Texas Cops

• Acoustic Panels
• Bass Traps
• Acoustic Foam Panels
• DIY Acoustic Panels
• Church Acoustics
• Studio Acoustics
• Home Theater Acoustics
• Restaurant Acoustics
• Acoustic Insulation
• Room Acoustic Treatments

Working in new product development for loudspeakers and attending the trade shows, one sees a lot of funny things. One of the tricks of the trade, little known to most consumers, is positioning the listener in the spot where the loudspeakers or audio system sounds best. While the goal for most demonstrators is simply to remove as much of the room acoustics as possible from the equation, some, and surprisingly the higher priced systems, carry this practice to ridiculous extremes.

On one visit to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, I was scouting out the competition and auditioning some of the extreme high end loudspeaker systems at the Alexis Park venue. Alexis Park was generally reserved for the higher end, more esoteric companies. These might be companies as small as two or three individuals often selling a pair of loudspeakers for $20,000 or more. Not my cup of tea, but fun to see.

I went into one demonstration suite to listen to just such a loudspeaker system. In the room was a single hard-backed chair of the kind you might find at a kitchen table, serviceable, but designed more to keep you sitting up straight than for comfort. As I sat down in the listening chair, I inadvertently moved the chair. It moved literally 3-4 inches back and a couple inches to the right. The demonstrator was horrified! He quickly rushed over, asked me to stand with a scolding look and moved the chair back a few inches to its original position. He had small marks on the floor for all four legs to make sure it was perfect.

The speakers sounded good, ok very good, but the problem for me was that anyone who bought these speakers could only listen to them in a straight backed chair positioned just so with a tape measure and marks on the floor to keep it positioned just right. Heaven forbid you should want to play music for visitors or when your family was in the room, too.

While I understand the issue of taking room acoustics out of the equation so that one hears only the speakers, that seems a little extreme to me. It is quite probable that with these particular speakers, the problem wasn’t so much room acoustics as it was beamy transducers, which is to say using a size or type of speaker motor that results in a narrowly focused sound wave.

A good real world speaker system demonstration will allow and even ask listeners to move about the room and listen to the speakers from several different positions. Directly in front of one speaker, between the two, off to one side, near field and far field, for example. Speakers that sound good in all of those locations are likely to sound good in your home as well. Of course, the secret here is that the listening room has been treated with acoustic panels, bass traps or whatever was needed to make sure that the effects of room acoustics are minimized to the extent possible.

Of course, if you expect your speakers to sound that good when you get them home, you’ll need to apply some acoustic panels to problem areas in your room as well. Fortunately, that isn’t expensive or difficult. Acoustic treatment for a listening room isn’t trickery, it is simply applying panels to minimize echoes standing waves that naturally result when any broad spectrum sound source is placed within a confined space. Positioning your listener’s head within an inch of the sweet spot for a pair of $20,000 loudspeakers, on the other hand, is going a bit too far.