Sony G90 - Manual (Page 32)

t is a conflict as old as good vs. evil. It is the war that came
before wars between peoples. It is the battle between
humankind and its environment and it is being fought to
this day in your house.
While not so noble as a life and death struggle between a
Jack London hero and the elements, your battle to extract
good sound from the room in which you listen to
music and watch movies is as challenging. Your
victory is not to be measured by survival,
but satisfaction. And when the tools
of war cost many thousands of dol-
lars, satisfaction is survival.
Know thine enemy: T h e
Room . Do not think of it as a help-
ful collaborator or even an inno-
cent bystander. It, more than any-
thing else, will determine the
overall quality of sound you
extract from your system. A bad
room will put a foot on the throat
of your speakers, choking off
their musical life.
From hard experience I have
learned these lessons. I built a
room – from scratch. And I vowed
it would be a great room, unlike
any other. In my hubris, I thought
this was truly possible and that I
would do it. Now my comfort
comes from knowing that humili-
ty brings education and, with edu-
cation, satisfaction is, indeed,
possible.
This article and the ones that
follow trace my experiences
installing the Revel Ultima speakers
and Proceed electronics multi-channel sys-
tem into this enemy mine. We begin here with the
Revel Salon loudspeaker and the Revel Sub-15/LE-1 sub-
woofer system. Future episodes will include the Revel Voice,
Embrace, and Gem models. Other players in this first episode
include the RPG Room Optimizer software and, briefly, the
Cambridge Signal Technologies T1100 Room Correction Sys-
tem. Each of these companies has faced the enemy with their
products, offering hope that victory can be had.
Meet My Enemy
Now that you have a blank sheet of paper,
what’s next? Choosing the dimensions. Start
with the realization that no set of dimensions is perfect. The
perfect room does not exist. Revisit Robert Greene’s “What
You Should Know About Bass” in Issue 24. Every room has
modes that arise from its dimensions. The most obvious – and
the most significant – are the axial modes. These are the fun-
damental acoustic resonant modes (and their harmonics) that
are created between two opposing surfaces, such as front
wall and back wall, side to side and floor to ceiling. In addi-
tion to axial modes there are tangential and oblique
modes. Tangential modes arise from four surfaces (e.g.,
the side, front, and back walls) and oblique modes arise
from all six surfaces. Your room’s modes will create
audible gaps within (nulls) and boosting of (nodes)
the sound at different frequencies, destroying the
tonal uniformity that is necessary for uncolored
music reproduction. The best you can hope for is to
avoid modes piling up on top of one another, since
that will greatly exacerbate the non-uniformity of the sound.
Programs now exist into which you can input the dimen-
sions of your room and calculate the room’s modal character-
istics. A “simple” Excel spreadsheet, properly configured, will
do the trick. It’s nothing more than math. But don’t let that
deceive you into thinking it’s simple. Such programs assume
accurate dimensions that form a uniform lossless rectangle –
that is a perfectly rigid room. But building a rigid, uniform room
d o e s n ’t solve your problems; it only helps make them more pre-
dictable. There is even some thought that a rigid room isn’t
preferable because it actually intensifies the low-frequency
modes because none of the bass can be atten-
uated by leakage through walls that flex.
R E V I E W S
Revel Ultima Speakers – From 2 to 7.1 Channels
Episode One: The Ancient Enemy
The Revel Ultima Salon
loudspeaker and
Sub-15/LE-1 subwoofer
system face an implacable
enemy of sound, with
some help from the RPG
Room Optimizer software
and, at the last moment,
the SigTech T1100 Room
Correction System.
I
T O M M I I L L E R