Gotta dance before you commit

New listening rooms are like new partners. You gotta spend time with them before you know them. The two biggest unknowns in any system are the room and the speakers. Both are so far away from perfection that they must be lived in and with for a reasonable period of time before committing to dealing with their particulars. Take the Infinity IRSV. In its first home across the street, bass was a serious problem. There were multiple standing wave build ups and suckouts that we tried to ameliorate with absorbers and Helmholtz resonators. These helped, but only a little, and in the end, I had to do two things: crank the subwoofers to their maximum output level and move the listening chair in one particular spot where the bass was closest to right. In its new home, Music Room Two, we decided on quite a different approach to the problem of standing waves. Instead of absorbers and traps, we simply angled the long wall so as not to be parallel (by 6 inches overall). This (seemingly) minor design decision was suggested to us by mastering engineer Gus Skinas in an offhand comment, "it makes a big difference". He couldn't have been more right. In the first few hours of Music Room Two's setup (and when I made this video) I was very concerned about the bass. The upper plucks of bass strings boomed into the room in a very unnatural way and we began moving the woofers around to fix it. That helped but still, the spectral balance of the bass was all wrong. Then it dawned on me. I was duplicating the setup in Music Room One and that was the problem. Tomorrow, the solution.