ASC is pleased to the Martin Dareff Listening Room come to life.
“ASC’s products let me tune the room out of my music. Boom, blur, megaphone, side wall reflections, rear wall bounce and the rest of the room’s sonic problems overcome. My first experience with ASC was more than a decade ago when I called them looking for help tuning new electrostatics into a room. ASC dialed the room right in. They are still here today to help solve a side wall reflection problem in a new room, and the fabric matches what’s on the original traps and treatments. Your largest component is your room and they make the best treatments I’ve run across… great products, great service, great results, and I still have those electrostatics.”
—Martin Dareff
Martin’s room includes TubeTraps, StudioTraps and CinemaPanels from Acoustic Sciences.
Listening Room Acoustics
The listening room begins with the listening footprint which is then is located somewhere inside the listening room. The listening footprint varies with personal taste but generally is an isosceles triangle with the speakers located at the two corners of the short side of the triangle (b) and the listener set back, a further distance (h) at the vertex. The base of the triangle identifies the plane of the speakers. Typically speakers are 7 to 8 feet apart and the listening position is set back about 10 feet from the plane of the speakers.
The location of the listening footprint tends to be centered in the listening room with the speaker end of the footprint closer to the front end-wall of the listening room than the back end-wall, which is behind the listener. Speakers tend to be directed towards the back wall with a slight toe-in towards the listener, but not aimed directly at the listener. The distance between the side-wall and the speaker is usually less than the distance between the speakers and the front wall.
These dimensions, as well as their Room Ratios, are given a lot of attention, the goal being to position the loudspeakers and listener in the listening room such that the sound heard is the most faithful version of the actual audio signal, which can always be referenced by listening to the audio signal over headphones.
Once the listening footprint is sensibly located and oriented inside the listening room, sound absorbers, commonly known sound traps are added to various surfaces of the listening room. Typically a thick carpet is moved into the room and slid under the two speakers and as far back into the room, past the listening location. Bass traps, low-frequency sound absorbers are located in the corners of the room and treble range sound panels and sound diffusers are located along the walls of the room.
Considerable effort is applied to determining where each bass trap and each treble range panel should be best located. The overall goal is to minimize the plethora of room reflections so that the direct sound from the speakers can be clearly heard within the context of an ongoing and evolving ambience which is comprised of the reverberation and reflections of those sounds most recently played.
The process of converting the relatively empty sounding listening room into a high-performance listening room is very complicated, but the techniques which yield amazing listening performance have been developed. We can skip over this technology for now. Once the pattern of sound reflections has been cut back and sculpted into a quiet and complimentary running ambience, the last link of the audio chain has been sonically groomed to near perfection, a real compliment to the nearly perfect electronic part of the audio chain. The problem is that this quiet, faithfully performing sonic link in the audio chain, now reveals yet another problem. This problem had remained hidden from detection as long as the sonic reflections remained out of control.
