I’m extremely lucky that the chief planning officer has granted me exclusive room of one of the spare bedrooms as a dedicated listening room and whilst I had got my hifi set up pretty well, as the room is mine to do with as I please I decided to take a look at room measuring and room correction. Being the lazy type I am I managed to secure the services of Mike and Nico of Halcyon Audio (highly recommend btw) and blimey what a difference just tweaking the position of the speakers and nudging a bit of furniture has made! Haven’t even needed any acoustic panels or anything.
Mike made it look easy and he could point at some unwanted peaks and troughs, identify very specific bits of furniture which were causing the imbalance and adjust the position of the speaker to work with the room instead of against it.
DIY is eminently achievable if you spend a bit of time learning how to interpret the measurement graphs etc and measuring software like REW is free but watching Mike show me a spike on the graph and go 'and that’s that shelf over there causing the issue and that one is that snake tank (I keep snakes as well as hifi) causing that imbalance was impressive.
Would highly recommend anyone with remotely a permanent set up to invest in a room measuring mic and having a go or to do what I did and get someone in who knows what they are doing as it has made perhaps the biggest single improvement to my audio outside of a major component change. Really quite startling the difference it has made.
I can’t take any credit for the results on this occasion and watching an expert analyse the room both with mics etc and just their ears and experience and move stuff about was very interesting. And then at the end to be asked to put a few tracks on and to hear the difference was staggering.
And the big advantage of what Mike and Nico did is that it was purely through repositioning etc. No panels, no convolution files etc so if I wanted I have the perfect base to build from or I can just kick back and enjoy…
I should also say what impressed me about these guys is that this was like a proper consultation. They didn’t just rock up and measure the room and produce the theoretically perfect convolution filler, rather they asked me about what music I like, where I thought my audio was lacking, what results I wanted etc
We then spent some time listening to some of my favourite music and again discussed what I thought was missing and any problem areas - I found my treble a bit bright for example.
Mike has been doing this 30 years and he could visualise the room interactions and used measurements more as confirmation of results rather than the method of identifying theoretical issues.
It was then a case of moving the speakers around to completely change their interaction with the room and working with what was already in there.
For example there’s a big wardrobe close toward the right hand side of my listening chair and this was causing issues but somehow he got it to interact and resonate with the speaker so now from the listening position the bass is perfect but from the front of the room, stood between the speakers because the wardrobe isn’t there the bass is massively biased to the left.
So at this stage no panels, no convolution files etc - just a really nicely set up room…
