Re: Why I so strongly disagree with Arny Krueger...

"William Sommerwerck" <grizzledgeezer@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

snips

I'm starting to notice a nasty reverse-snobbishness. "Monitor speakers are
modest, decent, honorable speakers. Audiophile speakers are pompous,
overpriced trash."

Some are, many are not.

Bad room acoustics will ruin any system -- but good acoustics can't
compensate for a mediocre speaker -- any more than a good turntable can make
up for deficient electronics or speakers.

Sure - one is assuming a fundamentally "good" basic starting point.

But, all other things being equal from that starting point you *will* see HUGE
improvements even with modest treatment. Some fabric-wrapped 2" 703 will help
imaging and detail quite a bit (generally less than US$100.00); two to four LF traps
can really help in ways you'd not expect as well as flattening LF response. DIY
four for less than $75 in materials, or you can buy Ethan's. They are a bargain at
the prices he charges. (If I'd know about his at the time I would have used his for
convenience.)

What I'm saying is that treatment IS VERY IMPORTANT (far more than you appear to
want to believe), so much so that given a fixed budget I'd go down a notch in gear
quality or do without some piece to make SURE that SOME treatment was applied to
any room problems I'd discovered.

Of course, I'd not trade my Tannoy SGM10Bs for Radio Shacks, but now that I've been
through this cycle and fully understand what's going on with treatment I'd consider
a lesser monitor in the commercial realm if it meant affording needed treatment.

I would be delighted to put your "modest monitor chain" -- in your treated
room -- up against my Apogee/Parasound system -- in my untreated-but-not-bad
living room. I'm sure your system sounds fine, indeed, but in terms of
reproducing what is on the recording, I have no doubt as to which would win.

A pissing contest. Oh joy. My system is designed for production; I would not trust
yours for the same purpose without some careful eval. It might sound nice, but I
doubt it's accurate, particularly in the LF -- it might be, but I doubt it.

Until you've heard a system with LF response ruler flat to 25 HZ, with only a slight
bump from the sub ports at 21 hz, and with a an even 100 mS room decay in that same
LF region, you have no idea what LF is supposed to sound like. NO system will
perform like that without treatment, unless you're in a 20-20Khz anechoic space or
listening in free space with no boundaries within 60 feet or so (including the
"floor").

Fortunately, my monitoring also sounds very good. (Sometimes highly accurate systems
don't sound all that sweet.)


Did I ever say the listener shouldn't? I'm simply saying that it doesn't
hurt to wait a bit if you can't immediately afford the treatment. Is there
something morally objectionable about that?

"As needed" is, I think, the appropriate advice.

Of course, one can overtreat -- it's part of knowing what you're doing.

We differ in that from a production point of view, I'd simply make treatment part of
the system from the get-go (room/monitors ARE indeed a system).

If I didn't have a few hundred for treatment, I'd wait, sell something, or forego
something else.

I probably would have agreed with you at one time -- that's before doing a
design/build on a couple of rooms, and working in many more rooms both treated and
untreated.

IME, treatment is at least as important as the choice of monitors, if not a little
more so.

Frank Stearns
Mobile Audio


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Relevant Pages

  • Re: Why I so strongly disagree with Arny Krueger...
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