It's difficult to let things go. Things close to you. But often it's remembering that money, time and heart invested in a project or a piece of gear happened in the past—sunk costs—that today is a new day, fresh with opportunities.
Those are the soothing words rattling around in my head as we build a new listening room to replace the two that have been a part of us coming up on 5 years.
Music Rooms One and Two—where once lived the Infinity IRSV and the room that birthed the Aspen series of loudspeakers—are being repurposed.
You might ask why.
As in most heart wrenching decisions it's complicated. Let's start with the simple.
Loss of bass (an unforgivable sin for us audiophiles).
When we first built the two music rooms we chose poorly. Looking at our new building there was a mezzanine area available, one we could have used to store inventory or build music rooms. We should have chosen the former but the practical side of us went for the latter. Didn't make sense to have to schlep heavy boxes upstairs.
It wasn't until we had invested a quarter of a million dollars into the new rooms before we discovered that any bass we produced upstairs saturated the rooms downstairs. And here's the thing with bass—if you're filling the room adjacent to the listening area with those low notes it's at the expense of where you want to be immersed in them.
We had built an expensive bass trap.
The new room we're building is downstairs and on a solid slab of concrete. Early measuring tests with a big subwoofer show great promise for keeping all that low frequency energy.
Our son Scott has already named the new music room, The Listening Lab.
I love it!
Tomorrow, part two of letting go.
