Can snake oil fix a bad room? (a survey)

I found a headphone like a HD250II/HD540II or K1000 were excellent as a listening reference for helping to get the speaker sound you want. Building your own speakers with quality drivers and a choice of enclosure that suits the listening room is a great start. Then the room needs dispersion clutter to scatter reflections and fabrics to absorb some bass boom. After that, the sound you get is typically very volume dependent and varies significantly on speaker placement and listening position.

Edited by Ash - 19 Jul 2017 at 10:54am

I tend to find now that the sound does not really change when adjusting the volume unless to silly levels where your ears bleed (well maybe not quite!).

The main thing that's changes is dynamics and scale when winding up but otherwise virtually the same.

hippyeverafter wrote: You have opened up a can of worms regarding this subject!

Sometimes you just have to dig to find out.

It is said we all hear differently. Hard to believe after 50,000 plus years of evolution...

So it has to be because of the listening acoustic. From a design and development point of view it is important to understand the listener's lot - and these comments should hopefully help everyone.

Propaganda over the years ensured the death of EQ (unless an essential part of a phono stage), and so in a boomy room (which at one stage I had) the listener could be clutching at straws, or blaming blameless products which I just about did. I'm sure we've all been there.

In the place of EQ there has popped up all kinds of things to "bend" the sound. All you need is a reviewer who doesn't understand his/her acoustic space to tell the world it's good, and the world buys into it - often without understanding and often finding it doesn't work for their particular circumstances - but best go along with it for fear of offending...

I would like to thank all participants for contributions so far, and hope many more will follow.

In my view the room sounds on the dull and heavy side with a lot of hf absorption. Bass in the past from my transmission line speakers started as overblown/dull/soft sounding with an obvious bass boost as the listening sofa around 5 feet off the back wall. This could be alievated y leaning forward in the seat which cleaned the bass immensely.

I will set out the changes which were beneficial in many ways but did not really impact on what appeared to be possible room colourations.