THE ROOM BEHIND THE RACING LIBRARY

When I retired in 2000 I had nothing to do and lot s of time to do it in. I thought that music was interesting and that I’d try getting a really good system and seeing if I enjoyed listening to music. I bought a series of NAD and Onkyo receivers and amps and a pair of Dunlavy SCIV. The sound was much better than I’d heard in a system and I thought this was great. I bought hundreds of cd, listened to the masters and decided I really liked music, most music. I still don’t really understand atonal or people yelling at each other. I used to think rap was what people did on doors and tables. I’d like to keep my ignorance in place on that one.

Then one evening I was having dinner at my usual restaurant hangout and after drinking a bottle of wine with a man who lived a few doors down from the restaurant, he invited me to listen to his music system. I was stunned. He had a Levinson Amp (331) with Teal speakers and Meridian cd and preamp with silver cables.WOW! I was in love. I’d never imagined that sound from a machine could be like that. I do owe Tony a thank you, for he showed me the light. A switch truly went on for me that night. Thank you.

After about ten minutes I realized that my ears hurt. I knew it was too bright, but ZAP!

I wanted to hear that clarity, that detail and I wanted to hear it for more than ten minutes without my ears hurting.

So, out went the receivers (actually I gave them to my three children) and in came Levinson gear. Since, I’ve been through ten or so amps and a few speakers and a few cables, cd players and turntables.

I’ve learned a lot of what works and what’s smoke. In wine, everything you need to know about it is in the glass you’re drinking, right now. Nope, you don’t need to know the grape picker’s name, nor the vintner, nor the name of the town, plot or mix of fruit.

You just need to know what’s in your glass. TODAY. I suppose by now you’ve figured out that I’ve tried a few glasses of wine. Yup. I stopped guessing how many bottles I’ve participated in after the 50,000 mark. No, that wasn’t yesterday. The benefit I’ve found of getting old is that you can’t remember when you stopped remembering.

I’ve come to see audio in exactly the same light as wine. I’m interested in what works, I can hear and I can feel. Once it takes an explanation to decide if it’s there, it’s not. If it feels like the music is wrong, lifeless, brittle, bright or skewed, toss the gear that caused it.

Around 2003 I bit the bullet and flipped for the design and engineering of a room by Rives Audio. It cost me the rebuild of our home. I could not find a single contractor willing to take on the room project. They clearly were so nervous about the details that they would not do it. On August 25, 2004 the room was nearly finished and the equipment was placed in it to hear what money can buy.

It’s pretty damn good!

It’s truly the best of everything I’ve heard in equipment and design. I grant those others with similar situations that there’s may be better rooms and sound, but I haven’t been to visit them and can’t say from experience.

What stands out to me in and from my room is that it feels small. It is actually 24’7” feet long and 15’2” feed wide where the speakers are located. The ceiling runs from 9’1” to 11’6” at the peak. The walls are not parallel, nor is the ceiling with the floor. And it does feel small. I believe it a combination of the oversize chair on a platform along with the monster truck sized speakers. They are 7’6” tall and 30” deep. When I have the equipment along side the chair, there isn’t much room to get past. I think I’m going to make a change in the seating. There goes my retirement fund.

The technical side of the room is Von Schweikert VR11's, Two DarTZeel stereo amps tri-wired, EMM Labs DCC2,Emm Labs CDSD Jena Labs interconnects and speaker wires, Jena Labs with a separate electrical panel fed from the top of the main panel and a separate HVAC system with acoustical dampening. The room is a floating system by Kinetics and what you see is in fact floating on a separate floor four inches below the current floor. The walls were built on the floating floor producing substantial isolation from the rest of the house. The rooms below are treated as well. There is a lot of sheetrock hanging on our walls. Waaay too much.

Having the room designed by Rives produced a set of plans which my licensed architect reviewed and then added support for. We now have two steel beams and three wood beams supporting the floor below the floor.

Pertusson’s corollary to Murphy’s Law raised it’s ugly head and true to it, “No job is so simple that it can’t be done wrong”. In spite of excellent design, engineering and effort, neither the construction manager nor those at Rives Audio ever asked each other if the plans they were each talking about were the same. They weren’t. Rives revised the plans and the contractor did not have them. Only months into the project when it became obvious that there were differences while on conference calls, did I learn that I wouldn’t be having front bass traps and that the window was offset. The first question that should be asked between designer and contractor is, what version plans do you have?

Issues arose during construction including isolating the steel column’s and room below the audio room sonically from the audio room. One is my children’s living room and the other is the boiler room. Each has loud distracting noises in it. We used a hanging isolated ceiling in the living room to keep the psycho music and video from being heard upstairs. That works well. The boiler needs more isolation and we will build a room within the boiler room to isolate it from the HVAC for the audio room.

There are two prices to pay for huge speakers. One is the obvious lot’sa money. The other is the speakers weigh in around 1000 pounds each, come in three shipping crates and need a couple of power lifters to install. Yes, call the gym first, before ordering to insure the availability of help. Our room is in the rear of the house which puts it ten feet above the driveway with no paved smooth walk to the rear. Problem! This problem needs to be addressed. It took five hours to install the speakers between bringing the six crates to the deck and actually hoisting them in place. The bookcase you see in the pictures is the actual door to the room. It is not a very wide opening and presents problems to bring in large objects. The speaker were tuned by Albert Von Schweikert and Kevin Malmgren. They measured the room and tuned and placed them in one night. Speaker placement is not critical, but position combined with seating position produces a variety of hall images.

I still am working on my vinyl setup and there are a few small details left in the room to do.

If you’re crazy enough about audio and have the willingness and ability to make it happen, I recommend taking the plunge into extreme audio. It’s a constant amazement that such beauty can be reproduced, for me (and you too).

Bill E.

Lakefrontroad