By Juan C. Ayllon
Late last night, my wife, Belle, and I watched our old favorite standby, Saving Private Ryan, on DVD. Explosions rocked the room, but as beleaguered soldiers stormed Omaha Beach, her brows furrowed.
"This doesn't sound as good as it used to in our old house!" she announced. "The sound of bullets would wiz over our heads and surround us, but now it's all up front!" My Padded Cell This past year, I had embarked on a series of acoustic treatments, setting up thick, homemade acoustic panels, bass traps, acoustic curtains and a thick rug in my listening room (I tacked some 5/8" thick Dacron Fiberfill batting on the backside of the Thomas Kinkade painting hanging there) -- so much so that when my adult stepchildren came by to celebrate Christmas last month, the joke was that I had gone mad and constructed a padded cell for myself in my man cave. Put nicely, Belle didn't appreciate the mass proliferation of Do It Yourself sonic treatments and, to be fair, the "man cave" was, in reality, our family room, so I curtailed plans to install acoustic panels on the ceiling and made sure that one that I place at the right reflection point by the fireplace for serious listening could be tucked away in a closet afterwards. It was a good compromise: she's more or less alright with the appearance and I really like what I accomplished -- as did others who either worked in professional audio or were audiophiles like me. Listen Up Yet, as I sat there last night listening to Belle complain, I realized that she was right. That's when I remembered that I had placed some 5/8" thick strips of Dacron Fiberfill batting in between the curtain and its blackout liner with adhesive spray. Springing to action, I peeled them off and suddenly the room opened up. It had been over-dampened. "Don't I have good ears?" Belle asked, triumphantly, giving me the thumbs up. After the movie ended, I placed my acoustic diffuser panel over the flatscreen in our media center and played some music at Belle's request. While listening to the live Eagle album, Hell Freezes Over, she asked if other treatments were really necessary. I offered to let her hear the difference between having the front corner faux ladder bass traps in place and out (I would have built one for each corner of the room, but for compromises). As each were secured with a bungee cord looped over a nail on top of adjacent door frames, it was an easy fix, Setting them in an adjacent hallway, I sat down and resumed listening.
Our reactions couldn't have been any different: she beamed and I frowned. She liked the added definition while I disliked it immensely.
"Listen to the clapping of the crowd," I said. "It sounds fake and artificial." Replacing the corner bass traps, I replayed that passage. "See how it sounds more natural now?" She nodded yes. "Without the corner bass traps, it sounds too harsh, too digital. It's kind of like the sound at church." She agreed. "Yeah, Patrice, Connie and I were talking about how the younger generation likes that sound," she said, referring to a recent coffeehouse conversation, where they complained about the harder-edged, digitally-etched house Christian rock mix favored by the younger audio engineers at our Sunday worship services. "They grew up listening to iPods for God's sake, so that sounds normal to them," I quipped. Our conversation devolved. A Matter of Balance "I'd rather have too little than too much acoustic treatment," a friend in the industry once told me. "A vendor loaned us his panels at an audio show one year, setting them up all around the room, but they deadened the space! We ended up taking a lot of them down. We hid them in a closet," he chuckled. An executive friend with Fostex once told me that in a good media room, the ratio should be 60 percent hard wall surfaces to 40 percent softer, acoustic absorptive ones. I would agree. Sometimes, as the saying goes, less is more.
0 Comments
Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |
ColumnistsJuan C. Ayllon Archives
March 2024
Categories |
Site powered by Weebly. Managed by iPage