Most unexpected sound improvement

Discussion in 'Audio Hardware' started by Andy Pandy, Apr 8, 2021.

  1. Tim 2

    Tim 2 MORE MUSIC PLEASE

    Location:
    Alberta Canada
    I've tried cable elevators many times, the heavily shielded cables don't seem be effected. imo
     
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  2. tIANcI

    tIANcI Wondering when the hifi madness will end

    Location:
    Malaysia
    Pulling my speakers further away from front wall. Cost me about 15 calories. :D
     
  3. Tone?

    Tone? Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco

    Yeah that’s exactly what I’m talking about as well

    instead of just getting new gear to improve your sound there are SO many tweaks and experiments you can do with speaker placement. And room acoustics.

    when you constantly get new gear you don’t let your imagination and experimentation flow. You bypass them.
    Move the speakers around and see what happens in relation to your room.

    lately I have learned to take measurements with REW and that helps a lot in seeing what different speakers placements are doing to the sound.
    So I tweak and listen. What do I hear? Then take measurements. What did it do to the freq? What did it do to the decay in the room?

    one of the most eye opening things I did was just notice that my tv in the middle of my system was a bit slanted downwards because of the stand it was on.
    So I got up and tweaked the stand to make the tv completely straight vertically and horizontally.
    what happened?
    the sound got bigger vertically. But in a natural way. I noticed that it was a bit short before.
    so for example listening to opera the people were four foot tall before with the screen having a downward slant.
    straightened the tv out and the people sounded their correct height.
    Then I noticed that things got quite a lot brighter. So I figured that when the screen was slanted downwards the reflections were being absorbed by the sofa which the tc with its downward slant was pointing to.
    So up with the blankets in different places to see if it fixed it and what effect it had on the sound
    Sure did.
    took some measurements to verify my theory was correct.
    It did.

    Now I had a wide soundstage and proper vertical height. Blankets helped cut out the reflection noise and smear.
    I could hear the opera singers in their proper height and was getting a lot more detail from their voices such as breaths and other subtleties.

    yeah it was mind blowing to say the least.

    sorry for the long rant but it was super cool.
    Just time spent tweaking speaker positioning and other stuff in the room.
     
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  4. trickness

    trickness Gotta painful yellow headache

    Location:
    Manhattan
    Going back to digital from vinyl.
     
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  5. Ntotrar

    Ntotrar Forum Resident

    Location:
    Tri-Cities TN
    Replacing Cornwalls with JBL Professional 3678.
     
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  6. Ingenieur

    Ingenieur Just a dog looking for a home...

    Location:
    Back in PA
    My TV screen
    Localized and focused soundstage, noticeable if not dramatic.

    [​IMG]
     
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  7. GME

    GME Well-Known Member

    Location:
    Denmark
    48m2 of this (though it wasn't unexpected) it'll do more wonders than any gear mentioned above.

    [​IMG]
     
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  8. Meehael

    Meehael Forum Resident

    Location:
    Slovenia
    I've also noticed that TV angle matters with sound. My girlfriend does a workout in the mornings and she tillts the display towards her to the left only by small margin. When I came to listen music afterwards imaging was all messed up... Vocals and instruments often drifted up, down, left or right depending on pitch or note they sang. It took me some time to figure out the problem.
     
    Last edited: Apr 11, 2021
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  9. Ingenieur

    Ingenieur Just a dog looking for a home...

    Location:
    Back in PA
    48 sq meters ~ 520 sq ft
    8 foot ceiling ~ 66 linear feet
    Wow
    What are your room dimensions? H x W x L

    what is your RT60 time?
    Try this app 'ClapIR', free at Apple and Google
    ClapIR · Prem Seetharaman
     
    Last edited: Apr 11, 2021
  10. Tullman

    Tullman Senior Member

    Location:
    Boston MA
    macster, Ingenieur and doctor fuse like this.
  11. doctor fuse

    doctor fuse Forum Resident

    What, did you cover every square centimeter of your walls with it?
     
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  12. johnny q

    johnny q Forum Resident

    Location:
    Bergen County, NJ
    Honestly? Experimenting with speaker placement and removing the covers from my Focal Chorus 826V speakers.
     
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  13. Pjotr into Music

    Pjotr into Music Don't be afraid to play this LOUD

    Replacing my stock jumpers for old 2nd hand Cardas jumpers and crosswire them. Huge difference
     
  14. Ingenieur

    Ingenieur Just a dog looking for a home...

    Location:
    Back in PA
    I was thinking the same thing. Lol
    Too little reverb may be worse than too much, the sound becomes a point source. You need some reverb for body and realism imo

    The ideal is 0.25 x (V/100)^0.33 sec +/- 0.05
    V in Cu meters
     
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  15. Jeffreylee

    Jeffreylee Rock 'n' Roll Typist

    Location:
    Louisville
    It isn't a power cord. Power cords have a plug.
     
  16. Swann36

    Swann36 A widower finding solace in music

    Location:
    Lincoln, UK
    If so a little more than my $1.67 fusees and for over 1,000 dollars i'd be expecting a lot of improvement ... so i'm hoping thats exactly what motorstereo found :)
     
  17. Tone?

    Tone? Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco

    I personally like a bit more decay since I listen to orchestral stuff a lot.
    Around 4ms for me
     
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  18. GME

    GME Well-Known Member

    Location:
    Denmark
    Cheers, I'll try that and report back.

    I made a quick scetch, probably makes more sense then. This is a garage that's been split into two garages with a big upwards going garage door for each (the traditional aluminum with caravan windows design..) I'm in the smaller of the two "rooms", luckily no one is in the other, other than a car which is rarely used.

    It's divided by two normal sheets of drywall, which acts as a huge baffle transporting sound from one room to the other..speech is clearly audible from one to another. Luckily outside is pretty quiet apart from a lot of damn birds, hence why I plan to use two layers of the 30mm rockwool for the door, and probably 3 or 4 layers for each of the two windows.

    The room is to be used as: recording, mixing, mastering, video editing/watching basically anything pre & post production as well as sometimes for band rehearsals and recordings. Mostly for one person recording vocals and mostly electrical instruments apart from that - though there will be recorded acoustic drumkit and other stuff like percussion etc.

    For now I've put it loosely on the walls and 4 plates on the garage door so far..probably gonna put some on the ceiling but I plan to install most of them with about 30mm space to virtually double the effect, though already putting them up for test like this has made an AMAZING difference.

    Mind you this is not a room for "classical music listening" it's a room to first and foremost produce the content that then later will be enjoyed in various environments, thus I do not need, nor want much of any reverb/smearing to the signal coming in, nor while mixing down or mastering. Also, this being quite a challenging room, 48m2 is certainly not too much. I can and plan to play around with and test for specific areas of issues that I can then attend to by stacking several of these dense rockwool together as a sandwitch, with equal spacing in between - particularly for bass trapping, corners etc. Depending what frequencies and at what areas I need to tame. Also given the not too wide dimensions of the room, I need all the dampening I can get since it will be bound to have amps and speakers that are somewhat close to the back wall and the amount of flutter and standing waves, I'm not aiming for pretty, but acurate sounding, quiet, professional work environment.

    I will say that for the countless hours I've spend learning about this stuff, very few have mentioned what really works - which is, DENSE materials. ALSO FOR ACOUSTIC TREATMENT. Not just for blocking sound from one area to the other. What most people fail to realize is, that most of the commercial materials are far too porous cheap light flimsy crap product that do so much less to acoustics than a simple sheet of material made for construction, applied between floors to dampen sound from people walking around upstairs and downstairs...I've have experimented before with Terrænbatts (translate that yourself) but these Trinlydsbatts (floor step batts directly translated) made by the company Rockwool (not afiliated) are far DENSER than Terrænbatts, and FAR FAR FAR FAR denser than 99.9999999999999% of the acoustic treatment crap products out there.

    Long story short, I couldn't be more pleased with this purchase. Even just getting th 10 packs into the garage I noticed an IMMEDIATE difference. Then quickly throwing them all up on the walls, one plate after another the sound in the room got better and better and better. More and more defined. Mind you I am sitting in a perfect triangle, perfect seating, height etc. position. only thing wrong obviously is that the whole sitting position should be revolved around the position of the speakrs relative to the room - so that might all change once it's all be installed, but I might also continue sitting as it is - haven't quite decided. I use the space in the middle to do the actual performing, so the editing desk kinda takes second preference. This might/will proaby mean I need to compensate more than a dedicated mastering room in terms of acoustic treatment, but so be it..I think I'll concentrate on making an "even" sounding room first and foremost - then I can always add diffusors, and play around with adding or subtracting stuff if I some day magically need flutter echo and smearing back in my life :D

    [​IMG]
     
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  19. Ingenieur

    Ingenieur Just a dog looking for a home...

    Location:
    Back in PA
    That makes sense, not listening, but mixing, recording, etc. you want it as 'dead' as possible.
    Please do the IRClap for science sakel
    I bet you're dang near 0. Lol

    so divided in 1/2: 7.32/2 x 3.68 x ~3 avg. = 40 Cu meters.
    Listening room ~ 0.18 sec.
    Curious to see yours.

    btw: thanks for taking the time to draw it up, etc, that's rare
     
    Last edited: Apr 11, 2021
  20. lonelysea

    lonelysea Ban Leaf Blowers

    Location:
    The Cascades
    Cat.

    [​IMG]
     
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  21. Khorn

    Khorn Dynagrunt Obversarian

    We always had two or three around the house so they could have others of their kind to relate to. We really miss having them.
     
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  22. Sneaky Pete

    Sneaky Pete Flat the 5 and That’s No Jive

    Location:
    NYC USA
    I had an LED bulb in my listening room.
    My highs had been sounding shrill and I felt there was some ultra high frequency ringing going on. I had my amp and preamp recapped and brought up to spec. That didn’t help. As I was listening one night the light bulb burned out. It was in the middle of a song and as soon as the room went black the sound opened up and the highs stopped being shrill. Everything was smoother, sweeter, and more extended. It was the way I remembered my system
    sounding.

    It was the damn LED bulb causing havoc with the highs. I changed the light fixture and went back the old fashioned incandescent bulbs. My system sounds great. Completely unexpected.
     
  23. murphythecat

    murphythecat https://www.last.fm/user/murphythecat

    Location:
    Canada
    high doses of mescaline
    this will make you realize how ridiculous to try to chase upgrade, what you have is already mindblowing
     
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  24. Khorn

    Khorn Dynagrunt Obversarian

    I remember in one listening room I had one of those wall mounted flashing lights to tell you when the phone was ringing. Never really trusted that thing.
     
    Sneaky Pete likes this.
  25. Khorn

    Khorn Dynagrunt Obversarian

    One of my all time faves way back. Unbelievably fantastic organic effects.
     
    Sneaky Pete likes this.

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