Pitfall One: The Room
Music generally happens in a room, and it may be a surprise to learn that
the room has more to say about how the music sounds than speakers and
systems. It would be nice if sound traveled from the speakers to your ears
and stopped, but it doesn't.
It also bounces around in your room, coming
back to you in the form of delayed echoes. Usually not much delay -- a
12'x12' room will bring an echo past you every few milliseconds, until
the
echoes die out, as the sound bounces between opposing walls. This amounts
to many echoes a second. Your ear can't pick out these individual echoes,
but the general result is a blurring of the sound -- what people call
muddiness. (There's also echoes off the floor, ceiling, and echoes that
angle off of multiple walls, making it a complex phenomenon.) These echoes
also overlap to make certain frequencies louder or more distorted than
others, destroying the clarity of the music.
There's plenty you can do to a room to make it a better place,
acoustically. And it doesn.t have to cost all that much to fix a room up.
Most audiophiles do end up going after the acoustics of their room, in the
end. Ironically, many folk have spent thousands on gear, only to find that
a $500 addition to the walls and floor in the form of some carefully
placed cloth, some "bass traps", and so on, makes the difference they were
after.
The Simplest Test: Move the stereo to a different room -- or even
outside.
So that's Pitfall #1: Spending money on fancy electronic gear to solve a
problem that isn't electronic. If the music sounds thin, or muddy (smeary,
indistinct), or if the bass sounds overpowering and echoy, like it's
coming out of a barrel, odds are fair that the room is as much of the
problem as anything -- so start there!
The simplest test is: Move the stereo to a different room -- or even
outside, for a quick test. Sounds different? You've just experienced the
profound effect of a room on music.
Plenty of sites can talk about taming reflections, the use of "bass
traps", and the importance of speaker positioning (and chair placement.
The reality is, even a great stereo in a good room typically only sounds
fantastic in one location in the room, a place called the "sweet spot.")
If you want to do it yourself, you'll be amazed what you can accomplish
with thick carpets, tapestries on the walls, shades over the windows
(sound reflecting from a large plate glass window can be downright
unpleasant to the ears), and new speaker positions.
But it takes
willingness to experiment and research, and that takes a serious amount of
time. You also have to be willing to put the speakers in places where they
don't look good. For example, a third of the way out into the room,
instead of pushed up against a wall, is a common ideal placement for lots
of speakers. Ideal sonically, anyway. Maybe not so ideal in terms of any
other uses of the room.
Pay Attention to the W.A.F.
And this brings up a point that's best revealed earlier, not later. Skim
websites about audiophile equipment and sooner or later you'll see the
term WAF. Without getting into a discussion of gender roles, this stands
for Wife Acceptance Factor, and it speaks to the fact that spouses may not
feel that good sound is worth speakers and cables out in the middle of
rooms, black and silver boxes that don't go with the carefully crafted
"country" look of a home, and so on. Let alone sound absorbing tubes in
corners, insulation on the walls...
If you're married, keep in mind that the no-compromise pursuit of
perfection is going to get you divorced. Discuss your incurable condition
with your spouse before you rearrange the living room.
But let's say you experimented, and you found that moving the speakers out
and apart a foot (sometimes a foot makes a surprising difference), and
hanging a thick, wool-backed tapestry on a certain spot on the wall, made
a big improvement. Enough that now you're starting to hear the actual
shortcomings of your equipment. Now what?
You're going to start buying new equipment, that's what.
Your condition is about to get expensive.
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