics. If it's just you as an individual, it's all about enjoyment and personal preference 100%. But I just can't agree with telling other people, especially newbies, that acoustic treatments aren't worth the relatively low cost.
I just take my cues from the handful of professional mixers and sound engineers with whom I am acquainted. I've just enjoyed my limited time in their studios so much and found those experiences to be so enlightening! Those mixing studios are heavily damped and pretty darn "dead" sounding. "Deader" than my small home theater since I've used diffusion in addition to absorption and bass trapping. But the resolution, detail and clarity of those mixing studios. It's just an eye-opener (or ear-opener as the case may be). My friend's studio in which he uses Focal SM11 monitors - I've just never heard any other system where the tiniest 0.5dB alterations are genuinely noticeable; and there's just no way that those minute details - even from such amazing speakers as the SM11 monitors - would be audible if it were not for his studio being virtually anechoic.
If there's one thing I've learned though, it's that there is no "right" or "wrong" in audio. There are no standards like there are in video. No coordinates for a calibrator to target, no delta E tolerances to consider. Pro audio mixers are OBSESSED with the concept of "translatability" - where what they consider to be the most vital parts of the audio recording come across clearly, more or less regardless of the playback system. They want listeners to be able to play their tracks on iPod earbuds, car audio systems, $200 HTiB speakers or mega-buck "audiophile" speakers and have the track sound good on ALL of them. Not the same, obviously, but still enjoyable and with the most vital parts of the mix always present and intact. That's their job and that's their goal. But in the pursuit of that goal, they also strive to mix in an environment where every detail and smallest alteration is laid bare so that they can accurately gauge whether or not each change they make is having the desired effect.
So for me, I can't help but think of the room's affect on the sound as anything other than - strictly speaking - a distortion. All of those lovely graphs and measurements, they're meaningless when you put them in an untreated room. I don't aim to take the room completely out of the equation. That's impractical and one might as well just listen to headphones if that's what one's after. But I firmly believe that reducing the strong, early reflections and reducing standing waves and echoes is a vital part of the audio system as a whole. And I just think it's a disservice to all the fancy gear that we all lust after to dismiss room treatments as an equal partner in the audio experience.
That's all...y'know...short and to the point from me...always...
lol
