I get what you’re asking. In a typical room, the walls are cladded with room treatment so any space ‘inside’ that area (i.e. the whole room) gets the benefit from the treatment.
MacArthur’s room is much larger than where his treatment is set up, so he’s only treated the area inside that treatment. Of course, the outside of his abfusers will probably help too.
I’ve literally sat with a couple of cushions beside my head to test this theory out. It works really well. It does however change a large part of the frequency spectrum so, if done in a permanent setup, I would re-do my speaker placement.
I was just trying to remember the weird and wonderful (stereo) things I’ve tried in the past…
The Peter Belt stuff (reef knots, sellotape and slips of paper) and, I think it was reviewer Jimmy Hughes (?) who used to point his speakers at the front wall for the reflected sound. In my case, the former was great fun, the latter awful
I know I am lucky.
Speakers are 2 meters ahead of the wall, I have 3.5m height for the ceiling and 12 meters behind my chair.
All has been calculated following REW measurements by an acoustic expert, and computerized for acoustic modeling.
Front and side panels are 20cm thickness, but I have ample space so it doesn’t really matter.
The only thing to be improved would be the bass (as usual) with bass traps but it would mean a full treatment of this 250sqm. Impossible. It’s a loft, not a studio.
This is just compensated with some EQ in Roon and all is fine.
In a space that big, you’re going to need subwoofers to get real bass. My room is large-ish but nowhere near as large as yours and, since I bought subs, I’ll never go back to just speakers.
They’re difficult to get right, but once you do, it’s pretty awesome. I’m not talking about boomy bass. I’m talking about hearing depth in a female voice kind of bass. It’s there but you really only notice it when it’s gone.
You’re perfectly right and 2 are better than one
This is on the to-do list, considering 2 JL Audio E Sub e112.
Budget, budget, how tough is our audiophile life!
Pass Labs int 250.8
PS Audio Directstream DAC
Totem Wind Design speakers
REL S812 sub
The REL is my most recent addition. Bought unseen and larger than expected. A bit of a shock for my long suffering wife.
Be careful of having the plant above the REL, - not sure if it’s magnetically shielded. I had a few plants around a logitech subwoofer back in 2019, that within 3 months all died…Since then I keep my subwoofers a distance away from plants, and any hard-drives / ssds, etc…
Am currently running s/510 in my setup, - beautiful sound…- REL’s are awesome!
