What Is Hi-Fi? Art Noxon PE, President of ASC and TubeTrap inventor discusses the topic.
Room Setup
To understand basic concepts for listening rooms we realize that each room is different and the equipment to be setup in the room can also vary. Still there are fundamental features in most all audiophile playback rooms. The orientation of the equipment in the room is fundamentally based on protecting the expanding sphere of bass pressure which is centered on the woofer of the loudspeaker.
The front of the room is where the loudspeakers are located. It should be symmetrical with respect to the speakers and have fairly hard surfaces with no open doorway or hallways, no acoustic venting to unload the pressure wave of one speaker differently than for the other speaker. The speakers are set wide apart, typically 8 to 10 feet apart and the width of the room also needs to be wide, typically at least 16 wide, otherwise the speakers experience some degree of acoustic loading, the megaphone effect, which changes the efficiency of the speaker in the lower range, hence its tambour becomes bass heavy.
The vents, the openings into the room work best for listening if they are located behind the listener. The kitchen break out, hallways and stairwell allow the bass wave once heard to continue on, out of the room, expanding into the rest of the volume of the house. This adds a desirable reverberance while minimizing bass wavefront reflection off the back wall and the accompanying standing wave and resonant mode effects.
We sonically erase, and then rebuild your listening room. Each surface reflection helps to sonically define the listening room. TubeTraps include a treble absorbing side and a treble diffusing side. We use the absorbing side to erase the old room and the diffusing side to create the new listening room — a wide expanse of sonic space where imaging, soundstage width, depth and surround all come alive along with full bandwidth musicality. We end up with the industry acclaimed audiophile 2C3D reference listening room. Get started now and discover a new world of adventure where each sonic upgrade opens into yet another great new vista of audiophile listening.
Although most HiFi rooms are existing rooms in a home that have been renovated to some degree, some audiophiles have the means to build dedicated audiophile listening rooms from the ground up. In these cases the desired room performance can be built into the design and construction of the room. Audiophile rooms are dedicated to supporting a particular kind of listening experience. They are unlike normal residential rooms. Without proper room conditioning the high end audio equipment cannot achieve its potential in performance.
- Setup equipment and listener with respect to room geometry
- Damp sympathetic acoustic and structural vibrations of room.
- Damp reverberant acoustic and structural vibrations of room.
- Damp treble range reflections
- Diffuse treble range reflections
- Add discrete reflections.
- Soundproofing
With basic concepts for listening rooms, the primary goal in these rooms is to hear the loudspeaker recreate music without room acoustic induced distortions and sound masking effects. The secondary goal is to cultivate the acoustic ambience suitable for listening, an envelopment by a blend of discrete reflections and directional reverberation. A third goal, which indirectly supports the audiophile experience, is to develop some sense of privacy. This manifests itself as keeping sound from bothering other people and keeping sounds by others from bothering the listener, essentially soundproofing.
