A Matter of Modes
Chapter 11 of F. Alton Everest's The Master Handbook of Acoustics (Tab Books) proved quite useful in determining optimal room dimensions. I settled on a 1.0:1.6:2.33 (H:W:D) room ratio. A 10' ceiling would mean a 16'-wide room---good, but a little less than what I wanted. An 11' ceiling resulted in a 17.6'-wide by 25.6'-long room. I cheated a bit and rounded the last two dimensions up to the nearest foot, for overall room dimensions of 11' high by 18' wide by 26' long (fig. 1).
Fig.1 TJN's dedicated listening room.
Room modes result from a buildup of…
Isolation
Next, I needed to consider acoustic isolation---keeping noise from the rest of the house out of the listening room, and keeping music in it. Perfect isolation within an integral, one-piece structure is nearly impossible, of course, at least not without resorting to drastic measures. But there are a few almost sensible possibilities. One of the listening room's long walls is shared with the garage. That, plus the outside walls which occupy perhaps one-quarter of the room's perimeter, take care of more than half the problem. For the two walls adjoining other living spaces, I…
Mechanics
The house was designed to be constructed of normal wood frame and drywall on a slab foundation---no concrete block, plaster, adobe, or basement. For the walls of the house I specified 16" stud centers throughout, 2x4s for the inside walls, 2x6s for the outside. The added cost here is trivial as a percentage of the total. If you don't specify this, your builder may be tempted to use 24" centers if local codes allow it---for builders of entire subdevelopments, the savings quickly escalate for every stud saved. Every time I cut loose with a bass-laden recording or listen to the…
A Word About Architects...
I was fortunate to find an architect who could work with me in satisfying my requirements, though I gave him little latitude on the floor plan. Your architect will undoubtedly come up with some interesting ideas---it's your job to keep them from messing up your plans for a good listening room. Remember, few builders or architects know much about sound transmission or acoustics. Nor have many acousticians designed small spaces---the requirements of a concert hall, arena, or even a recording studio are different from those of a listening room. The best way to get…
The wall-to-wall carpet in my listening room is currently a medium-weight Berber style with a raised pattern of squares small enough to be of some assistance in moving things a few inches here or there. The windows' vertical blinds are of fairly heavy cloth. Several acoustic panels from Acoustic Sciences Corporation (the Tube Trap folks) are placed high on the side walls to cut down on flutter echoes, and three additional panels of a different design (one of them homemade) are hung a few feet out from the short, windowed wall. Several Tube Traps and similar devices from Acoustic Solutions are…
It was an unusually fine day for a New York September. The W train crept from the subway tunnel into the sunlight of the Manhattan Bridge—"My God, the World Trade Center's on fire!" came the voice of the woman driving the train. I vividly remember what I did the rest of that day—the day the world terribly changed. The train continued on its way. I didn't know passenger planes had been flown into the Twin Towers until I arrived at the Stereophile office, near Union Square. My fundamental optimism remained intact until the first Tower collapsed before my eyes. I tried to contact the rest…
Related Letters from December 2001: With us
Editor: After the events in New York of September 11, we Europeans are all with you. But please, be aware that terrorism is not Islam. Afghanistan is already a country destroyed by 20 years of war, where live innocent people like you and us.—Name withheld by request, France
Sympathy
Editor: Please receive my deepest sympathy for all of your people involved in the terrorist attack on September 11. It is unbelievable and tragic. We are not only friends in same hobby, we are also friends in our passion for civilized and…
J.S. BACH: Suites for Solo Cello
Nathaniel Rosen, cello
John Marks Records JMR 6/7 (2 CDs only). Doris Stevenson, prod.; Jerry Bruck, eng. DDD. TT: 2:16:43 Bach's Cello Suites do not have a long performance history; for long considered only exercise or teaching pieces, they were first championed by Pablo Casals in the 1930s. His recordings, made from 1936-39, still hold up as deeply felt interpretations, admittedly Romantic in character, and certainly uninfluenced (for good or ill) by any research into Baroque performance practice.
It is in this tradition that Nathaniel…
Listening to multichannel music with the new SACD and DVD-Audio players has produced equal parts contentment and consternation. The contentment is easy to understand: Here are media that can reproduce music with better-than-CD resolution and, for the first time, re-create a believable illusion of the entire acoustic space in which the performance was recorded. The consternation is related to those same two issues: 1) maintaining the resolution and tonal balance relished with high-quality stereo, and 2) making the psychological transition from two-channel to multichannel listening. Both of…
PATTI SMITH: Gone Again
Arista 07822-18747-2 (CD only). Malcolm Burn, prod., eng.; Lenny Kaye, prod.; Brian Sperber, eng.; Greg Calbi, mastering. TT: 55:58 Where Patti Smith led, I followed, a respectable, whitebread suburban distance behind, generally much later than sooner: the 1968 Democratic Convention (where Smith's husband-to-be Fred "Sonic" Smith led White Panther John Sinclair's "house band," the incomparable MC5), Jah reggae, Mapplethorpe, Springsteen. Packed away somewhere with the Wallace Stevens and John Berryman my-then-poetry-prof Helen Vendler said I'd never have the…
