Audio Investigations: Acoustic Treatments

Friday, February 18, 2011

Acoustic Treatments

Here's a great article on room treatments by Ethan Winer (maker of Real Traps). Ethan seems like a very good guy and I trust him.

Looking at my room though, it's hard to see where I would fit the Real Traps. I have a very nice spot for a 16 or 20 inch diameter tube trap, but I'm not sure I like the way Tube Traps are constructed with fiberglass, which I'm worried about leaking through the fabric and into my HVAC system. Real Traps tend to enclose the fiberglass in plastic, which seems safer.

I'm planning to order RplusD, the premier acoustic measurement software, today.

I'm still liking my manually adjusted EQ's, though I really want to measure and "improve" them. I listened to some Bach organ works today and was delighted by the clarity of the bass.

For measuring my manual adjustments, however, I have to dial them into the Behringer. (Currently I dial them into the Tact Parametric EQ, but that is turned off during measurement.) So it's a bit of a pain, and the Behringer can't be adjusted with as high resolution as the Tact.

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Living Room System

2-way with Acoustat 2+2 from 125Hz to 17k, and a pair of SVS Ultra PB 13 below 125Hz (linear phase LR8 crossover). Now using the best from 2 pairs of 2+2's, one white and one black, EQ'd to be the same. Acoustats powered by Aragon 8008 BB. All amps including Subs and Tweeters driven by Emotiva Stealth DC-1 DACs. DACs for each way driven by AES from Behringer 2496 DEQs (EQ and limiting), driven by AES from MiniDSP OpenDRC (linear phase FIR crossovers or corrections generated by RePhase). Driven by AES from a Henry Engineering AES 4-way splitter. Driven by AES from a Tact RCS 2.0 Digital Preamp with Room Correction and PEQ bypassed. The Tact receives most sources as digital. Analog sources are converted to digital at 24/96 by Lavry AD10 analog to digital converter on the side wall and sent via a 12 foot AES cable to the Tact. Emotiva XSP-1 serves as phono preamp and analog selector and level adjuster feeding the Lavry. Oppo UDP 205 plays most discs, and does streaming from my library and Qobuz using Roon, through digital coax output to the Tact, but in other cases through HDMI and a Kanex Pro De-Embedder, and in the rare remaining cases (used to be more) where neither digital transfer method retains full resolution, analog through balanced cables to the Emotiva and Lavry. Denon DVD-9000 plays HDCDs better than anything I know of and connects to Emotiva and thence Lavry for conversion to 24/96. A Sonos Connect is an alternate Tact source, and destination for the Pioneer F-26 FM tuner, which also plays in other rooms through Sonos. A Dynavector 17DIII is mounted to the hockey-tape dampened Ittok tonearm on a Linn Sondek LP12 with Lingo external power supply, using a Michell plastic low spindle clamp is with a trimmed felt washer. There are seperate AC circuits for Subwoofers, Acoustat Poweramps, and Rest of System. The Rest of System circuit is conditioned and regulated by a Panamax MB 1500 and served via a variety of audiophile grade power strips. Single ended digital cabling by Blue Jeans Cable using Belden coax, and Blue Jeans LC-1 audio cabling. AES by Canare, Mogami, Gotham City, and Geistnote/Canare. PTFE balanced audio cable by Surf Cables. Speaker wire mostly hand twisted milspec PTFE coated 12g silver plated copper. Playlists generated by mplay version 0.69 soon to be released.