A few weeks back, I ran into this interesting article - "
Is the room the most important component?".
In summary, it seems like the article is basically saying that we can rearrange our gear or perhaps treat our rooms in ways that sound good, thus making the room less important than a general consensus might suggest. There seems to be an undertone of trying to downplay the role of the sound room and suggesting that one can spend more money on high quality gear and still benefit. OK, sure, to some extent that's true; but there are obviously limits. After all, if the room is way too small, cubical, highly reflective and impractical to treat, speakers inappropriately shoved deeply against walls, or if there is no space behind the seating position, there's obviously no point spending $$$$ on gear that one can barely appreciate! In my opinion, the quality and size of the room and quality of the gear (especially speakers) should be reasonably balanced.
IMO, without doubt, the
room does play a major role in the sound quality; I think it would be silly to suggest otherwise even though I have heard some completely deny this over the years! For example, objectively we can easily show the nodes (nulls) and antinodes (peaks) resulting from reflections and standing waves in our small domestic listening rooms. Subjectively, these effects/limitations are easily audible as well. The way we arrange the speakers will interact with the inherent properties of our listening room in ways much more significant than much of the concerns "
hardware audiophiles" often speak of or obsess over (like which CD player/DAC/streamer/server we use, cable differences, or
if jitter even is audible :-).
The above should be obvious to readers already. Over the last month, with "social isolation" in place, there was time after work to try out something I've wanted to play with for awhile. Let's see if I can smooth out the low-frequency response in my room by experimenting with the use of an additional small subwoofer...
