Room Treatment Reviews

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Room Treatment Reviews
Working the Room
Rogier van Bakel  |  Jan 11, 2024  | 
What goes into building and outfitting a listening room? One of Stereophile's reviewers found out first-hand—and almost bit off more than he could chew. A tale of white powder, a mummified dog, and various deals with the devil.
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Analog CornerPhono Preamp ReviewsRoom Treatment ReviewsSolid State Preamp Reviews
Analog Corner #286: StillPoints Aperture II, VPI Voyager, Bespoke Passive Preamplifier
Michael Fremer  |  Mar 15, 2021  |  First Published: Jun 01, 2019  | 
VPI Industries Voyager phono preamplifier
Following my auditioning of Channel D's Lino 2C current-mode phono preamplifier, back in the world of voltage amplification, here's another phono preamp from another company based, like Channel D, in New Jersey. Probably not since Dynaco manufactured its electronics in Pennsauken has the Garden State enjoyed such riches of analog electronics!
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MiscellaneousRoom Treatment Reviews
IsoAcoustics Gaia loudspeaker isolation feet
Robert Deutsch  |  Sep 14, 2017  | 
IsoAcoustics Inc. has its head office in Ontario and its manufacturing facilities in China, and is headed by Dave Morrison, who for 20 years has been involved in designing radio and television studios for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The IsoAcoustics products are the result of this experience. Although relatively new on the consumer-audio market, IsoAcoustics' speaker-isolation products have gained wide acceptance in pro audio; their client list of recording and mastering studios includes Blackbird (Nashville), Mastering Palace (NYC), Flux (NYC), United Recording (LA), the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Skywalker Ranch, and Abbey Road.
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Room Treatment Reviews
PSI Audio AVAA C20 electronic bass trap
Bob Katz  |  Jun 01, 2016  | 
"Bass—the final frontier," declared Captain James T. Kirk. I have no doubt: The biggest problem in nearly every listening room is getting the bass to sound right. Today, we voyage to the frontier of bass response.

A Brief History of Time
Because my listening room is also a mastering room, it has to be as accurate as possible (see photo 1). The floor is a concrete slab, with solid-block wall construction and a cathedral ceiling 23' high at the rear—there are no floor-to-ceiling resonances. A bay window hidden behind the curtains disperses the lengthwise room mode by varying it between 18' and 20.6'. The curtains tighten the stereo image and damp the subtle resonant chamber that would otherwise color the sound.

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Room Treatment ReviewsThe Fifth Element
The Fifth Element #90
John Marks  |  Apr 03, 2015  | 
As a film title, Quantizing Hanson Hsu might not rank up there with Kissing Jessica Stein, but we work with what we have to work with. Hanson Hsu is the principal designer at Delta H Design, Inc., an acoustics and architecture firm based in Marina del Rey, California. Though he dabbles in some weird science, Hsu doesn't wear a white lab coat, literal or figurative. He's down-to-earth and personable, with a conversational style that evinces warm wit and a real love of music. At one point in our conversations, he exclaimed, "I get so much joy when things sound good."
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Analog CornerPhono Accessory ReviewsRoom Treatment Reviews
Analog Corner #234: Do You Believe in Magic?
Michael Fremer  |  Dec 29, 2024  |  First Published: Feb 01, 2015  | 
When a magician pulls a quarter from someone's ear or saws a woman in half, I believe in magic. I know it's an illusion—not real—but that doesn't mean that magic isn't real.

What's real is that the magician's illusion is believable because your eyes see it and, until sometime later—even if only a fraction of a second—your brain doesn't argue. The best your brain can do is tell you, "Yes, you saw that, but you know it didn't happen."

Funny, then, how anti-audiophiles always claim that the ear is more easy to fool than the eye. Yet books have been devoted to cataloguing optical illusions. Do you believe that a railroad track's two rails meet at the horizon? Sure looks like it! The brain and ear are easily fooled, yet our very survival depends on their reliability. And the survival of an audio reviewer's credibility depends on his ability to be fooled as rarely as possible.

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Room Treatment Reviews
Acoustic Geometry Curve System room treatments
Erick Lichte  |  Feb 10, 2012  | 
For a few weeks each year in the high summer of Minnesota, the corn sold from rickety roadside stands is so sweet and tender it is best eaten unadorned. For the wise and lucky nibbler willing to forgo condiments, the rewards of eating these naked kernels are the pure taste of Midwestern soil and sun transformed into a juicy, golden confection. I've begun to wonder if the yearly encounter with this magnificent and ephemeral sweet corn reminds Midwesterners of the joys of simplicity and plainness. Though my hypothesis is a stretch, it sure would explain a great deal about the Midwestern mentality. Perhaps Midwesterners subtly learn from this corn that if we get too fancy or try too hard, we can often screw up what nature has already made perfect. Conversely, we learn that no amount of fancy accoutrements will make a bad ear of bland, mealy corn come alive in the mouth.
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Budget Component ReviewsRoom Treatment Reviews
RealTraps room treatments
Wes Phillips  |  Feb 23, 2010  | 
In the beginning, I had a room adjacent to my office—a room filled with bicycles, hi-fi gear, and assorted crap I'd never gotten around unpacking since our last move. Feeling ambitious, I thought I might turn it into a guest room, and emptied it.
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Subwoofer ReviewsMusic in the RoundRoom Treatment Reviews
Music in the Round #38
Kalman Rubinson  |  Sep 29, 2009  | 
We all recognize that the Super Audio Compact Disc, despite being an almost ideal format for high-resolution audio, has not replaced the "Red Book" CD. However, Sam Tellig's comments in the June and July issues of Stereophile, and Steve Guttenberg's "As We See It" in July, unleashed e-mails urging me to champion multichannel sound (don't I do this already?) and smite the unbelievers (not a chance).
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Room Treatment Reviews
Nucore Cathedral Sound Room Treatments
Robert Deutsch  |  Aug 15, 2009  |  First Published: Jul 15, 2009  | 
One of my favorite Charles Rodrigues cartoons, originally published in Stereo Review and reprinted in the book Total Harmonic Distortion (Perfectbound Press, 1988), shows a customer in the soundroom of an audio dealer, auditioning a pair of speakers. This is no ordinary soundroom: the floor, walls, and ceiling are completely covered with irregularly shaped boxes, apparently an extreme form of acoustical treatment. The salesman is saying, "Of course, you realize that it won't sound exactly the same in your living room, sir..."
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Hi-Rez Disc Player/Transport ReviewsMusic in the RoundRoom Treatment Reviews
Music in the Round #31
Kalman Rubinson  |  Aug 01, 2008  |  First Published: Jul 01, 2008  | 
Recently, I got an e-mail from a colleague at another audio magazine complaining about the paucity of new SACD hardware. We've been hearing about the slowing pace of new SACD releases, and about Sony's neglect of a format they themselves developed, but I now realize that, apart from the High End (footnote 1), machines that can play SACDs have been fast disappearing from the middle of the market. When the battle of SACD vs DVD-Audio was raging, universal players that could play both formats were available from almost every major manufacturer. Even John Atkinson jumped on the bandwagon, acquiring a Pioneer DV-578A universal player for $150 to use as a reference. The exceptions were the very companies that had developed the new formats: Sony offered only SACD players, and Panasonic, at least at first, only DVD-A players. No matter—you could buy a universal player at any national electronics chain store, even if that store didn't stock recordings in either format and their staff had never heard of DVD-As or SACDs. Some things never change.
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ReferenceRoom Treatment Reviews
Anti-Node: Active Room-Acoustics Correction
Keith Howard  |  Feb 06, 2008  |  First Published: Jan 06, 2008  | 
Recently, I assessed four disparate room-correction systems based on digital signal processing (DSP): Copland DRC205, Lyngdorf Audio RoomPerfect, Velodyne SMS-1, and Meridian DRC. I concluded that Meridian's approach—which applies IIR (Infinite Impulse Response) "anti-resonance" filters to suppress room resonant modes, if only partially—was, in many respects, the best. What I particularly like about Meridian DRC is that, unlike the Copland and Lyngdorf processors, its approach to system tonal balance is largely hands-off. Yes, it lightens up the extreme bass a little, as you'd expect, but it doesn't recast the system balance in any way that might prove undesirable. If you like your system's tonal character as it is, Meridian DRC behaves just as you'd want a room-correction system to behave: it quells room resonance effects while leaving the system's essential sound well alone.
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Room Treatment Reviews
RealTraps MondoTrap room acoustics treatment
Jim Austin  |  Aug 18, 2007  | 
For a hobby based on science and technology, audiophilia has more than its share of unscientific elements. That's not necessarily a bad thing; not all of those elements are obvious snake oil, and there's more than science to creating—or re-creating—a musical experience. Still, for the more technical-minded it's a little disconcerting that even the most basic distinctions, such as why two CD players sound different from each other, are hard to explain using technical measurements and simple scientific concepts.
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Room Treatment Reviews
Echo Busters Decorative Room Treatments
Brian Damkroger  |  Sep 28, 2003  | 
One of the biggest challenges in setting up any new listening room is getting the room to work with your equipment rather than against it. I faced this challenge in spades when Trish and I moved into our dream house in the California hills. What would serve as my listening room was a wonderful, open space with panoramic views of the surrounding hills—a space that bore no resemblance at all to a traditional, rectangular, dedicated listening room. Instead, there was a wall of glass, a huge marble-and-glass fireplace, a 20' ceiling—and did I mention that it isn't actually a "room," but one arm of a continuous flowing space?
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MiscellaneousRoom Treatment Reviews
Rives Audio PARC 3-Band Parametric Equalizer
Kalman Rubinson  |  Jul 20, 2003  | 
Last January, the Stereophile website conducted a poll asking readers what they thought was their audio system's weakest link . The results indicated that 24% thought that their room was the most problematic component. What this says is that, though often accused of being obsessed with hardware, we audiophiles are aware of what a potent effect the speaker-room setup has.
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