Some listening room projects involve custom design, new construction or remodels where the aesthetics are not based on acoustics. Voicing of the room is still required. Some parts of the acoustic compliment may be integrated into the design while others lay hidden behind grillwork, drapery or scrim. Coordination between owner, designer and acoustic requirements is essential.

Standard acoustic products are usually not involved in custom projects. Visible acoustic elements in a customer project are themselves unique; with coordinated dimensions, visual & mechanical requirements are integrated. The non-visible or hidden acoustic products frequently involve customized acoustic devices, all designed by ASC, built in our factory, packaged and shipped with a contractor friendly install.

Most frequently we help upgrade the existing living room. The owner has painstakingly put together the audio system that should be sounding great. It’s not sounding great and that can be very frustrating. We study the room to know how it is handling the wavefront, and how the speakers play in the room. We interview and listen to what the owner has to say. Often, a simple test can be done to help clarify or sort out the difficulties.

We then spec the acoustic package that fits the upgrade budget and addresses the concerns of the owner and our findings about the performance of the audio system. Surprisingly we find that about half of the time the room is actually acoustically set up wrong, backwards or sideways. The first problem to resolve is the orientation of the set up in the listening room, then we move to acoustics.

The finest acoustic performance is found in purpose-built reference high class listing rooms. These rooms are found in the headquarters of high-end audio manufacturers, some dealer showrooms, playback rooms for writers and product reviewers and some fortunate audiophiles. These rooms generally conform to the golden standard audiophile reference room referred to as 2C3D: 2 Channel, 3 Dimensional. 2C3D was coined by Bruce Brisson of MIT cables.

These rooms begin with healthy room dimensions that depend on the type of speaker intended for the room and designs include speaker position and listening position. Each speaker is set on a concrete pier with an independent foundation and not connected to the floors at all. The floors are not suspended joists but overly supported, multiple piers to eliminate sympathetic vibration and assembled with structural damping to eliminate sound vibration conduction. Walls and ceilings are semi-floating, converted into giant deep bass membrane bass traps. Sometimes ASC proprietary sub bass soundproofing is included. Once the room is built correctly for use as a high end listening room, it is fitted with the appropriate acoustic complement.

For decades Audiophiles have relied on ASC’s award-winning TubeTraps to get their room sound perfected. The IsoThermal TubeTrap continues this tradition with our new patented technology by delivering 2x the bass absorption. When combined with a fully adjustable diffuser, this acoustic workhorse delivers dynamic broadband sound absorption & diffusion to help your room sound lively & tight.

TubeTraps are available in 67 beautiful colors & many different sizes.