Design Projects: The Room as Part of the System

A listening room is part of the system. The same amplifier and loudspeakers can sound lean in one room and boomy in the next, and no component can fully undo what the room does. That is why our design projects start with the room, not with a list of equipment.

The first questions are about the room and the people in it. How large is it, and what are its proportions? Where can the listening seat go? What else is the room used for? Rooms whose length, width and height are equal, or simple multiples of one another, concentrate their bass resonances at the same frequencies, and the bass becomes uneven. A seat in the exact middle of a room often sits in a bass null. Moving the chair by a few tens of centimetres can change the bass more than changing the amplifier.

Next come the loudspeakers and their positions. They should suit the size of the room: large floorstanders in a small room will excite its resonances, while small standmounts in a large one may run out of scale. A common starting point is an equilateral triangle between the two loudspeakers and the listener, with the loudspeakers clear of the front and side walls. The final positions are found by listening.

Acoustics follow. The first reflections from the side walls, the floor and the ceiling arrive just after the direct sound and blur the stereo image. Absorption or diffusion at those points, and some control of the wall behind the listener, usually help more than any further upgrade. Corners are the natural place to tame excess bass. Bookshelves, curtains, rugs and upholstered furniture can do much of this work, and the result should be a room you want to live in, not a studio.

Then the practical details. Tube equipment needs space and ventilation above it, and a rack works better beside the loudspeakers than between them. A dedicated mains circuit, where it can be installed, keeps other appliances off the supply. Loudspeaker cables of equal length, tidy signal runs away from mains cables, and a quiet background all matter: a fridge, an air-conditioning unit or traffic noise can mask the low-level detail a good system resolves.

Finally, the visual design: materials, lighting and cable routes, so that the system belongs in the room rather than being placed in it. Our task in a design project is to bring these decisions together in the right order, so that the architecture serves the music.