Room Dimensions are 15x17x7.5 with a concrete floor. A room was constructed within an existing room to eliminated music and sound for escaping. Sound deadening materials and 5/8th inch dry were used. One can listen to music or watch movies at any time of day or night and not disturb other household members or neighbors. The overall construction of just the room, treatments and rack took approximately 10 months of weekends and evenings. Different types and locations of room treatments were added over time. The room is wired with four dedicated 20-amp circuits with the projector totally hidden in the canister lighting soffit.
The 2-channel system is self-contained with the HT processor running through the tape loop of the Rowland pre. The REL sub is used for both 2-channel music and 5.1 movie soundtracks.
I'm a strong believer in Treating your room. Many say and I believe that the room is the single most important part of a sound system. All walls including ceiling is treated with acoustic panels as well as with room lenses.
Rowland Monoblocks recently added. Incredible improvement over my previous amp. Improvements in detail, silky smoothness with incredible power reserves. I'm pretty much done for now.
JM Labs Micro Utopia Be with Utopia stands replace Thiel CS22's.
My first sub was a Velodyne and it did not integrate well with my Thiels. I went without a sub for three years until aquiring the REL. I've had my Stadium for four years.
My only other consideration at the time was which REL to get two Storms or one Stadium III. I think I will have my sub for quite some time, maybe someday aquiring a second one. If you like to buy new, I'd at least look into the Utopia sub. The current REL's are manufactured in a differnce factory than the old ST series.
Dizzyizzid, Yes, after playing around with placement and adjustments for about a month, I finally got it dialed in. I haven't made any change in settings in over a month. Initially, I was assuming that because of the size of the Micro Utopia's compared to my Thiel floor standers the cross over or roll over point would be at a much higher setting. After it's all said and done, I've got things set at the A-2 setting exactly were I had things set with my Thiel's.
If I would have just listened to my ears instead of making assumptions, I probably would have got it right in a day or two. Those Utopia's have very surprisingly good bass by themselves.
System edited: Digital music server added replacing SACD player/transport. Result is better sound quality with convenience and Internet radio. The Roku device also gives me remote volume control and a beautiful readout of music titles, artists, etc. Best audio investment I've ever made....
System edited: After months of contemplating between Dynaudio and JM Labs 2-way monitors, decided to to go all out with the Micro Utopia Be's with matching stands.
yes on the spikes. i have talked to rel on how to set them up and i know how they do it. what you do is see what side of the room sounds the loudest. you do this by setting the crossover at about 40 hz and put the sub either along the short wall or the long wall. play some music with bass as well as turning up the gain on the sub so you can hear the bass coming from it. pull the sub away from the wall at about 45 degree until you hear the bass pick up or get louder and it will. continue until the bass gets less. then move the sub back to the point where it was the loudest. check the other corner and see if that corner is louder. i have found that the left corner with every rel i had it went into the left corner. i also found that the sub did its best against the wall you have it now but move it close to the side and back wall. also check to see if the bass plays louder out of phase. it does for some but never in any of my rooms. so when you have the sub against the wall just pull it out, you want to try to keep the same distance from the side and back wall. this gives you a idea how you need to pull it out. when you find the spot this will load the room properly and that is why the bass will be louder and deeper. works everytime. then put your crossover points back to minimal and see where the best crossover point on the sub controls will be. rel recommends this set up as well as getting those spikes off as this is working against a good floor,i have had concrete and the spikes suck the life out of deep bass. if you do this you will really hear what that sub is capable of. by the way how big is the room the stadium mk3 is in ?????? i no longer use a rel as i went with full range tyler acoustic woodmeres with external xovers. the response on them are 22-25khz. the reason i ask about your room size i moved my system from another room into a room 16 wide with a vaulted ceiling and 21.5 ft long with another 23ft behind me and rel told me the sub was not the right size and recommended i believe the stentor. rel believes only in one sub and with their subs getting one bigger rel will outperform 2 stadium mk3's in the same room. rel contributes this to frequency cancellation but do not get this with one sub that is for the right size room. i know this is a little long but if you try it, it will yeild you better sound that what you are experiencing now as rel subs are designed to be corner loaded
Excellent effort on the room! I also DIY'ed my HT. Same thing, mostly stuff from Home Depot. took 8 months. I did have the dropped ceiling profess. installed, since it's only a 3" drop and they had to literally insert the tiles as they built it.
If you have the space, you should check into a stereo pair of subs. It IS a huge improvement over a single sub, especially for two chanel listening, which I also use the room for mostly.
Just a thought. If you haven't done a dimmer on your lighting, it would be excelent upgrade. But you cannot use flourescents with one - they may interfere sonically with your system. It's actually recommended to have some dim light in the room while using visuals, so that there is less "shock" to the eye when transitioning from dark scenes to bright ones. It also makes it possible to move about without too much difficulty.
If you have several circuits of lighting, you could check out the Lutron Spacer system - remote control lighting with several "scenes" or presets for whole lighting system in the room. Way cool. Just a thought.
You may enjoy a subscription to "Home Theater Builder Magazine" if you've not heard of it before. Very informative and interesting to see what others have done.
Thanks for the feedback on sub location. I have tried various locations including corner loading and have prefered my current location. All seem to work well but will all the adjustments on the sub, having the sub sit between my main speakers fits my room the best. I've got the crossover setting at 22hz which is the Stadiums lowest setting. I'm extemely satisfied with its output. I use my system 95% of the time for 2-channel music. With concrete floors, do you really feel that removing the spikes would benefit? What main speakers do you have your system and where is your crossover setting?
you can get better bass than what you are getting now because the way you have your subwoofer set up is not really recommended by rel. they are to be corner loaded and do not use spikes.on a good support floor the spikes will actually decouple the sub from the floor which will reduce the amount of bass. the closer to the floor the better for a rel sub. i have had about 3 rel's including the one you have. the center setup looks uniform but actually defeats the purpose of getting good bass. rel has a specific way to set them up and they train dealers to do this but anyone can do it. if you would like to know or already know try it, it makes for a huge improvement not only in bass but soundstaging, imaging etc... good luck
System edited: An outboard Audio Mirror DAC was added to significantly improving my digital. Currently using the Marantz SA14 SACD player at a transport. Its amazing what a $500 non oversampling DAC can do. StraightWire info-link digital cable and Crescendo interconnects added and Im sure added to the digital enjoyment. To round things out, I've added vinyl playback and dug my LP's out of the garage. I had a lot of fun building the plinth to enhance Lencos playback following the monster Lenco thread here on Audiogon. TWL tonearm modification brought things to another level for just a few dollars. Highly recommended.
dope i only used 2 first reflection points. i'm still very happy with the absorption panels. batman style. the bass traps clean up the bass to a small degree. my listening room is 12 x 15 x 9. I have a non closed rear quarter of the room and a slider to my left (first reflection point). i also have three diy absortpion panels on the top of the front wall behind the speakers. i do agree with you that dealing acoustically with your room is the most important thing you can do with your system.
i will give some diffusion panels a try behind my listening position to.
When I first placed the room lenses in my room, I did not feel that they made much of an improvement. After leaving them in for a month, I removed them resulting in a noticable difference. I've found that if I position the front two half way between the speakers and the side wall 45 degrees off the speakers corners, I get the best results. Moving the lenses just a couple of inches makes a difference in imaging and detail. The closer to the speaker, a bit more detail and more pin point imaging. Pulling the lenses away from the speakers, the sound stage opens up with the presentation a bit more layed back. These differnces are suttle but after your get your system dialed in with speaker placement and seating, you will definitely notice a difference. Because of my projection screen, I used two more lenses instead of the more conventional one between your speakers. Moving the rear lenses towards the rear of the speakers resulted the same as the front lenses for me but to a lesser degree.
nice room. i did not have the same result with the jon rische diy room lens with my 2 channel pass labs x350 x-2 thiel 2.3's. i'm in a smaller room. i have had wonderful success w/the jon rische acoustic (absorption panels) on all three 1st reflection points and smaller ones on the rear walls and the diy quick and dirty bass traps in 4 corners of the room.
Here is the link to a site that will give you step by step instuctions. If you decided to make a set and have trouble finding materials or need more specifics, let me know.
Hey, great room! I just constructed a very similar room this summer. I was wondering about your Room Lens designs. Where are these exactly on the web? I've looked several time but don't get anywhere. A great room is your best component. I've found that diffusors on the ceilings make a great differnce in the height. Sgr
The rear wall diffusers made my room sound bigger. I found that after installation of the diffusers, I had to increase the output on my sub in order to get the same bass response. Prior to the diffusers, during big band or orchestras, my room at times sounded congested when listening at higher volume levels. I believe that I cannot make a 17 foot room sound any bigger and at the time seem to be happy.
Nice work. How are the diffusers made. I am nearly finished my new room. I am working on some of the Risch designs for absorbtion and am looking for a good plan for rear wall diffusers.
When I finally finished construction on the room, I did not have any treatments. My speakers and electronics were unchanged minus the sub. The room sounded like an echo chamber, much worse than in the den were my system resided in the past. The first thing that I did was to construct four room lenses using the recipe by John Rische. Upon completion, it took a few days to finally find out were to place them. To this day, I still find myself moving them around an inch or two. They almost work as tone controls allowing you to tailor your sound. The lenses completely solved the echoing problems with up to moderate listening levels. I was happy with this scenario for a few months until I got the upgrade itch.
I added the two side and rear corner panels, also designed by John Rische. This resulted in a large improvement at higher listening levels. The music no longer sound congested at any level but I seemed to loose a bit of bass response. This gave me an excuse to purchase a sub that I needed anyway for home theater.
After installation and break-in of the sub, I realized that I would need some more panels to help absorb unwanted boomy bass. I added the three rear panels and ceiling panels. I was now able to open up the sub and enjoy an incredibly tight sub-terrain low end that totally changed the way my Thiels sounded. All of a sudden, the music got warmer with an increased soundstage.
Another six months go by and I got the bug to make another improvement. If my room had a weakness, it was that especially with big bands or orchestras at higher volume levels, the music sounded as if were in a room. In other words, I it still sounded a bit congested. By adding the diffusers to the rear wall, any hint of congestion has disappeared.
The addition of the binds covering my screen really did not change much. This is probably because my mains are four feet from the back wall anyway.
Well, that’s about it. All I need now is to upgrade my 2-channel amp and get some better seating. I’m sure after those issues are taken care of, I’ll think of something else to upgrade. Hope this helps.
