Your room looks like great fun and really careful attention to tuning the components (I loved the Townshend isolation platforms when I had them under my Q3s)
Dimensions: 10’ × 18’ Medium
Ceiling: 9’
Quick update on the ongoing story of my UK setup. As I mentioned after only seven months or so of use for my new room in West Sussex I'm moving again!
I've attached a plan (scaled in meters) and a few photos of the current room. As you can see it is a custom designed build mostly in plywood, vented to act as a bass trap and damped in all walls and ceiling. In addition the walls and ceiling are isolated from the basic garage. One area that could be improved is probably the damping of the walls themselves with some sort of constrained layer material.
The room has been a very interesting experience to really help me understand how the design and shape of a room influences the performance of your system. After many months of listening and experimenting I believe I finally have a handle on what the system itself is capable of delivering and a profound realisation of how fundamentally the room defines what you hear.
Before I get to this a quick update on system changes – basically only the upgrade of the Mutec to REF10 SE status, plus some power supply upgrades by the UK Mutec dealer. Other than that the system is as in the US – with of course the upgrade to the latest limited edition SR Galileo PowerCells! I’ve also been restricted to CD listening as I never got around to installing my vinyl setup.
Back in Portland I had a room that was warm, enveloping and exciting with rich round and deep bass. The basic sound was good and acoustic folk type music in particular sounded very believable with great 3D imaging. However, the room would often overload, and complex music tend towards sounding harsh. Image scale was also variable, and the bass tended towards a little tubbiness (i.e. emphasising the upper mid tom tom range)
Initially in the UK I was able to get close to the same sound, and spent time adjusting the amount of SR tuning (primarily ART bowls) in the room to optimise the soundstage. However, on a whim one day knowing I was taking the room down I decided to try taking off the acoustic fabric panels covering every wall. These are taut panels of fabric designed to cover room treatments while being acoustically transparent.
Wow! What a change. All of the sudden the room came alive and sounded completely different. Images took on a genuine true to life scale – i.e. vocalists became points in space perfectly located relative to one another, instruments scaled to the size of the recording and the instrument (i.e a solo violin playing in an orchestra is actually tiny). In addition, I could pick apart drum lines and interplay in percussion in a way I never had been able to before. I also realised how much the SR add ons were colouring the room – adding an artificial sound stage and metallic tone that was now very apparent. The only SR acoustic treatments I now use are a pair of FEQs which are actually fundamental to the performance of the room.
So what had changed? In a word I think the room was now preserving timing. By this I mean how well the room stops and starts and does so while maintaining the relative integrity of the signal. An over damped room will stop too soon and sound dead. However, an overly resonant room will muddy everything up. However even an ideally (by say RT60) optimised room if overly diffuse will deliver a mix of reflected sound cues that blend reflections from all over the room and mess up the original sound cues in the recording. The same room with a more dominant primary (ie. first reflection point etc) resonant signature retains the timing of the original recording and the brain can make more sense of that and work back to the original cues. So the tubbiness I’m describing (which is shorthand for an overall warm bloom but a muddying of spacial and subtle stylistic cues) I think is the effect of an uncontrolled wash of diffuse second order reflections.
The balance I’m now getting is much closer to the mix from headphones — it’s probably not what many would be after but is hyper analytical and very dynamic — it excels on classical music rendering each player in perfect scale but contained in their own space (if recorded that way). Overly mixed and tweaked studio recordings are treated honestly with all the trickery and artifice laid bare. I’m not meaning that the sound favours “better” recordings but simply that it is truthful — honest recordings (by which I mean ones that are either informed by a true “absolute sound” mindset or ones that have more of a “field” character) are often the ones I like best.
A couple of examples can help make this point. The first is Chesky. I own a number of Chesky binaural CDs that historically I've never warmed too — take for example “Dazzling Blue” by Alexis Cole. On my past systems this has sounded blown out and confused. But now it all makes sense and the absolute relationship of all the players in space is clear to see. This review gets it quite well — I’d say the room now delivers the sound as described via headphones https://www.soundstagesolo.com/index.php/features/9-music-reviews/137-alexis-cole-dazzling-blue
Another example is Susan Cagle, “The Subway Recordings” — this was recorded live at Times Square Station at rush hour and frankly on many systems sounds absolutely terrible, overloaded and chaotic with a tilted up overly loud vocal and boomy drums and bass. Get the blend of direct and reflected sound right however and the vocal snaps into place, the relative position and scale of all the instruments makes sense and you are in the station with her and the band.
I also think the system is getting closer to the real sound of live acoustic performance. I’ve often gone to classical performances and come away disappointed that it didn’t sound like my hifi (i.e. it wasn’t glowing with bloom with each player highlighted in space) but the reality is music in the real world doesn’t sound like that. Pianos are not 12’ wide but they are incredibly dynamic. Vocal soloists don’t sound as if they’re six feet in front of you, but they can give you incredibly subtle inflections and go from nothing to full tilt in a breath. The system is now delivering this and I’m finding great pleasure in digging into my back catalogue and comparing different performances of the same piece.
So I guess at the end of the day the big discovery to me is how essential it is to get this timing element right — probably as important if no more so than frequency range, flat response and all the rest — you can listen though and adjust for all manner of frequency anomalies but you cannot recreate timing cues that have been lost.
The lesson for me is to take nothing for granted – continual experimentation is the basis for really understanding what your system could deliver. Get off the “upgrade” bandwagon and spend time really getting to grips with how the room and system interact – only then can you really benefit from what your existing equipment can bring you.
I’ll take all the lessons I’ve learned from this room into my new setup which is going to be slightly larger (20’ by 24’ rather than 15’ by 18’) which should allow a little more space to breathe and also more room for all of the equipment (including vinyl). The basic room itself is an 36’ by 48’ office on top of a garage block in an early 19th century brick and timber barn so a very different space but should make for an interesting experience – and hopefully somewhere I can stay and listen for a very long time.