Over the last 20 years or so we have finally arrived at the place where there is not as much talk about removing the room from the equation in sound. This is one of the biggest steps forward we have made. For those hanging onto this thought "the room can be removed from the sound of your system"  I have the easiest test in the world for you. Take your speakers and put them in any other room in your house and you will hear that they sound completely different.  I personally have never heard two rooms sound the same with the exception of some designed as round rooms not meant for audio.

I have also heard two types of speakers (systems), those that play the music and those that the music plays.  I've spent a lot of years listening to components and all the other parts to this hobby but it wasn't until I heard a system disappear before my apetite was satisfied.  To me this was the end of all ends. It was hard to even think about making judgements cause everything was there and the room turned into one big recorded concert. The most shocking part to this sound was it was not in front of me but all around me.   I had to rethink soundstage cause I was use to this stage that was limited to the typical measured stage we talk about in high end audio, and this was nothing similar. The dynamic range and fullness left nothing for want, and the size of stage had no walls going way past any room dimensions by a long shot.  Getting up of my chair was the next huge shock. The stage did not collapse in any way and even moving way off to the side the sound stage was still very stable. I had to get my ear right up to the speaker to even tell is it was on.  This was when I realized that the room was playing the sound and not the speakers trying to force their way with the room.  The music was playing freely without roadblocks, without the system dictating it's own sound. Not only was the room playing the sound, the music was playing the system. It was like all of the system got out of the way and the music magically was there.  This changed everything for me and every since I have made it my goal to achieve this same event when listening.

Once I found what I now call the "float" it has given me a model for sound that I don't hear described by many in the hobby but those who do find it very rarely ever look back.

I have never heard the float with a stock system I must start with, so if your sitting there listening to a plug and play system and think I'm nuts your probably right from your point of view.  Finding what I would call the absolute sound is pretty far from the setups I have owned and heard around the world that resemble what we see in the pics found in the high end audio galleries.  For a long time this kept me out of the mainstream cause I didn't want to offend, now I think maybe this was a mistake. Maybe I should have kept pushing and showing people that there is a world beyond stock products being thrown into a room and being told the room will disappear when it is dampened. LOL. I see so many acoustical products and other tweaks that keep circling the camp with shouts of absolution and wonder when are we going to realize that we are in the music reproduction business and this business has one constant and that constant is vibration. Well right there I can see the hands flying up to correct me saying "we have been addessing this michael". Have you? I have a bold statement to make here. Stopping vibrations short of their goal is not controlling them. That's not how instruments make music and as time goes on your going to see that this is not the way to get better sound.  You might have a fancy rebuttal to come back with but in the end now or later your going to come back to the fact that the signal that is traveling through your audio chain is tunable and very easily made out of tune. Before you say "I know, I dampened it" you need to take a closer look at what dampening is and how easy it is to over dampen and loose signal content. This isn't something I've just come up with but have been practicing for maybe longer than anyone here reading this.  I'm also not saying I'm the all in all cause I learn something new every day, but there are certain things that you are probably doing to your system that are stopping you from hearing a large percentage of the music. How can I say this? Easy. If you have a system that only plays certain types of music well, or sometimes the sound comes directly from the speaker with a big production, or the stage is only in front of you, or when you stand up from your chair the sound drops or heads into the speaker. If your sound has an audible peak, or you can not hear way past the sides of your speakers placements, or you listen to classical and there is not hall sound behind you, my friend I can tell you, you have a system that is out of tune.

michael green
MGA/RoomTune

http://tuneland.techno-zone.net/

In my end of the business you can imagine how many people ask "why don't my speakers work". To be honest it's actually a process of blame. They get their system and after they start hearing things wrong they go down the path of trying to figure out what went wrong. Many choose to live in the misery, talking about what they own as if that faceplate means a particular sound, but they end up doing very little listening or only listen to their pet recordings. Others begin the wheels of the blame game in motion, and if you've ever seen this in action it's one of the funniest things to watch how disturbed a grown man can get. Components will come and go out of the system, the subscription of "trade a cable" is renewed, test CD's get dusted off, and the calls go out to the "rent an expert". When I walk into these rooms it usually takes me all of about 60 seconds to start hearing what the problems are. I do this without ever turn on the system. After I have a basic handle on the sound the system comes on and I start to make mental notes. The first thing I listen for is if the system playing is fighting the room or not. Most of the time the noises I make in the room with the system off are very different from the sound I get with the system playing. This immediately tells me the system is having problems passing the signal through the audio chain, and by the time the soundwaves are being delivered into the room they are out of tune. This problem in high end audio is so real that I'm shocked that it is not addressed before people buy. Why would I own a car without knowing how to drive it?

Grab your reference CD (no not the simple jazz piece that plays on anything) or what ever source and go to any audio show in the world and play that recording on the systems room to room and if lucky you might hear two or three setups that are even close to being in tune for that piece of music. You look at the system and start making judgements on what it might be, usually casting blame on some part or piece that you read about or have some engineering stroke of genius as to why. But let me paint a slightly different picture for you.

Bring 5 acoustical instruments into the room and start playing them. Sounds just as bad as the stereo. Sounds just as bad as the stereo that is, until you tune the instruments. And lets not forget you can't just tune them, but you must tune them to each other, and one more step they in the process of tuning are also being tuned to the room. What? you say. Follow me on this one ok. Pick up those instruments and walk down the hall to another room, begin playing them. What do you hear? They are out of tune again. These instruments must be tuned every time they go into a new environment not only to the environment but also to each other.

If you want to play the game of it sounds good because it is high end you go right ahead, but if your listening to your system and you know that it's not right and you are not getting what you always thought you deserved even after buying component after component and climbing the dollar tree, than maybe you should take a look at what is going on with the signal and how that signal travels through the system and what happens when that signal reaches the air and what happens in the air as it is pressurized by the room. I know you got into this thinking that if I plug this into that and that into this and read my magazines that I will sit in my living room and have magic happen, but I have news for you. If we took the magic carpet ride together and dropped in on audiophile's rooms ramdomly you would not hear what you thought you would with your reference music. In many cases what you would see is a Ferrari needing to go into the shop, or a kit car that never got put together yet.

The industry comes to you and says measure this and dampen that and here's all the engineering stats, formulas, charts of your room and all this wonderful stuff, you spend your money, look through your music collection pick out the nights choices, sit down and hear something that taste like a meal gone horribly wrong. Why? Because that recording is not a test CD, it's not the recording you got sounding good on your system at one time, it has a completely different set of vibratory codes to it and your system sad as it sounds, can't play it. Folks, time to wake up, it's not the recording. It's your system out of tune! We have sessions quite often (and I have done this with reviewers as well) where we take a recording that the listener has had trouble with and after tuning the system into the recordings vibratory code, the recording will open up and fill the stage giving a nice performance, sometimes, many times shocking performance. 

Michael, your down on the industry aren't you? No I'm realistic. I'm the guy who's going to tell you that throwing a system in a room in most cases is not enough if your wanting to hear more than 10% of the music being played in that recording. I'm also the guy who is going to tell you that many recordings that you have and have maybe dismissed are probably a ton better than you would have ever guessed.

story time

I was sitting at a clients house listening to his 500K plus system that he wanted me to tune up for him. In the beginning I asked do I have carte blanche. He left me alone as I often asked to be so I can think without an audiophile glued to my ear talking high end garbo as if they were a defense attorney with an obvious guilty client, and when he returned I was told my services were no longer wanted and to leave his house. Waiting back at my hotel room for my ride to the airport I got a call from him asking if I would come back to the house. His tone was apologetic so certainly, back I went. He told me that after his rant he desided to sit down and listen and heard music like he never had before. What had him upset was I took out most of his furniture and all of his system and started from scratch. I fixed his electric (no the conditioner was removed) I took his bedroom audio system and used it as it was far more simple, CD player, receiver and two way speakers. Use my cable and tuned the system to the room with his recordings he had pulled earlier.

"how did you do that"

I took him through and showed what I did. Basically I did a bunch of stuff the industry doesn't touch on but makes big differences, plus un-did a bunch of stuff that gets in the way of the sound that the industry has done for years not understanding how easy it is to corrupt the audio signal. Once the system was set free I voiced his room, making it a part of the sound and not fighting the sound like all the dampening crap was in there doing. He was a little surprised that I took out most of the treatment so I had him sit in the chair while I only brought back in one trap. "Wow, that hurt the sound that bad" I then brought back in a set of plastic tubes, again "Wow!"

needed to deal with this in his head

After canceling my flight and having me stay a little longer he wanted me to bring back in some of the high end gear. This is where he got really turned around. Everytime a piece of the more expensive over built product was put into the system the sound collapsed. At first he thought it sounded tighter but the more he listened it was clear that something was missing from the overall to get the tight. I then showed him how to get tight when he wants it and how to get relaxed with other recordings out of the receiver, which would not happen with the heavy components cause they only knew how to go one direction when tuned. Note: much easier to tune when a component is open, then tune in, rather than closed (fix) sounding and open up.

At the end of the day a new listener was born and a new hobby for him.

michael green
MGA/RoomTune
http://tuneland.techno-zone.net/

Sorry guys

I was doing some editing at the request of a member and didn't know this was going to bump the thread.

Oh well since I'm here. I'm glad to see posts of late talk more about the room/speaker interaction, very wise. So many think a room disappears when a speaker is put in it, but those who are seasoned listeners will tell you the speaker and the room are really one. Repeating myself, you don't actually hear the speaker when listening to your setup. Your listening to pressure, and that speaker can either get along with that pressure or it can be a disaster, as some of you talk about "why did that speaker sound so good at the store and not here". Or the opposite, or a friends system sounding so different than yours with the same setup.

If you learn how to turn your room into a mini concert hall, almost any speaker will sound pretty darn good, or at least make it much easier to pull that buying trigger.

anyway, back to what your doing, and maybe a piece of advice

If you have a system that doesn't sound right to you, you should ask why. If you ask that question to the right person you'll save yourself a ton of time and a ton of money.

here's my speakers http://tuneland.techno-zone.net/t72-mga-speakers

michael green
MGA/RoomTune
http://tuneland.techno-zone.net/