Now that we’ve moved the main PS Audio reference system from Music Room Two to Music Room Three we have a new challenge at hand. Where formerly the problems in MR2 were a loss of low end (a severe suck out from 100Hz and below), now we’re noticing in MR3 a kind of lackluster presentation.
Call it a loss of musical life.
Following my own advice found in The Audiophile’s Guide: The Loudspeaker, I have spent a great deal of time getting everything in balance. Only, no matter what I do there continues to be this lack of musical aliveness.
And this means I cannot get to where we need to go by setup alone. It is time to turn to the room.
First, a little history.
Neither music rooms two nor three have great dimensions. We did our best to turn a bouncy-floor mezzanine into the best rooms possible. We then spent a goodly sum of money in MR3 hiring a sound engineer to measure and condition the room with corner traps and wall absorbers for an even frequency response. It measures correctly now and so we moved the reference system in place.
Back to the story.
Late one Sunday afternoon, after spending hours of frustration working to get some life into the system, it occurred to me I was trapped inside conventional thinking. I had taken for granted the room treatments we enacted were right. After all, I had seen the acoustic measurements of the room and they looked correct.
I had broken Paul’s rule. If you can’t get where you need to go, think outside the box.
Damn the measurements. I removed the sidewall absorbers, moved to my trusty method of a bare sidewall helped by a simple diffuser at the point of first reflection, and voila!
Life! Yes! I felt like screaming it as Gene Wilder did in Young Frankenstein.
Sometimes you have to go with the less-than-obvious choices.
