SUMMER MUSINGS: "Final" ceiling absorption 😉. AI-assisted summary of Floyd Toole's thoughts on early reflections treatment & discussion on this.

Hey guys and gals, it's July and thus time to enjoy some summer jams, BBQ, and family time ahead. And of course getting into the "Summer Musings" season here on the blog!

Let's "shoot the breeze" and talk about a couple of things in this post related to discussions over the last while with room treatments and acoustics you might want to consider for your own space.

First, as you can see in the picture above, despite the self-proclaimed statement that I was "done", I just had one more little addition to add. I cleaned up and optimized my seating area a little and realized that the rear ceiling panel wasn't exactly overhead. So I added an extra 2' x 4' x 0.8" PET panel immediately overhead above the main listening position. [I also spent some time optimizing the height channels and DSP recalibration along the way.]

Ceiling Absorption Panels (AudioSilk branded PET material 2'x4'x0.8", doubled thickness).

With the recent discussions about room acoustics and treatments, I thought it would be good to continue on this theme and move forward with the next logical step for my listening space. Let's talk about ceiling sound absorption as you can see installed in the picture above.

For years, I've been thinking of doing this but really didn't want to put something up there that could damage the walls. I definitely would prefer not to drill holes unless absolutely needed. Recently, I had some positive experiences with 3M's Command Strips when I put up some picture frames and artwork around the home. These double-sided tape strips were designed to be removable without damaging painted walls. Looking around at options, it seemed that this could be a reasonable ceiling installation solution within weight limits.

On Amazon, there are various options for acoustic absorbers these days. I settled on a package of 4 sheets of 0.4" thick x 2' x 4' AudioSilk-branded polyethylene terephthalate (PET, non-toxic, non-irritant, made typically from recycled plastics like bottles) absorber panels at a good price (~US$110) along with some strong 2-sided tape for doubling up the panels for thickness and of course the 3M Command Strips to stick it up on the ceiling.

Sound Absorption: IKEA Mittzon Floor Standing Panel (+ GIK Acoustic panel).

Greetings audiophiles. Finally, I'm back home in Vancouver after my Asia trip. I love traveling but there always comes a time to look forward to "Home, sweet home." And music to listen to in my personal sound room of course!😌

In this post, let's talk about perhaps one of the most boring things you could buy - a sound absorption panel. Made all the more pedestrian because this one comes from IKEA. At a retail price of US$230 each for the smaller (but IMO adequate for my home audio) 27.5" x 61.75" x 3.125" panel, the IKEA MITTZON Floor Standing Acoustic Screen is inexpensive and easy to find. There is also the larger 35 3/8" x 61.75" model if you prefer for just a little more - US$250.

While this may look boring, I must admit that as I've experienced more and dare say, "matured" in this hobby, the most interesting upgrades do not have to be high-tech active gadgets, bear fancy brand names, or the stuff that seems to capture the latest hype.

No friends, always remember the most important components that contribute to sound quality! Digital technology in particular has reached levels of performance where diminishing returns are quite easily reached these days. Make sure to explore other "domains" and products in your search for high fidelity audio.

Small Room Acoustics: Example of impact with (ultra) high-end speakers in Stereophile. (On AI audio writers, and Asia vacation pictures. 😊)

Last time, we discussed small room acoustics and audiophile listening rooms. In that article, I used an idealized loudspeaker with flat frequency response from 40Hz up. As I'm still traveling, away from my gear, I figured for this article, let's look around published data in audio articles to examine room effects and consider what this means.

One widely available and consistent source of objective data over the decades comes from Stereophile. While there are clear examples in the magazine where they perpetuate the "woo" in audiophilia, I appreciate that they do provide measurements for audiophiles who can read graphs and consider the technical performance of devices beyond subjective claims of how "great" something sounds, at some point in time, to someone, in some nebulous-quality sound room.

So let's take a look at a very recent Stereophile article - this one reviewing the Marten Mingus Septet Statement Edition loudspeakers - and consider the effects from room acoustics. Clearly, at an asking price of US$200k/pair, we're in the zone of "ultra high-end" luxury audio hardware. These speakers would be way above and beyond what the vast majority of audiophiles (never mind "music lovers" at large!) would ever spend.

Audiophile small room acoustics: complex and essential.

In the post "What are the most important audio components?" a few years ago, I said that we need to understand the various audiophile "domains": audio hardware, room acoustics, quality of your music, and of course personal mental engagement. Each of these have a part to play in the achievement of and personal judgment around sound quality.

Of those domains, it's hard to speak about personal mental engagement as this is a highly individual exercise (and related to one's auditory acuity). The quality of the music we listen to again is related to not just personal preferences (like genre) but also what mastering quality and variants like hi-res, multichannel, and on what format (SACD, vinyl, etc.) the record label makes available of our favorite albums.

It's always tempting of course to get excited about audio hardware - the latest toys. For example, recently, I heard that Andrew Jones has another ported box speaker design with paper/fabric drivers, this time with a coaxial tweeter+midrange that's based on field coils / electromagnets, paired to the permanent magnet woofer at something like USD$34k. While I'm sure this could be a compelling design for many, I think we can also recognize that these days, as equipment fidelity has improved significantly to the point where a simplistic "high price = high quality sound" equation no longer works, it's maybe wiser to direct our attention to the other domains.

This then leaves the very important issue of sound room acoustics, an area that we can all to some degree optimize (see also previous discussion on the sound room). I have heard it said that the sound room is the "foundation" from which we build our hi-fi sound system. As with any project, without an adequate foundation, no matter how great the rest of the system may be, you can only achieve a ceiling of performance dictated by the limits of that foundation.

In this post, let's dive a bit deeper into the importance of typical domestic small room acoustics and general principles around achieving good sound quality.

SUMMER MUSINGS: The Soundroom - speaker layout, vibration control & correction. (And importance for the subjective reviewer!)

I thought before summer's over, it was time to "shoot the breeze" again and talk generally about a very important topic that affects all of us audio enthusiasts with what I hope are some practical suggestions from my own "journey" here at home.

The image above of a room set-up came from an article back in 1960 entitled Room Acoustics for Stereo by Abraham B. Cohen (Electronics World, January 1960 - make sure to also check out Part 2 here from February 1960). This was a time when many homes were still transitioning from the monophonic single-channel era to the bold new world of stereophonic "3D" playback with an opportunity to virtually experience an actual soundstage in the comforts of the living room. Those must have been exciting times, perhaps comparable in my lifetime to the late '90s with the release of AC3/DTS receivers providing discrete multichannel home theater.

As you can see from the pair of articles, already back in 1960, the groundwork had been laid out for what constitutes conditions for good "stereorama" sound. Best practice tips to achieve a sense of realism, the variables related to speaker placement in a room, angles to target for from the sweet-spot, distance between speakers and orientation like toe-in. Room characteristics like absorption characteristics of materials, reverberation time, room layout were discussed as well; all this informed by decades of professional recordings and studio design that came before.

MUSINGS / MEASUREMENTS: Multiple subwoofers to reduce nulls. The USB/UFO faithful. And thanks for the blind test submissions!

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...

MUSINGS: Golden Earism (& The Philips Golden Ears Challenge)

Don't you love the term "golden ears"?

I wonder historically when this term was first coined. I suppose it must have been in the murky distant past of times immemorial when primitive man glazed upon the yellowish gleam of Keynes' "barbarous relic" and began ascribing all manners of idealistic properties. Or not...

The other day, a forum poster brought up this link from What HiFi? about Hi-Res audio. Yeah, it covers the basics, but I did want to add an item #5 in terms of "factors to consider":

5. You must have good enough ears to appreciate the difference hi-resolution makes.

I know this can be touchy for some folks, but it is what it is. Our ears (and brains), like all the other sense organs (and cognitive domains) do not have infinite resolution. And like everything else, time is not on "our" side. At 42 years old this year, my ear's "frequency response" only goes up to about 15-16kHz at normal amplitudes. Do I really have the need to go for files with sampling rates of 88kHz+? Honestly, I don't think so... But as I've expressed elsewhere, this is about perfectionist audio so I'm certainly happy to have access to my favourite music using the most accurate technology available (I'm still of the opinion that 24/96 is more than I'll ever need in terms of the technical specs).

If you haven't seen it yet, recently, our friends at Philips have come up with a very cool website called the Golden Ears Challenge. Just enroll with your E-mail address and get going with some ear training. Log off and it'll keep your place in the test. Seriously, if you believe your equipment and ears are up to the task, take the challenge! I suspect some audiophiles will be surprised at the limits of their hearing ability.

I took the Challenge using the ASUS Essence One on my desktop with a pair of venerable Sony MDR-V6 (<$100) studio monitor headphones. I figured, if the V6 is good enough for Roger Waters, it's good enough for me!

I suppose better headphones like my Sennheiser HD800 and being in my much quieter audio room downstairs could have made tasks like hearing high frequency extension or detection of minor amounts of reverberation easier, but the computer desktop was more convenient... Remember to make sure the DAC is set to native 44.1kHz and something like Windows Mixer isn't upsampling.

The Bronze level wasn't difficult at all unless one has hearing issues, I suspect.

Silver level was achieved in one sitting. I think the test music samples were encoded with 320kbps MP3 and it wasn't too hard to differentiate between 320kbps and 128kbps lossy compression - as usual, listen especially to the treble and see if you can hear the loss of detail, more "brittle" rendering, and slight "chirpiness". I found it more challenging detecting small amounts of reverb down at dry/wet ratio of 0.15 later in this test.

Here's the "coveted" Golden Ears achievement :-). You get an E-mail to confirm.

Not bad, took my time over a couple of nights in between some virtual paper work. Achieved with a little patience and using the same ASUS Essence One / Sony MDR-V6 combination. The most time consuming part was getting the Boost/Cut Identification Test right at the various frequencies (63, 125, 250, 500, 1k, 2k, 4k, 8k, 16kHz). A frequency boost at 16kHz with real music was barely audible for me. Tests like the bass boost really benefits from headphones capable of good bass response so I suspect an open unit like my AKG Q701 would not be the best headphone to try this on.

As of this writing, here are the overall statistics for this test:

Not bad, looks like I'm one of 117 who have completed the Golden Ears level so far out of 925 who finished the Basic level (12.6%). Objectively, Golden Ears aren't that rare :-).

Anyhow, I highly recommend giving this a try yourself... I believe that anyone can have an opinion about equipment fidelity just like everyone has the right to have an opinion on what music they enjoy. But it does require good ears technically if one is to claim discernment of small differences between pieces of gear. I think for many, engaging in tests like this one would be very educational if not eye opening in terms of limits of one's hearing. Furthermore, I think doing challenges like these should be mandatory for those who engage in "professional" audiophile hardware reviews focused on audio fidelity. (And those championing technical specifications based on 'articles of faith' like 24/192 over 16/44... errr... who's that Pono guy again?)

-----------------------------------

PS: Remember that JPlay software I measured awhile back which made no difference (actually there was a bug in that version which makes it even worse)? Looks like they've returned with a line of "JCAT" hardware! USB cable for 299Eur, SATA for 349Eur! How about Cat 5e (!) for 349Eur - man, they didn't even bother trying for Cat 7; at least the AudioQuest "audiophile" ethernet cables did! Reminds me of sellers on eBay trying to scalp some bucks by listing items at huge mark-ups with "Buy It Now" to catch shoppers who have never tried "The Price Is Right". This time around, they don't seem to claim sonic superiority of these products - merely "help you create the ultimate PC audio transport and get the most out of JPLAY".

Considering that a high quality SATA-III cable with fastening clips (which this one doesn't even seem to have!) runs for about the equivalent of <$4Eur at my local computer store, these guys are charging at >8700% mark-up presumably for that JCAT logo stamped on, silver plating and teflon coat (of course unless you're pimped out and have a window into your computer case, these will be hidden from view)... Sorry J-Dudes, but IMHO, The Price is Gluttonously Wrong. Why don't you guys show us in what way these are better than good quality generic SATA-III 6Gb/s cables first? (As if there's even a plausible explanation.)