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Based on my loving a “real” “alive” sound, I should try to describe this first. I go for a sound that really makes it sound like the room is where the players are, or where the recording is happening…. where the completeness of resolution and the many balances make it feel like real musicians in a good room. My sister was visiting a while back, and every time she came in with music playing, I saw her make a little double-take. She later said it was because the music sounded so real, her first impulse was to think the players were here with us, and to look for them.
Though I get that a room seriously EQ'd (treated) for frequencies and reflections can go a long way toward getting us “there,” and that some rooms require more work than others.... so far, for me, a slightly lively room that does not notably accentuate or attenuate any parts of the music, makes "real" easier. Like playing live acoustic music, some reflection done well can support a more complete "alive" feel. And in my room, though quiet here, this does not particularly equate to "quiet" due to a lot of calculated absorption and diffusion like Groovy's.
Still, I am always careful to try to get the many balances... spectral, timing, and resolution, without going very far in any “adjustments,” tending to go gradually and learning discernment as I go so that I can make better choices. If I can find it more simply, without much compensation in any one area at a time, it seems I can remain within the vast complex of balances that make lots of recordings sound great in my system/room more easily. This is an ultimate balancing tool for me… if it sounds really good across most decent recordings.
And this has been our day-to-day living area... not a "dedicated" music room, though my dedication to making the room sound real is an ongoing creative devotion, and to me, effective.
But my room does a lot of good things just from how it was made... so I can't say how any of this would come out if I started with a room with square and plumb sheet rock and glass everywhere... very different from this adobe house with virtually no flat reflective surfaces except glass, and lots of natural materials, and inadvertent (for music) construction choices supporting diffusion and adsorption.
Within this, toward the quest for "real," I try for all information to be present and balanced, so that each part of the frequency range and timing support all the others in terms of balances that feel as "real" music does in a good music room. I am like Tony, I can’t even listen in many venues anymore, it just sounds so much better to me here, clearly pointing to the importance of room in those places I don’t go.
The places I do like are generally quite live, like good old-school church spaces. Related, for me, once I heard more complete harmonic complexity, really good seeming resolution and balance was not enough... I realized that there was much more to resolution and space, even though at the time, I had a resolving system by most standards.
I find that with care we can have good balances and enough resolution to sound like a pretty awakening system. But it takes the refinement of resolving the very fine detail within the "detail" to transform hardness into complexity, and bring out the more nuanced information and tonal values of beautiful instruments and spaces…. including textures, air, decays, spacial information between players and beyond.... things that create a sense of living music.
Clearly all balances are important to hear it all, but looking at harmonic richness, the very fine stuff in balance, it seems to me to be a lot about resolution and timing at this point... the timing good enough to create space around the finest detail. So I go for musical resolution and balances without smearing, whether from gear or room, requiring a level of liveness that is “just so,” not too live and not too dead.
Pulling this information more completely not only proves 44.1/16 files can have loads of musical information, but without that finer information, it can sound bad...to really good, but not quite real.
And the broader balances.... the rooms I don’t go to for music, are off balance and dull sounding “dead” in some areas at least, but a little death goes a long way for me. At the same time, though not necessarily dulled "dead" overall, off-balance is pretty disturbingly deadening to the music for me. So what is dead?
The same applies in my experiments here. Even if the bass/mid-bass frequencies are pretty well defined and fast themselves, if the bass is balanced to be too much in the blend, it will mask the rest. It may not make it dead, but heading that way by dulling the complex of articulating information. I think a little too much bass can be seductive, especially on better recordings, but on others, it can easily mask the mids and highs, and with that, even if subtle, it can damage natural tones, textures and decays of the bass information the mids and highs help create. Even a little off tends to feel pretty invasive to me across recordings, making the potential of gain riding with Steve’s tuning boxes useful. If otherwise “good” bass keeps the mids and highs from blending properly, the bass will sound thicker, less defined, weakening its potential to sound real itself, while dulling all the rest. I am glad to be able to tune the balances on the fly for recordings that need that.
So I need to solve smearing across the spectrum from all of the electronics and cables, and from the room, mitigating notable attenuation, overlap, and amplification of some frequencies over others, while ending with a fast alive sound that sounds “right” bottom to top. Related, loving a lively, reflective feel, excess reflections confuse the sound, another balancing act. So many fine lines!
Based on the old clap test, seems my room is on the lively side of absorbent, and this balance seemingly works more or less across the spectrum for revelation and natural speed the way it is tuned. But it is always in a state of being tuned...Each month and year the whole getting realer and more captivating. And now, though more real sounding across recordings, the clap test reveals less reflection than years back when I did it last with a little less refined components, cables, power, absorption and diffusion. But as my sister noticed, it is live feeling, real feeling. And it sounds about the same most places in the room, and down the hall in my bath tub… so I am hearing a system/room here, not a system or room. “The seat” is another thing, where the soundstage blossoms, but overall, the whole sounds pretty right to me.
Finally, assuming decent balances, speed, and resolution, with relatively balanced reflections, I guess a fairly typical way of considering "dead" sound would come from taking down mids and highs more than low mids to bass on balance. Even if the lower frequencies are in pretty good balance and not particularly muddled, not having good complexity with mids and high contributions, information that articulates the bass sounds, it would sound mirky and some level of dead to me.
Or, the mids and highs could be really complex and real sounding, and a muddled low end from system/room bass imbalances could cause it to sound dead, the lower frequencies smeared and wacky spectrally, enough to mess with speed and articulation no matter how much the mid bass-up helps articulate and texture it.
Or, if the mids and highs are present and relatively balanced spectrally, but rigid and lacking complexity ...concentrated... and the low mids to bass pretty right, I might call that "hard" (or some folks might call it "bright"). But, "off balance," having rigid, too concentrated mids and highs, it is not able to sound real, leaving out complexity we associate with real bass sound, as well as mid and high complexity.
I know these are all listening impressions based on sonic information, not whether a room is dead seeming or not. But the point of Groovy’s room is to solve all this, that room treatment done well can balance all these things. I have never been in a room that heavily treated, so can’t guess how I would like it, but I can certainly imagine the difference he feels between quiet and dead with an excellent balance of room tuning tools.
I could ramble more, but I guess to me, a dead or quiet room, or not, is not just like a chamber compared to an untreated reflective space. I guess it is all part of the same toward the end musical experience... the system and room. And functionally, the room can sound quiet, and the music beautiful, if all works with extensive treatment. Or the music can be beautiful with less extensive treatment and the room not feeling as quiet, dead being the too-far side of quiet. So whether from gear, or room, or how those synergize... spectrum, resolution, speed and smearing imbalances can deaden the sound if the many, many intricate balances that cause it all to work together are not refined as a whole.
Clearly great treatment can seriously support this all working together. At the same time, I have yet to see “science” in audio define complete, beautiful sound, indicating to me the science is incomplete. In ways, this makes the approach of Acoustic Fields based treatment pretty bold seeming to me, where you basically build a room with a variety of calculated treatments and mold the sound this way..... helping to create a notably quiet system/room like Groovy’s, that if just-so, reveals the many musical balances together to make the deep beauty. I am really glad it works!
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