The ultimate system was probably the one in the screening room at Dolby Labs on Potero in San Francisco. The entire room was supported on anti-vibration mounts, isolated from the rest of the structure by an air gap. Outside that was a foot of acoustic insulation. The speakers are built into big chambers in the walls hidden by grille cloth screens. There's a control and projection room at the back. You didn't even see the system. Which is the point. The equipment should not distract from the show.
The room also had good enough acoustics that a speaker didn't need amplification to address 90 people.
I was there once for a demo of spatial audio for video games. We could hear the enemies sneaking up behind us. They had full hemisphere speaker coverage.
The room wasn't particularly luxurious. It was a working facility for the industry.
Dolby has since moved to a larger facility and built a new, larger screening room. I haven't seen that one.
All the room effort is a good point. This guy's listening room appears to be an acoustically odd shape with a lot of hard, echoy surfaces. The room acoustics likely dominate any benefits he hears after the first $5,000.
That said, I suspect he has more fun building the room than anything.
The main thing is avoiding resonances / room modes. These will cause peaks and nulls in the frequency response that cannot be fixed with EQ. The primary way to do this is to avoid right angles; it looks like he has largely done this. In a more typical room where right angles are a fact of life, furnishings and bass traps can help with this.
The (lack of) sound absorption is kind of a tricky issue to discuss in a brief manner.
On an objective level w.r.t to room interactions, this guy's seating area is closer to the speakers than the side walls. That makes this a nearfield arrangement, meaning that the direct sound from the speakers will be greater in magnitude than reflected sound from the walls. This alone will minimize the effect of reflections.
On a subjective level w.r.t. room interactions, somewhat counterintuitively the goal for enjoyable listening is not to create a purely anechoic room totally free from room effects: this sounds unnatural and essentially just recreates a headphones listening experience. One can save a lot of money by strapping on a pair of headphones if that's what's desired. The human brain is, frankly, rather amazing at doing its own "room correction" and hearing through room issues anyway, as long as they're not massive peaks and nulls.
I'd pay some decent money for time in that room! Maybe not a lot of money. But some.
The entire room is supported on anti-vibration
mounts, isolated from the rest of the structure
by an air gap. Outside that is a foot of acoustic
insulation.
Tangentially: the noise floor in a "normal" residential room is one reason why technically inferior formats such as vinyl records continue to be enjoyed by many. By the numbers, vinyl is objectively inferior to many digital formats. However, the average residential room has a noise floor of something like 30-40dB anyway. So, under normal listening conditions, vinyl tends to sound quite good compared to modern technology.
(edit) This could have been phrased better. What I meant was: when you look at "the specs", vinyl is vastly inferior to CD-quality digital audio. However, real world listening conditions render many of these advantages moot. For example, vinyl has a higher noise floor than CD audio - but this and other "flaws" of vinyl are essentially rendered moot thanks to real world listening/playback conditions that mask them.
- vinyl is technically inferior to CD-quality digital audio, by a longshot
- one reason among others is: vinyl's noise floor is higher than CD-quality digital audio
- however, the "disadvantages" of vinyl are somewhat mooted by real-world listening and playback conditions. for example: the approx. 30-40dB noise floor present in many residential rooms. that environmental noise floor is going to mask a lot of vinyl's flaws, rendering them somewhat irrelevant in the real world.
Vinyl's noise floor is heavily rumble-centric. We can't hear that as easily and when we do we can hear through it very easily. Also, our hearing's evolved to hear past intrusive transients like crackle or leaf rustling, so in every sense the noise floor of vinyl is incredibly deceptive.
Yup. Additionally, this roughly correlates with the noise floor in a "typical" room. The walls themselves do a great job of attenuating high-frequency noise from outside the room. The outside noise that does penetrate into a closed room will be in the lower frequencies.
Also, our hearing's evolved to hear past intrusive
transients like crackle or leaf rustling, so in
every sense the noise floor of vinyl is incredibly
deceptive.
I'd never considered this angle, but in a way a higher noise floor could be an advantage. If the noise on the recording medium drowns out traffic noise, the fridge, the heater, etc. it could make for a more immersive listening experience.
My initial post wasn't phrased very well; my apologies. I edited it for (hopefully) increased clarity.
You are absolutely correct. In an acoustically refined setting such as this (or, with a nice pair of headphones) the differences between vinyl and digital would be more obvious.
However, in a more typical residential setting with background noise and non-ideal acoustics the differences are masked and mooted to a large extent.
Thanks. I am puzzling about this because of the experience of visiting a friend's this weekend, playing records on his turntable. Old records, low end turntable and speakers, but bizarrely the listening experience was strikingly better- more engaging, transporting, interesting- than my higher end digital setup. The records were noisy, to be sure, but it was almost that I could hear through the noise to actual musicians playing actual instruments. Like the cocktail party effect, my brain was more engaged by the experience of listening. Makes me wonder if adding noise to a digital system would for some use cases improve the experience.
Much of the unreality of modern recordings is collateral damage from the loudness wars.[1] For noisy environments like cars and for casual listening, lots of dynamic range compression helps. Most recordings are made for that market.
You can get more dynamic range from the hardware than most listening environments support. This is a problem for serious music. Even for serious loud rock music.
To add to this -- vinyl and CDs/digital always have at least some mastering differences, and often are completely different. If the vinyl edition has better mastering choices, it can sound better than the digital edition. But if the digital had equal or better mastering choices, it will sound better than the vinyl and will retain that through generations of direct copying.
> We could hear the enemies sneaking up behind us.
Consumer audio is getting really good at spatial audio. Like, surprisingly good. I just got a sub-$500 television, and haven't hooked a soundbar up yet (just using TV audio). I was watching a movie with a scene in a cabin in the woods (not that one), and I was sitting by my window with my back to it. I started hearing birds chirping and wind blowing outside behind me, but when I looked out the window all was still. I realized it was the "outside the cabin" audio in that scene. My mind was absolutely blown.
The ultimate system was probably the one in the screening room at Dolby Labs on Potero in San Francisco. The entire room was supported on anti-vibration mounts, isolated from the rest of the structure by an air gap. Outside that was a foot of acoustic insulation. The speakers are built into big chambers in the walls hidden by grille cloth screens. There's a control and projection room at the back. You didn't even see the system. Which is the point. The equipment should not distract from the show.
The room also had good enough acoustics that a speaker didn't need amplification to address 90 people.
I was there once for a demo of spatial audio for video games. We could hear the enemies sneaking up behind us. They had full hemisphere speaker coverage.
The room wasn't particularly luxurious. It was a working facility for the industry.
Dolby has since moved to a larger facility and built a new, larger screening room. I haven't seen that one.