Listening rooms are real, imperfect places. Their character arises from their defects. I like real, imperfect things (footnote 1).
Not that there’s such a thing as a perfect listening room. Every domestic listening room shares the same basic problem: Its most fundamental nature—its size and shape, the amount of space it carves out—results in resonances that can profoundly alter the sound of reproduced music, especially in the bass (footnote 2). Favorable dimensions, sound-absorbing furnishings, room treatments, signal processing—many things can mitigate the problem, but it can never be eliminated. Play an immaculately recorded piece of music, in any room, and no matter how fancy and expensive your audio system is, some bass notes will be too loud while others are too soft. The only thing in doubt is whether those deviations from neutrality are serious enough to detract from the pleasure you take in your music.
A few months before the plague hit, early on a sunny afternoon, I was at the headquarters of a well-known audio company, seated in the sweet spot in a small listening room. It was a day of new-product demos, and I was the latest in a long procession of audio reviewers being hosted by the company in one-hour listening sessions. On a track selected by the company to demonstrate the excellence of their new loudspeaker—and indeed the new loudspeaker was excellent—a note went missing from the bassline. It was an important, repeated note, and it was totally MIA.
Why did this happen? Apparently, my listening chair was positioned precisely at a null point of a standing wave—a room resonance—and the symmetry and size of the room, the symmetry of the setup, and the rigidity of the room’s construction made the destructive interference at that location especially intense. The note was well up in the bass’s range, so its absence was exceedingly easy to hear.
When I described what I heard to my host, he said “You’re the first person to notice that. I guess that’s why you’re the editor of Stereophile.” Here’s hoping that all those other reviewers were more polite than I was, not deafer.
Real-world listening rooms have other problems, of course, besides room resonances. A problem many people think less about is material resonances—soft spots in suspended floors; thin, casually installed sheetrock; a loose window; a piano—all can absorb energy and then release it back into the room as sound, creating distortions not only in frequency but also in time.
Absorptive surfaces, including flexible walls, can be good: They can lower the Q of room resonances, making the peaks and valleys broader, the changes in the bass response from place to place and frequency to frequency less severe. If the energy is dissipated as heat, you’re in good shape. But if it’s released back into the room as audible vibrations, the room can sound subtly off in ways that can be hard to pinpoint.
Such trade-offs are a good example of how listening rooms are never perfect: Increase the rigidity of the walls and floors to reduce the amount of delayed energy, or to better soundproof the room, and you end up reducing absorption, worsening room resonances.
Conventional wisdom says that listening rooms should disappear sonically so that the recorded acoustic space can be projected into the room more convincingly. It’s a valid aspiration, but I don’t completely share it. A sonically neutral space is desirable for multichannel audio, where so much ambient information comes from the six or eight or however many speakers arrayed all over the room—one reason I never went in for multichannel despite its theoretical superiority. But in two-channel audio, reflective walls and other imperfections are an intrinsic part of the experience. I like the fact that two-channel audio is a big, imperfect mux that nevertheless works really well. Multichannel is a more perfect system, but I distrust perfection. I’m not suggesting you should leave your listening room alone—not necessarily. If you break an arm, go to a hospital. If you’ve got a big honkin’ bass mode at 60Hz or 80Hz, or a window that vibrates at your normal listening levels, deal with it, preferably via genuine acoustical means. If the room is too reflective, add some well-stuffed furniture—just not leather, which reflects sound.
But some subtle sonic imperfections are best left alone. They’re distinctive aspects of your room’s sonic character. They can make music, or the experience of listening to it, better by rooting it in something real, that sounds real. Minor imperfections are your friends—or anyway, they’re my friends.
Perfection, to me, is akin to soullessness. The perfect is the enemy of the good, the creative, the spontaneous, the real. Ask any jazz musician: There are no wrong notes (footnote 3).
Here’s the clincher: In the context of two-channel hi-fi, your room is the only thing that’s real. Every other aspect of the experience is a psychoacoustic illusion. Do you really want to filter out that one thread of reality? This may be heresy, but I want to hear my room in the music and the music in my room.
Sonic anonymity is a valid aspiration in audio, but it’s not an aspiration I share. It is possible to seek excellence without seeking perfection. What I’m seeking roomwise—musicwise—is something I consider richer and more characterful. I want a good, authentic room, not a perfect one (footnote 4).—Jim Austin
Footnote 1: Herb Reichert has expressed similar thoughts about hi-fi, although he was writing about components, not rooms. I acknowledge the debt. Still, I come by this commitment to imperfection honestly: My research in physics, carried out in the late ’80s through the mid ’90s, focused on imperfections—specifically defects in materials. It showed—not for the first time of course—that defects can form lovely shapes and patterns and that they’re responsible for some of the most important properties of materials.
Footnote 2: Before we curse our fate over the physics of standing waves, we should consider that precisely the same physics is at work in almost all musical instruments.
Footnote 3: I’ve seen variations on this quote attributed to Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis. Probably they both said it.
Footnote 4: J. Gordon Holt wrote about listening rooms in March 1983 and Thomas J. Norton wrote about designing a dedicated listening room in October 1991. Stereophile‘s reviews of room acoustics treatments can be found here.—John Atkinson
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