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July 15, 2008
Getting Real: Anthem Room Correction and Anthem
Statement D2 Audio/Video Processor
Audiophiles are generally detail-oriented folk. Most
audiophiles I know sweat the small stuff: each component chosen with utmost care,
everything assembled just so. Then the tweaking begins: cables need to be properly routed
and lifted; vibration-control devices are placed under each component; power filtration is
employed to perfect the incoming AC; and so on and so on . . .
If you’re one of those audiophiles, you probably
attend to the small details because you know that, to one degree or another, everything
matters. Even if the differences between employing and not employing a certain tweak are
tiny, and require you to strain your ears to hear improvements that you still think only might
exist, it’s better to be safe than sorry. In audiophilia, the highly tweaked system
is the norm.
But if you’re that sort of audiophile and you haven’t
addressed your listening room’s acoustics, get real: you’ve neglected the single
most important link of the audio chain. All those tweaks, all that careful attention to
detail -- all of it is minuscule compared to the effect your room’s acoustic
has on the sound. When your audio system is playing music, acousticians say, only about
50% (some say less) of the sound you hear is coming directly from the speakers to
your ears. The rest of the sound -- half of it -- first bounces off and is altered
by your room’s boundaries and materials, not to mention the furniture, before it gets
to you. This single, simple fact has profound importance for all audiophiles, and bears
repetition: At least half of the sound you hear has been changed by your room before
it reaches your ears.
Logic would seem to dictate that if the ratio of direct to
altered sound you’re hearing is 50/50, the music should be a jumbled-up mess. After
all, the direct sound hits our ears first, followed by the reflected sound a short time
later. Luckily for us, our brains make sure that that isn’t a problem. In a
phenomenon known as the Haas Effect, different sounds arriving at our ears within a time
window of about 30 milliseconds are perceived as a single sound, and that single
sound is perceived as coming from the source of the sound that arrived first -- in this
case, the speakers. This explains our ability to locate the physical sources of sounds,
both in the real world and in the listening room. But don’t get the impression that,
because of the Haas Effect, sound reflections don’t matter. They do -- just not so
much in terms of time and localization. Although all of the sounds that reach our ears
within the first 30ms will be perceived as a single sound, to fully grasp the importance
of room acoustics, you need to understand how direct and reflected sounds combine in other
ways....(read more)
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