RG. And the effect of that?
ST. By starting with a bare or minimally treated room, I have a more ‘honest’ view of the system and its relationship to the room. I can hear reflections more clearly and identify lower level disorganisational effects more easily. My approach to speaker set up naturally takes into account what it happening at, what the room’s impact is, at the listening position. By manipulating the speaker, often by tiny, tiny amounts, you can achieve huge effects at the listening position. I don’t really care what’s happening in the rest of the room as, most of the time, the rooms I work in are single chair, dedicated spaces.
I will start adding sound treatment back, but only once I have a clear picture of what the system is doing in the room and how the treatment affects the musical presentation as a whole. But I’ll put it back very judiciously. I have a client in Dallas. I pulled around $25,000 of acoustic treatment out of his room and we have never put any of it back.
There are rooms that I find very challenging and one of them is the Rives room. They are musically dead. They have this very large, quarter round thing in the centre that does very strange things in terms of scattering noise. They have the saw tooth side panels that mess with timing. They blanket the sound.
RG. Once the system is reassembled, presumably it’s finally time to start on speaker set-up?
ST. Yes. Once again, it’s a question of having a defined goal and a clear strategy for achieving it. While a lot of set-up approaches deal with the speakers’ relationship with the room – and that’s clearly important – taking a system a whole step further in performance terms means working with the relationship between the speakers: optimizing the stereo pair, not just because the stereo system depends on the speakers working in concert, but because it’s actively destructive if they don’t. It starts with the relationship between the speakers – or in my case, one speaker – and the room. But that’s just a sonic adjustment. Maximising musical potential means working with the precise placement of each speaker, relative to the other and the listening seat.
Physically, I want the speakers to behave in a linear fashion with the room. I do that one speaker at a time. For me, it’s too difficult to pay attention to two speakers at the same time but, more importantly, if you try to deal with both speakers at once, you don’t know if you are dealing with a speaker interaction with the room or the speakers interacting with each other. I work on one speaker and turn the other one outwards, so it’s pointing away from the sound-field. That get’s some funny looks the first-time people see it, I can tell you.
