After my visit to the "Raven's Haven" I decided it was time to enter the world of tuning my room and thus far built six absorber panels.

I am now testing them out and playing with the position/orientation and having pretty good luck getting a better 3D sound stage.

Any recordings that emphasize the 3D effect/placement of musicians you'd suggest listening to?  

I have some of the usual suspects like Pink Floyd and a smattering of live Jazz and well recorded studio jazz (Kind of Blue, etc.).

Any suggestions are appreciated.

"Earl Hines Plays Duke Ellington" is a recording of fantastic solo piano by one master playing the music of another master and the quality of the recording can make this sound like a real piano in a room on a great system, worth checking out. There are different releases of this on vinyl and cd, there were three volumes altogether but they all share the same excellence so any and all will serve.

Theres a lot going on in John martyn`s studio albums (electric period)
Not many guitars at all but so many sounds popping up. A rich tapestry's of, well, I`m listening to this one now



and its always a pleasure to get drawn in.

You could try these...mine are error corrected redbook Cd files.

If you like Bosa Nova in a newish, but more or less old style..."bluebossa" by Ana Caram. Great sound stage width and depth.

Archie Schepp and Niels-Henning Orsted Pederson, "Looking at Bird"...pretty mellow Schepp...just sax and stand up bass. Not a huge stage, but just right and a nice recording...holographic.

If those Room Lenses weren't so expensive...

I might make a set and see what happens. It's a neat concept, but hard to swallow at $1200 for a set of three...especially when they offered no way for tuning them for your rooms particular nodes.

Thanks everyone for your responses.  I think there may be some good examples there of what I am after.  

Maybe a more specific description of what I hear could help one of you steer me in the right direction - via other recordings to test and/or room treatments to explore.

I have now achieved a virtual soundstage that eclipses the entire area in front of my listening chair.  Speakers disappear.  Height and width is only limited by the recording.  Overall depth of the complete stage is good. Within that soundstage, on good recordings, the individual instruments and/or vocals have their own 3D "orb."  They seem to float within that soundstage having their own height, width, depth and radiating decay.

What I feel is still compressed is where those orbs of sound appear in that soundstage from front to back.  So I can't tell for example, where the bass player is positioned relative to the vocalist, etc. in terms of depth.  I know they are on the left side, but front to back on the stage, everything seems somewhat bunched up in the rear of the soundstage.

So I was looking for good recordings that others can definitely differentiate the front to back location of the "orbs" within the soundstage so I could see if I indeed do have a issue to work out.

That sounds right up my alley, Lon!

http://www.polkaudio.com/forums/showthread.php?22736-SDA-Playlist

....large thread here to check out!


You might not have SDA like I have... . However, with a Decware Amp it is there with these too!

To bad ALL recordings are not as good as a REFERENCE RECORDING, A PROF. JOHNSON RECORDING....BUT, that is where Decware comes in/for my Listening Room & SDA SRS comes in for the Living Room System... .   -S

Palamino and all.

My room/system does really well width, height, and depth, with great spacial accuracy and individual player saturation. Though I prefer the sound with HR-1s, soundstage did not change notably going from MG944s to HR-1s in this room. I don't have any official diffusers, but do have round log beams with angled rough wood boards for a ceiling, irregular adobe walls, and open segues to other spaces. I also use Synergistic Research Art Basik bowls (they are placed at first reflection points on the sides, and  front and back) and a Kemp Schumann resonator. Both contribute to a more defined sound and soundstage in this room.

I have used these for years, so thought I should test them. The difference is subtle in ways, but each is quite clear in contributing its own part. The combination is a very real aspect of a great soundstage. As LR said, the Decware is a big first step, but in this room, these tools really help. I can't say how much they do compared with official diffusers since I have none. I also built a small low bass, and a small mid bass trap, and more absorbers strategically placed in areas where sound got bunched up.

One thing I have really noticed in this difficult room is that when my bass/mid-bass is too dominant in the frequency balance, masking the upper mids and highs, at some point it weakens the sound stage. Right now I have a nice warm tube set that is really good at sound stage though, so it depends on tubes here. I do generally use less pushy, less dense OB3s in my Torii rather than OA3s giving a sound that is still warm, but more articulate. Also, this is where the Schumann resonator contributes in this room...it articulates without messing with the frequency balance in any negative way (positive actually, better micro detail rounding out the timbre).... I think anything that contributes to good power treatment and vibration control really helps by cleaning up/articulating what is there.

My other room also has a great sound stage with a similar ceiling to this, and with segues to other spaces, but with flat sheetrock and masonry walls. It does have a lot more speaker placement flexibility though and it has a great soundstage with no treatment at all, not much of a power filter, and no vibration control. I have not put much energy into that system yet, but the room is so easy, and I don't use it as much, so it is not pressing.

I also find the recording effects the quality of soundstage location and saturation, or, likewise, with well saturated spacial information, the plausibility of the player placement is not always great based on engineer choices.

The recordings I mentioned above do width and depth well in my rooms. Don't know if you can play digital files, but if you can get individual songs without compression, "Inutil Paisagem" is the test tune I use on Ana Caram "bluebossa." Not being as saturated and simple a recording as the Schepp one, it is a good test for bass and drum differentiation in width and depth. They are well back through the wall in this room and spatially well placed, the drums further back and right, the bass forward of them and left.

One with big, complex, and layered music is Vision: The Music of Hildegard von Bingen. This is a new style Hildigard thing with additions of bass, big drums, bells, and with the occasional obvious electronic hyped instruments I uncheck in my play lists, but that is me. There is clear attention to sound stage in this production. I use the tune "Praise of the Virgin" as a test tune. Great for analyzing width and depth, bass, soft or hard mids, highs...the lot.

Also Ayub Ogata the tune "Kothbiro." Nice saturation width and depth, and a good test for depth. With subtler depth differentiation on some of the up front voices and instruments (several feet here), it is quite deep on others. For me the piano is about 15 feet behind the speakers and the bass a bit forward of the piano and not far left of it, so a good test for depth and right/left location and saturation.

Good luck pulling in the front to back part!

Will, I'm so intrigued by those little bell like cups and stuff you have. I'm very, very skeptical, but very curious.

Marky, you have photos of your setup!? I love seeing rooms with sound treatment!

If anyone is curious, I have a collection of diffuser images I've put up on my ZenFolio gallery. I have a ton more I need to add, but it's my own little collection of "sound treatment porn" LOL

http://lonelyraven.zenfolio.com/p968463117

I am open to any treatments or products that take me from this:



To more of this:



I'm getting a great horizontal and vertical soundstage and good holographic voice and instruments.  I am just trying to get them more separated front to back (with recordings that are engineered this way).

My speakers are actually toed in about what is showing in the diagram.  I experimented to get to that point but I continue to play with it.  I'll start pointing them further out and see if it helps.


I recently built 7 24X48 2" panels http://acousticsfreq.com/blog/?p=62 and the results were pretty dramatic.  That is what got me going on this path.  I have one in the middle behind the speakers, two acting as quasi bass traps in the corners, two at the mirror reflection points on the sides, one in the back in the middle and two on the ceiling.  Helped the imaging and tamed the bass.  Best $120 I have spent on audio.

Palomino,

I just noticed you use a Mini with Audirvana. Audirvana Plus has eq, and may be really interesting to play with. I use AppleAUfliters, which do low shelf, high shelf and three parametric EQs in the middle. With four filters you can do a lot.

To find troubled bass zones I set a narrow Q, like .1-.3 octave, jack up the Dbs maybe 10 Db and slowly slide across the frequencies until the nasty resonant ones show up. I write them down as I go. Then it is easy to keep the Q really narrow and adjust down by sound....or to widen the Q's a bit if necessary to cover larger resonant areas and adjust until it sounds right.

Also interesting to explore small changes in the mid to upper frequencies, same method as above but less Db...maybe up or down 3-5 Db might tell the tale to find areas you might like more or less of.

With the graphic interface in Audirvana, it can be fun to play with it as you listen. Narrow the Q some, widen it, change the cut or hit.

I start with recordings that are good, but may be too bassy, or for mids and highs, that may be too intense or hard. It can be tedious, but if you make small adjustments, it is safe enough and can really improve the sound if your treatments are not quite enough, and do it very transparently for your whole collection.

Looks like you have it all going on. It is amazing how tuning can be so captivating, that bait of better sound always tempting us.

I am not an Audirvana user, so no expert by any means. Though I always like it at first, I tend to go back to Pure Music. Somehow, with this system/room, I get a more authentic, less processed sound with Pure. It is like Audirvana tries to work the "analog" smoothness angle a bit much, along with a bit too much push and definition layered into this effect. Subtle though and I think loads of folks prefer Audirvana, and I have explored Pure more.

You got me experimenting with it. Thanks for the reminder. One reason I really want to go further with it is that it appears to work in integer mode with my Tranquility DAC. So I will see if I can refine its settings to my tastes.

It was crashing at times for me as it integrated with iTunes also. I may have solved it by lowering the memory allocation to it. They recommend at least 2.5 GB to be left for the computer.

I love EQ to finish out my room problems (and preferences), and my settings are minimal (most less than 2 Db). But even if you don't use it in playback, it is an interesting and instructive way to identify problem areas for treatment. Flexes the hearing/perception abilities.

I have not gone with REW as it looks like more of a learning curve than I ever have time for. But I do run measurements with DSpeaker AntiMode 2.0 now and then, which actually works really well on its own for sorting out low frequency troubles. But I go back and forth using it and just straight EQ, liking the sound of the simple signal chain without....

On the other hand, I like the ease of letting AntiMode do the work, and the reenforcement of checking my ear against actual measurement. I was gratified to find that before I bought a used AntiMode, I had the low EQ set very, very close to how Anti-Mode did it. It is harder with mids and highs, I suspect because of the HR-1s radial dispersion making measurement difficult. Seems I can use somewhere around half the adjustments the Antimode perceives to good effect though. That puts me sort of half way back to "by ear" but I like that fine.

I look forward to how your experiments end up!

Will

Palomino - IMHO, to improve your depth, you need diffusers on the rear wall and front wall. Or at very least on the front wall. A couple 1D QRD on the front wall I think would liven up the ambiance and tighten up the imaging. It would make the reverb in the recordings wrap around the room better.

Wow 3/4 of the front wall covered with plastic?

I have found an adjustment in Audirvana that helps here. It is in the Audio Filter preference, the sample rate converter. I have not played with anything else, but I set the "filter max length" for "better" - turning it up higher, and liked it less, so went with it lower and like it better. More texture and a more natural sound to me. The default setting is 500,000. With very little experimentation and listening time, I am liking it more in the 450,000 range give or take.

Good luck with those diffusers!

Quote:


I would be happy to help design, but I've not come up with a building plan I like yet that's fast, easy and repeatable. I'm out of town visiting family, but when I'm back I hope to get more time putting my garage back together, and maybe actually cutting some wood!

I apparently have piles of 1/8" board to use for the dividers, I just need some 1/2" wood for the wells.

Also, a quick and dirty diffuser idea to see if it makes a difference - try a cylindrical diffuser, it would be light, portable, and uses very little material. I would also be easy to breakdown and reuse the materials if you decide you don't like it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyriZDOG2rA

I like the curved ones.  I could build those.  The frame would have to be metal though, right?

Jury is still out on the ceiling absorbers.  Now I don't notice as much.  I think I am going to have to get serious and do some measurements.

I don't know how 3D this would be in a treated room, because I don't have one in any of the three rooms I listen in, but with the ERR and the modded C amp in my parents' living room this recoding seems to have real solidity and great dynamics and especially the cello sounds very real and present.

Quote:


Palomino, sorry I missed this.

Have you emailed audioirvana. Since my stopped crashing with a change in the preference for the "Audio System" with less memory allocated to the app and more to the MAC, I am wondering if it is a memory issue. I use only 44.1/16. I wonder if the + version needs a lot of memory or if something is just haywire?

Stumbled into this great video just now! The before and after demo around 5:30 is amazing, and exactly what I keep talking about when I'm pushing room treatment!

http://youtu.be/D66v5JC0eVk


Notice the measurements show where the problems are, and demonstrate the "ringing" in the room that you can clearly hear in the before and after videos!

I'm only about half way through the video right now, so I'm going to finish it off and see what else they show - I just wanted to post it before I forgot!

yes, this is a great video.  I downloaded some of the tracks to see how my treatments stack up against that room.  I have to say, I feel pretty good about the $160 I have spent so far.  I tried to post a video, but the mic on my camcorder is pretty bad and didn't capture what I was hearing in the room.

I have started to look for mics and think I've found one that doesn't require external phantom power and works with REW.

I had a friend over last night for drinks and then got him to come into the basement to listen to my system.  He's and engineer and helped me procure some outlets and such that were hard to find but he could get them from his supplier.

Anyway, he was clearly impressed with the sound and told me so.  Minor victory for me.

From what I hear, I think the highs are pretty tamed and the focus of the soundstage is pretty good.  Still not as front to back as I want, but pretty good.  Some music is better than others.

I was at that Menards today near your house to buy some lumber to prototype some of those bent wood diffusers.  I got the framing lumber, but could not get 1/8" ply.  I think that is what you need to make enough of a bend.  I have some other 1/8 material (not sure what you call it) and will give that a try.

I still need something to keep the bass in line (upright bass booms big time) and am considering my options for corner bass traps.  I'll send you the link to some I am looking at on-line for $60.  Seem a bit too good to be true.

I've yet to see anything under a few hundred that would put a dent in *real* bass.

It takes a lot of material, or clever use of specific materials to tame bass. Little pieces of foam the corners are BS. It takes lots of corner traps, and/or helmholtz resonators to get that low bass cleaned up like you heard at my place.












I've got those covered in cloth, and stacked 8' tall, plus I have two of the old Decware designed CWALL, which I'm really having trouble measuring to figure out what they are doing.




Plus have about 30# of insulation behind my 10' projection screen, so it acts as an absorber as well. And I still think I could use some more bass treatment to deal with a 27Hz bump I have.