Paul McGowan: The main listening room at PS Audio is approximately 16 feet wide by 35 feet long – not a huge room but not too small either. Left bare and with nothing more than just the loudspeakers and equipment to power them in place, the room is an OK venue for sound reproduction.
Add room treatment diffusors and all of a sudden it goes from an ordinary space to a stunning one. I use a combination of DAAD’s and RPG diffusors to treat the space – without their help I don’t think I’d spend anywhere near as much time in that room as I do.
Are the diffusors fixing the room, or the speakers, or both? The quick answer is both, but I wonder about that snap answer. I have had several different speakers in the room and multiple arrangements of those speakers and in every case, I kept the diffusor arrangement the same – even after repeated attempts to readjust and optimize – time and again I came back to the same thing.
Now I am in the process of stripping the sound room bare preparing for the arrival of the new reference system. My first thought was to just clean house and assume everything will be so different, given the new speakers, that it wouldn’t serve me to keep the arrangement. But then I start to question that decision – given the amount of time and effort I have put into optimizing the diffusor pattern in the room.
