Building a Room Full of Balanced Harmonics

Hi Michael and Zonees

Here is a continuation of the tale of Sonic’s bringing my system back to the Tune path after several detours and the struggle to drive out the BOO!

I was listening to another system/room combination this weekend and this is a system in a smallish room with a well-known set of mini-monitors (not the Rogers LS3/5a) driven by rather esoteric tube amplification. The owner is quite the opposite of Sonic and the Tune, preferring to adopt the theory that a resonant, alive room compromises sound of the original recording by obscuring the acoustic space. Only an acoustically inert (not anechoic) room acoustic will allow the sound and ambience on the recordings to be reproduced.

So here is Sonic in a 12ft x 14 ft x 9 ft room and the resonant signature is the opposite of my room. It is not Boo! but Buh!/[stop]. It is a dry and damped acoustic.

What did musick sound like on this system? I heard music being produced through the speakers giving a small ‘pocket universe” of sound and the room is just a container, it does not interfere but neither is the sound engaging or play in a bigger space. A bit like how a reviewer once described the Quad ESL57 electrostatics (in Abso!ute Sound) -- the sound of a live marching band heard through a window cracked open). The recorded ambience is coming from the same direction as the instrumental images. Is it good hifi? Very good. Does it immerse me in a field of harmonics and deliver the emotion of the musick? Not exactly.

This room is very quiet and clear when I do my reading test. I think the ideal room for Sonic will be halfway between the resonant room I got and this, and I won’t mind going a bit more towards this small, dry room. I wonder if the right approach is to Tune a room with Michael’s gear with no loudspeakers in using Boo!, some percussion instruments and reading. When satisfactory, then bring the loudspeakers in…does this work, Michael?

Here are two scans of what I have done with the EchoTunes to fix the Boo! These last few days.







Diagram 1 is where I am now – three EchoTunes in front and four Echotunes per side, three in a row with one more EchoTune near the mini Shutters. The EchoTunes marked with a tick in the drawing are the ones originally placed before I started this struggle. That is 11 EchoTunes (that is 8 more than when I started) just to get some control on the Boo! with still a way to go before Sonic gets anything like control.

For clarity, the Diagrams do not show the TuneStrips in each of the front vertical corners, the Sound Shutters on the ceiling or the curtain over the window.

Diagram 2 shows what I tried (marked by the positions for the EchoTunes with dashes). These didn’t work – the effect was an upward shift in pitch.

The Boo! is a complex thing with a low fundamental and two or more overtones (one of which is the “f” note). I suspect the various components are coming off different geometries of the room, so knocking one out may emphasize the others. And Sonic is finding that it is easier to attenuate the lower component than the higher pitched ones. They are stubborn.

Along the way I have also learnt that the short Shutters at the top ceiling/wall joints are essential. I got two on the front wall and two on each side wall. Take them down and the room gets very ringy with one of the upper notes in the Boo! sticking out in a very irritating way. Also pulling the curtains open by 2 or 3 feet is not a Good Thing. Ringing is emphasized again.

At this stage, I am miles away from being able to replace the curtain with the bamboo window blinds.

Michael, your views?

Sonic

S

"What did musick sound like on this system? I heard music being produced through the speakers giving a small ‘pocket universe” of sound and the room is just a container, it does not interfere but neither is the sound engaging or play in a bigger space. A bit like how a reviewer once described the Quad ESL57 electrostatics (in Abso!ute Sound) -- the sound of a live marching band heard through a window cracked open). The recorded ambience is coming from the same direction as the instrumental images. Is it good hifi? Very good. Does it immerse me in a field of harmonics and deliver the emotion of the musick? Not exactly."

M

Sometimes I start to go in this direction if my system is out of balance and I'm wanting to blame something other than a common sense tuning solution (which may take time, effort and listening) but I usually don't get very far before I loose important parts to the music. For me it's do or die when it comes to revealing emotion. For example, on dark side of the moon second track when the guy is running and breathing do I get a sense for where he is in relationship to the other 5 layers of (in motion) effects going on? To do this comfortably I need at least 10 to 15 feet of depth to convince me that this guy is running through the stage of a bunch of different front to back sound effect happenings. This is the difference between a good recording and a great recording. In other words do I really want to watch Avatar on my TV after watching it in a 3D theatre?

"a small ‘pocket universe” is distortion, and that's what I'm trying to get away from. Your friend is under the audiophile impression the distortion only moves in one direction and is confusing distortion with amplification, which is a common side effect of the audiophile disease.
______________________

S

"This room is very quiet and clear when I do my reading test. I think the ideal room for Sonic will be halfway between the resonant room I got and this, and I won’t mind going a bit more towards this small, dry room. I wonder if the right approach is to Tune a room with Michael’s gear with no loudspeakers in using Boo!, some percussion instruments and reading. When satisfactory, then bring the loudspeakers in…does this work, Michael? "

M

No, having a dry non-musical room is torture for me. It's like having chapped skin and not being able to put moisturizer on it. I'm only speaking for me here but, living with a sterile sound after having full and lush would be like finger nails on the chalk board. I would rather listen to a sub/sat system that had a nice pleasant boom to it like what is out in my workshop. I'm not kidding either, that small dry thing is not appealing to me in any way. I feel claustrophobic and some what irritated by it. See, I would not call this a music experience at all, I wouldn't even call it Hi Fi. I know this sounds terribly judgemental, but if I have a chance to choose between a 20" TV and a big screen I'm going to find it almost impossible to watch the movie on the TV.

Like right now I'm writing to you from my writing room with a system on in one of the other rooms. the music is flowing into this room and it is full and alive. If that system was "Dry" I would have to turn down that system and shut that door to be able to concentrate on writing. Why? Because I can't stand listening to terrible, thin and tinty music and that's all that I would have left to overflow into my writing space because no harmonics would have been developed and the amplification process would have been diminished greatly. Instead I'm in here writing fully aware of the great music playing tapping my foot and hitting the keyboard.

However what I just described is for me and may not be for others. It would not be fair for me to say people need to listen like I do or they are wrong.

S

"Michael, your views?"

M

So hard for me to be objective right now. Your heading toward dry and more dead and I'm working on opening up a system and just gained 5 to 6 feet more stage and liquidity. The emotion and impact that came with my recent opening up makes it almost impossible for me to say I would want to loose one inch of this new found space.

Hi Michael

I am finding that the lower component in the Boo! is relatively easy to fix and the "f" note is finally subdued. But the thing is I need to control the one other upper bass/low midrange "loose note". Come to think of it, the lower component is actually tolorable and it might be musical.

But if that goes (is attenuated) when I tune the room, the upper bass "loose note" becomes audible and colors the sound on every record I play. Nasty.

Also Sonic has experienced the "running resonance syndrome" with some systems (fortunately not mine), where there is a slap echo in one spot and if I fix an EchoTune on that spot, the slap echo runs to an adjacent untreated spot to the right or left. Add another EchoTune and the slap moves again. And again.

Michael, what do you do when you face this ghostly phenomenon?

Back to my room. I am getting this "loose note" from the Right Upper Front of the room. Funny is that with my ears, in other live rooms I have helped friends fix, including a room in an earlier dwelling, it is always something in the top Right Hand Corner zone that gives problems....I have experienced this too many times over in the last 10+ years....a ring, overhang or slap echo in the Right Upper Front....is it a coincidence or is it me? But listeners with me point out the same spot where they hear the where trouble is....what is it about the Right Upper Front (The RUF)?

I am moving towards a controlled (no ringing or "loose notes" -- how can any music be harmonically full and alive if there are "loose notes" I cannot imaging) with a smooth decay in the reverberation of my room. Dry and more dead is not the target at all.

Sonic

"Michael, what do you do when you face this ghostly phenomenon?"


LOL, I test the echo to see if it is hurting or helping the sound. Again you have to visualize what waves are doing in your room. If that echo beam is not in a direct line to your ear or influencing your particular listening zone in a negative way, why would you want to mess with it? That echo beam could very well be a stabling factor in your sound stage and tonal balance. That's like saying we should kill all nodes only to find that when we do this our music is dead and part of it missing altogether.

When I'm doing a hall or some place where the whole room has to sound the same I treat it differently than I do a listening room. With listening my priority is to get as much of the recording, in balance, to my chair as I can. Once there I begin to shape things to my liking. My room is my loudspeaker and my room is my instrument that wants to be played. It's important I treat it as such. I can only recommend making changes that make the music better to you. If that means killing all the echo slap cool, but you will find your walls will in the end be almost completely covered because you are changing the rooms natural amplification process. It's a balancing act and you want the winner to be your pressure zones. I like my pressure zones to be big and full. This way I get a ton of harmonic richness and a more fullrange sound. When I start to make my pressure zones smaller and the room more "dry" my instruments start to become mini, shrunk down size. More like toy figurines than instruments. I have in the past done the looking at the tiny classical stage thing but as soon as I put on a jazz or rock piece now I'm stuck with this tiny production that I know in real life was a ton bigger.

Basically what I'm saying is while your playing with cutting out the boo take note of how much music you loose with it by doing certain things. One of them can easily be chasing echo slap. Also keep in mind that I've gone dead to live to dead so many times I've pretty much decided where I like my own balance set, and I know how far I can go on either side of that before I get into distortion, or what I would call too lush or too dry for my taste. When I set things up for me I like being about 2 steps to the lush (fat) side of the line. This makes it easy for me to go from lush to tight quickly without loosing a bunch of settling time. Plus on the lush side I can listen to a lot more music without worrying about a brittle sound.

"Back to my room. I am getting this "loose note" from the Right Upper Front of the room. Funny is that with my ears, in other live rooms I have helped friends fix, including a room in an earlier dwelling, it is always something in the top Right Hand Corner zone that gives problems....I have experienced this too many times over in the last 10+ years....a ring, overhang or slap echo in the Right Upper Front....is it a coincidence or is it me? But listeners with me point out the same spot where they hear the where trouble is....what is it about the Right Upper Front (The RUF)?"

There are a few weird things that rooms do and a lot of it has to do with what direction the rooms face and how the energy pull is in a particular part of the world. Here in the US for example there is a thing I call left room drift that I have noticed in a lot of systems here. Some of these energies get their start from electromagnetic sources.

"I am moving towards a controlled (no ringing or "loose notes" -- how can any music be harmonically full and alive if there are "loose notes" I cannot imaging) with a smooth decay in the reverberation of my room. Dry and more dead is not the target at all."

Did I ever talk about when I made my own sound rugs and wall hangings. They actually sound pretty good and don't give a lot of ill effects.

Ok, now I have to ask, what is a "loose note"? Are you talking about Frequencies that use parallel surfaces to build?

Also again we need to be making clear that we are talking hard rooms in Singapore or "some" concrete rooms in high humidity in other parts of the world. I don't want to start heading down that path again where we are calling isolated room formulas the norm. For example echo slap here in the states sound far different from echo slaps in Hong Kong. Echo slap here in the states in dry wall rooms spread out much further along the wall than in high humidity concrete rooms. So lets say if I have to put a tune right on a spot in Singapore I might be able to control that same spot here but have the tune 2 feet away from the spot to have the same effect.

In our anechoic camber we tested how different wall materials reacted with the same test frequencies. What we found was different wall materials of the same size all responded differently from each other. Another thing that I found interesting is when I moved these test to my listening rooms I could hear the effect that different echos made on the performance of the music. Surprisingly and what you might be asking is at a certain point the echos actually kept the room in balance from the perspective in losing or not losing music content. By cancelling some of the echos we actually lost the body of guitars and cellos in the room altogether. When we restored the echo the body came back. So basically after 20 more years of doing this I have come to the conclusion that for any given room there is a natural course that the room wants to take and when it is disturbed to the point of collapse the sound stage shrinks and or parts of the music content comes up missing.

The rooms that I have walked into that had magical music abilities were nothing like we read about with a certain size. These were rooms that just happened. Openings into the room were just right and size, shape, construction had this rightness. Foundation and age of the rooms were factors, but most importantly they had presence. A beautiful body to the sound that made your chest fill and your voice project. When an instrument was played the room filled with body and volume as if you were sitting in a natural amplifier. Notes were balanced and yes there was a beautiful over hang or plumpness I would call it. These rooms as listeners make you feel happy when you are in them. Don't know about you guys but bad rooms give me vertigo. When I sit down to listen the music is so robbed an artificial sounding it makes me want to run out of the room to breathe. I can not do sterile rooms. I feel like I am in a hospital bed. Violins sound like they are strings attached to a piece of stone instead of rich and meaningful. Building the tunable room this is what I go for. A room full of life and at the same time can be deadly accurate and revealing, able to pick out even the smallest of detail.

Now back to Sonics room.

People reading this thread need to get the basic ground rules down.

First size of the room?

2. construction of the room?

3. doors and windows?

4. furnishings?

5. humidity?

6. age?

7. foundation? 1st floor, 2nd so on?

Also I recommend people read Sonic's past posts to see his traveled course.

Assuming you guys have this info digested Sonic is at a place where he is heading toward removing more energy from the room. One question that is brought up is how much is too much energy?

If too much energy how does it make the music sound toward the negative? At this point a before and after listening test would be good. If you dead-ed a spot in the room how does the music sound before you did it and after you did it? These tests should be done at the listening position. hearing what they do in the particular area of the room is good but how it effects the stereo is the main goal.

From what I have gathered over the years it seems like we have been playing with the idea that the room was in a controlled mode but at sometime we realized that the room is producing more energy than we thought. Sonic has named this the "BOO". Meaning when a sound is made there is an extra amount of energy excited in the room that is above and beyond natural room build up. He has utilized this energy before turning it into music content but still there is too much energy. For myself the fear factor comes in cause I know how easy it is to loose music and I have never heard a dry room produce good sound. At the same time if the room is sounding like a bathroom well we know that is way too much.

Also for those reading you can go to www.tuneland.info for many archives covering these topics.

"Diagram 1 is where I am now – three EchoTunes in front and four Echotunes per side, three in a row with one more EchoTune near the mini Shutters. The EchoTunes marked with a tick in the drawing are the ones originally placed before I started this struggle. That is 11 EchoTunes (that is 8 more than when I started) just to get some control on the Boo! with still a way to go before Sonic gets anything like control. "

Hi Sonic

In one of my rooms I tried the extra EchoTune approach and here's what I got.

I started with 4 EchoTunes (one in the middle of each seam) and when I added one more to any placement area like your drawing said the sound got covered like a dull blanket. I couldn't even add one extra anywhere.

I did the sonic boo test in each of my rooms and hall ways.

In the biggest room where it sounds the loudest the room sounds very controlled with a nice plump roundness to the bottom. If you boo around the room you can hear the walls but they don't really stick out much making themselves noticed beyond a nice hush. There is echo snap as in presence but there is no where in this room that it actually turns into a ping pong. You can hear where it would take off it it where going to but never does quite get to that point. At most it sounds like Neil diamond was singing and a country star added a bit of twang to the harmony. Overhang? Just slight, more like a seasoning more than a barrel.

Medium room I'm using for tech stuff. But since it opens to the bigger room. Live but no echo. Nice bottom tone with nice balance to the range.

Hallways. These tunnels have been tuned to perfection I'm afraid. I depend on them so much that I put some time getting them to sound heavenly. There's a tiny ping at one spot but no echoslap.

Small room. I'm surprised by the small room as in the beginning it was a bathroom sound with tons of echoslap, but just now I couldn't get a echoslap to come alive anywhere. The boo is really pretty with that plump thing but no overhang beyond that.

Writing room BTW is dry as a bone with a hint of spice. I could record some dry stuff in here.

Now this is very interesting. I would have swore that on this field trip I would have gotten some serious slap back, but after tuning these rooms by listening and tuning in the music I can hear where the echos would be starting but they don't quite turn into full echo slap. Well tie my tennis shoes! And that was all done by tuning in the music an no clapping of hands like I do on short business trips. Now how did I do that

So in my rooms adding more burn could be costly. Voicing what I have is the way to go with some more wood tones and a bit more flavor.

Hi Michael

Since my last post, Sonic tried something you recommended -- I used Space Cones on the doors on their outside surfaces. I used 3" x 3" x 1/8" MW squares and stuck the Space Cones on then applied these to the 1/3 height points of the four doors.

That is 8 MW pieces with 8 Space Cones.

After 15 minutes of listening, I could hear how much sound was leaking out the doors. With this sound pressure energy now held in the room, the upper bass/mid bass zone became more rich and resonant but it did not ring/honk. The EchoTunes were doing their job but I felt that the overall balance was upset. The decay envelop was not right. So I started to take down a number of the EchoTunes ending up with 3 in the front and 3 on each side wall around the ETs that were ticked in my diagram.

Better. There is still Boo! but the decay is faster and there is less upward shift in pitch. The loose note/echo is now confined to an area just forward of the front wall. Sonic thinks we may be moving in a better direction.

Sonic

Hi Michael

The 8 Space Cones/MW pieces on the doors are working well but they created new PZs over the door areas (L and R) which resulted in resonant zones to the Left and Right of my listening chair. I had to add two EchoTunes to the ET triple set over the doors to balance things out.

This is telling me something about where the Boo! comes from. It may not be a case of the parallel surfaces but how the pressure flow is moving Front-to-Back in the room, the rebound Back-to-Front plus side-to-side.

This is just a vague theory and Sonic thinks I may have found something that might cut the Boo! The experiment is in progress and I’ll report it in my Friday post, but must first let this settle for 48 hours before Sonic comments.

For Zonees who are trying the BOO!, it is a good test, but it cannot be used in isolation to tell how a room sounds. From the Boo! alone, Sonic’s room should be muddy with a sting in the treble like an off-QC Decca London cartridge (yes, I have owned those and one of them wrecked the inner track of a rare Archiv LP. Decca cartridges can be great, but them Sonic prefers to salute from a great distance…the Decca professional and the later London arm [long pillar, not the one with the spirit bubble in the headshell] are very good arms) but my room sounds far better and more controlled than the Boo! test alone indicates.

But as things are now, Sonic might be zeroing in on a good place to take my room. More soon....

Sonic

Our rooms are like teachers of a foreign language. We have to let go of what we think might work and let the language teach us.

nice to see the thinking process

Sonic thinks the source/cause of the Boo! has been found. Better still, the remedy to eradicate it is proving effective.

Source/cause: it is the ceiling. Sound from a source spreads through the room and then the pressure flow along the ceiling that is not diffused and weakened by the Sound Shutters on the ceiling runs till it hits the end walls and shoots out of the ceiling/wall junction horn loaded. Result: a Big BOO!

This will happen along any untreated ceiling/wall seam which explains why the Boo! is always behind me and room filling wherever I generate the Boo! It also explains why the Boo! "rains" down on me. It is the ceiling being live and the flow comes from top down, less a SIDE-to-SIDE direction.

Solution: I set up a pair of Shutters parallel to the front wall about 1 ft from it and where it faced the bare wall seam. Instantly the Boo! reduced in intensity, the reverb time shortened and the room went cleaner and drier. The Boo! at this point was on the way to be longer a problem.

Sonic then used some balsa from Michael and set them up parallel to some untreated seams in the side walls. BTW I am using 3M Command tape that allows me to experiment. They leave no mark on my walls on removal.

Shutters on the side walls even reduced the Boo! further. The front wall is a primary source of Boo! and the parallel Shutters were so effective that Sonic found the room dry, quieter and the "loose" notes are gone!

The effect on muscik: no more overhang, the volume is about the same but I am hearing an effortlessness in the sound that I only heard from tube/horn systems till now. No more overhang, the midbass projects and the sound has much more girth. The soundstage has increased in width and depth. The whole musick sounds real and with an ease I have not I heard before from my Magnaplanars.

You'd think the amp has been boosted 3x the power and that there is a subwoofer somewhere. The bass is that good. The treble is shimmering and highly detailed. Again, an ease that encourages me to listen and listen and after writing this want to listen for hours more.

To remove the Boo! completely, there are still some more Shutters that need to go up parallel to the front wall and the side walls. The solution is at hand where Sonic now can set up the diffusion to remove the Boo!

The source/cause is no longer a mystery.

The Boo! has been reduced in intensity and there are hints that I need to start cutting on the Burn in the room -- Sonic thinks the curtain in front and the multiple EchoTunes may in time be taken down.

Sonic

Hi Sonic

This is exciting news and can be used as a guide for those who find themselves facing the same conditions. One of the key signs of this working is "ease". The ease of sound is something that can be heard easily once you experience it. You can actually hear the stress taken out of the air. You might remember when I did this in the studio during a piano recording. The artist actually felt the pressure on his fingers change when the room relaxed. I've heard drummers say the same thing "when the room is in balance the drum skins are more responsive" (drummer for Janet Jackson).

Another step toward your system becoming less of an audiophile myth and more of a musical instrument.

nice! proud of you for hanging in there and finding the answers

Hi Michael

I'll post some diagrams to help Zonees who may face the same problem.

Is this solution similar to the "seam tuning" product you are developing to replace the soffit tuner that got too expensive?

Sonic

Hi Zonees

Here is the diagram that explains what Sonic discovered.







Drawing 1 describes the cause. Sound pressure waves run along the ceiling (mostly lengthwise, less side-to-side) and horn loads out of the ceiling-wall corner seam.

Drawing 2 describes what didn't work. There is little sound pressure waves going up the walls because they are broken up by RoomTune devices, furniture etc. A Shutter mounted at "X" is ineffective or worsens the hornloading effect by focussing the horn load effect out from the corner more by preventing downward dissipation.

Drawing 3 is what worked.

Sonic

Hi Sonic,

Brilliant! Congrats on finding that ease!

Hey, Sonic,

I'm the slow kid who sits at the back of the classroom. Are you saying that the shutters, in this new position, are sort of a "second line of defense," used along with corner tunes and echo tunes? Are these shutters in the "gaps" between the "pillows?" I hope you can get some photos soon.

Hi Robert

You not the slow kid. Took me a lot of own tail chasing to get to this.

RoomTune stuff like Corner Tunes and Echotunes are still to be used in the recommended places in the corners, ceiling wall seams and some spots like Mr Green as shown you. Shutters would still be mounted on the ceiling and side walls.

All this should be done first and in many cases that is your room tuned (finis/done).

There may be rooms with more complicated problems like mine where hot spots develop along the seams giving Boo! These spots can appear anywhere and I am getting the nasty feeling that the bigger the room, the greater chance of these popping up.

If the cause is due to pressure flow along the ceiling, placing more Shutters parallel to the wall where the Boo! spots are about 12 inches out breaks the energy coming off the corner like in my discovery.

In my room, two extra Shutters face the front wall seam with no ET behind them. I am using this because I am sure more ETs and XLTs can fix the Boo! but they could damp the room too much. Shutters are surprisingly effective.

With the Tune, less is more.

And it should not take years and a saga of posts to Tune a room.

If we have all the required bits and advice from Michael a relatively normal room should be done in two cycles of Tune acoustic control gear (CTs, ET, FS-PZCs or FS-DTs and Shutters) purchased over a couple of weeks at most.

After the room is dialed in, then the equipment chain can be tuned with racks, platforms, cones and wires plus some of Michael's wild and wonderful products for things like circuit boards and transformers. Then enjoy the music for years.

What I don't want to do from my posts is to give new Zonees the impression that "Buy Michael's products and You will spend the Next 10 years writing a Book about your Experiences"

That's the opposite of what should happen.

Sonic

Hi Zonees

After Sonic dealt with the flow on the ceiling hornloading out of the frontwall and ceiling seam (see my August 25 posting), the settling of the system showed the overhang in the room started to clear up.

Just like a haze and fog clearing then allowing us to see the scenery better, the reduced overhang showed me where some ringing hot spots were in my room. Not surprisingly, they were on the ceiling. There were two spots that were near the ceiling wall seams and about a little more than a quarter length down the room. These positions that needed treatment had no Shutters placed yet so SOnic made Shutters to barricade the front-to-rear flow on the ceiling.

Sonic fashioned two Michael Green balsa DIY pieces into Shutters, mounted them at those points and the ringing reduced even more.

A little settling is beginning to show that the Boo! has reduced a lot and the residual resonance in the room hints that the soundstage area is larger than the physical size of the room.

Along the way as the settling took place, the sound started to open up. I got more width, ease and midrange detail than before.

Sonic now has 10 Shutters on the ceiling, 6 short Shutters at the ceiling/wall seam and 6 full-length Shutters on three vertical walls.

The soundstage images are much more 3D and....more ease in the sound.

Only drawback (this may resolve after 10 days of settling) is the zones just ahead of Sonic's listening chair to the right and left feels a bit empty. The music and ambience seems to leave that zone alone. So I get a full stage front, good ambience rear but there is something in the zone a bit ahead of where I sit that is missing and that takes away a vital 3D presentation with images from the speakers and between them not coming forward to the listener that give music such an engaging presentation.

Michael your views?

Sonic

Hi Sonic

Very good that you are actually hearing the zones. This is the height of tuning in my book and the part that the audiophile world misses all together. You are at a very precise but delicate place. Try not to disturb the front and back while expanding the sides but the answer could be in a couple of places. The pressure in another zone could be holding back the center zones. Remember that zones work like inflating tires on a car. When they are all equal the car rides smoothly. Second, since your room is so close to balance the signal electronically made be telling you to make just the slightest change of opening. Check your screws, one might be just a hair tight. Third, your room is now working almost completely with itself so your speaker placement may be off a quarter of an inch in it's zone an may be filling the other zones a little more than the one you are in. Most importantly is that you make a mental note of the sound you now have so you can combine this sound with the sound when you get the side fill and make sure that you keep it all.

Hi Michael and Zonees



Think Sonic has got the room Tuned. After the two extra Shutters went up on the ceiling this week I did a round of Boo! testing and from what the room told me I placed a RoomTune Square on the Left and Right walls just ahead of the Shutters at the ¼ pts of the room length just about half height of the room (see pix in Drewster’s room of Dec 25, 2011 – the 2nd and 4th pictures to give you an idea what I did).

KAPOW! The soundstage opened up and I got ambience and girth fill in the zones just ahead of Sonic's listening chair to the Right and Left between the speaker plane. They aren’t empty anymore. I can hear details and things going on in these parts. The volume for a given preamp setting increased, the Boo! is damped and tight without being acoustically “dead” and the resonance is flat in frequency spectrum or shifts down in pitch slightly and no more upward shift in pitch.

The result is musically exciting – I been listening to Alfred Brendel Playing Schubert’s piano sonata D959 and D960 (EMI), William Byrd’s Consort Musick (Fretwork/Virgin), Copland’s Connotations/New England Pieces etc (Sony), Gregorian Chants (EMI), John Playford dance pieces (New York Renaissance Band/Arabesque). Got tonally correct voices and instruments, big soundstage with a projected centre stage which I hear in live musick, detailed trebles and good bass (even without a subwoofer), ambience that is subtle yet with zones filled nicely.

There may be room for improvement but this is already very good and I am going to pause here. Given the constraints Sonic has to work with, this is about as good it gets.

Sonic means that I could go and tune the screws in the system and tune each of them but there are more than 147 screws in my system/room and I lost count not yet including the screws that hold the blades to the brackets and the brackets to the walls and then there are all the mounting on the doors and what about the source-equipment I bring into the room and play alternative software occasionally.

Think I’ll get on with expanding the collection of the musick I love and listen…be a music fan

Sonic

Hi Michael and Zonees

A friendly audiophile said to Sonic “want to try running my 300B single-ended triode integrated amplifier in your system?”

Sonic says “err..your amp gives out only 8w + 8w into 8 ohms….my MG1.5QRs are 86 db/1w/1m efficient…the result will be something that will not make 90 dB at my listening chair” but Sonic thinks “given that the Tune improves the efficiency of things…this might be worth a try…after all, if the amp works I could get one and my system will be even simpler.” And this amp sounds pretty good driving the owner's Hi-Efficiency speakers. Off we went…

First impressions were good and the SET amp could play fairly loud in my room. After about 2 hours of continuous musick Sonic concluded that:

Likely a Fail -- 300B SETs are very kind to singing voices, they have a wonderfully musical midrange. The bass given the 4 ohm load of the Magneplanars is ripe and maybe overripe and plumy.

The soundstage is fairly big with midrange-rich images well fleshed out.

The 300B SET can play loud (if you sue a lightweight loudspeaker or one that is very inert) but with rock, I can hear a lot of compression in dynamics as the volume is raised. The thickness increases too sue to the soft clipping.

What finally made me reverse the plan is the 300B SET had a noticeable signature to the sound. It is not a neutral device. This signature is there regardless if I am playing classical, jazz or rock. A certain warmth that has the upper bass emphasized and a mid and treble that is musical and pure on one hand but also harmonically rich in a way becomes a signature that colors the sound. I like the ease but this thing is seriously colored.

So back to the Quicksilver preamp and the Rega amp and the dynamic headroom came back and I can tell the sound is more neutral than with the 300B SETs.

Sonic is working to discover what Michael pointed out – that the point at which the whole sound snaps into place may be ¼ inch away.

I am experimenting now with speaker coherency through moving the MG1.5QRs about and testing toe in and testing the effect of reducing the speaker separation and different amounts of toe-in.

Experiment

Let’s see how this works. It has been more than a week since Sonic stopped Tuning, but listened to musick and did nothing to Tune the system and room.

Sonic’s system is not at all perfect even though I plan to cut down on the tuning but I want to work towards getting more musick from a system getting nearly into balance.

Sonic

Hi Michael and Zonees

In Sonic's attempt to find the focus from a 1/4 inch move, it turned out I got a few more tunes to do.

Seems like there is a better placement point for the Magnaplanar 1.5QRs not 1/4" away but 7 inches inward on either side.

This came about as I read about transient phase linearity and looking at the Magnaplanars owners manaul where Sonic saw that Winey and the good people at White Bear Lake recommend that the middle of the loudspeaker panel (by width of panel not height) should be on axis to the listener's ears with the ribbon tweeter on the inside.

In my system, the tweeters are to the inside but off axis to my ears and the mid-width of the panels even further off axis. Could this be the cause of the over-wide and spaced sound that occasionally gets to me caused by a lack of coherence?

Sonic then moved the speakers inward (closer to each other) so the middle point of each panel was the same agle to my ears where the tweeters once were. This meant a move inward of 6+ inches each side and the tweeters are now just about on axis to my ears.

The sound, though narrower in stage width, has now more transient snap and power. There is a sense that all the harmonics of the instruments are in phase with each others from the bottom of the frequency range to the top treble. And given that I heard a small vocal ensemble sing live recently, a recording of a similarly sized vocal group played back now sounds properly spaced and presented.

The outer edges of the Magnaplanar 1.5QRs have moved fron 18" from the side walls to 24.75" and the toe-in definitely needs adjusting.

From two evenings of listening, Sonic finds that this plaement could be an alternative if not better one. Also, some movement or addition of Tune equipment needs to be done before I can say that the set up is right. Is the Tune over? Not quite, but Sonic might be getting close. Maybe.

Michael, in your earlier set ups, you toed in your speakers quite a lot. I see this in your landmark interview with Postive Feedback where your original Tunavilla system had the Chameleon toed in almost to the drivers on axis to the the listener's ears and from your earlier diagrams in the Tuneland archives.

What made you move to a near zero toe-in set up? What were the differences and benefits of the more recent set up?

Sonic