Room Factor Floor Material

Click pics to enlarge. Above, Station B. Center, Philips AK601 CDP and Melos 222 Preamp below Sun Audio VT25 and DIY 45 amps. Left, from top, Micromega Duo transport, Micromega Solo, Elekit 8230 2A3 amp, Philips el cheapo CDP, Micromega Duo Pro DAC, PS of Melos 222 and Bryston 4B. To the right, note the Ruark Crusader II in front of the B&W Matrix 801 Mk II. Note the "wall" on the right side was a partition using steel cabinets. Note the Tile Floor.

Letter from Hong Kong (23-7): Room Filling Sound

HiFi Basics (XVI): Floor Material, Dead vs Live Room, Three-Phase Electricity

Written in the UK.

It was only in June that I made it back to my Hong Kong (HK). After running errands, I had little free time. When I finally returned to my old house, where all my residual equipment are housed, I discovered that, while the ceiling lights and fridge etc still worked, all the lower outlets off the floor were dead. It took another week for the electrician to come and solve the problem. Like all "Village Houses" in HK, the Electricity is Three-Phase  (much coveted by audiophiles). After a new fuse box was installed, all was restored. I did not get to listen for very long, but what I heard took me back in time and made me think hard.

In August 2018 I left HK for NYC. Two years later, in October 2020 I was in HK for almost 2 months before crossing over to Shenzhen (SZ). I had the opportunity of firing up some of my stuff but didn't really write about it. In an article then I casually mentioned: "...I returned to my old house, which housed a lot of equipment. In 2018, before we returned to NYC, I moved some of the furniture and stuff from the new place there, so it was packed to the rafters. Due to the humidity in HK, the house was moldy too. So it took a lot of getting used to. Over the weeks I spent a huge amount of time cleaning up, unpacking, sorting and throwing things out...Of course there had to be music. The NAD 3020 is still tethered to the B and W Matrix 801 Mk II (reported here) and they still make beautiful music. I stream through a Meridian Explorer (my downstairs neighbor generously let me use his wifi). Later I also fired up the Ruark Crusader II (same link above) and it makes fantastic music with my ICL 300B. You shall hear more about these..." What happened just a bit later was that I turned the volume up just a little too much and the NAD gave up the ghost. I substituted the Rotel mentioned below. So! for practical purpose it has been three years since I last fired them up!

 

From top, Left rack: Technics SP-1200, ARC SP-11 Mk II, Marantz CD-60, Marantz CD 94 Limited DAC, PS for SP-11. Right rack: ARC CD2, Revox CD-221, Pioneer T-07A, MFA Magus B, Rotel, RB-870BX, Marantz 9 (reissue). B&W 801 to the left. Note the Tile Floor.

 

Station A (by the Entrance)

I first turned on the Counterpoint SA-3000 but it'd not come out of Muting. Sticky Relays perhaps after three long years of inaction, but I shall also check the tubes next time. I substituted the MFA Magus B, which drove the Rotel RB-870BX (Gotham GAC-4) and B&W Matrix 801 Mk II (Belden 1810A). Digital source was at first what's on the (Jap) 100V line: Marantz CD-60 as transport into Marantz CD94 Limited DAC (Belden 1694A); then, miraculously, the Pioneer T-07A, which was not working 3 years ago, worked flawlessly! Sound was just fabulous! I slotted in Eagles' Hell Freezes Over and wallowed in it. YES! The sound is back! After a few tracks, I played Miles Davis' Tutu, and it was just as great. No matter what I played, it was utterly musical.

Difference from SZ While the sound was utterly familiar, it immediately dawned on me that there is a fundamental difference from the sound I get in SZ. The HK setup is by far more room filling. As you shall see later, it's not because of the large B&W loudspeaker. It's a sound that "richochets" around - not reverberant, just nourishing and big, and it conveys the excitement of the crowd in the venue of the Eagle's live concert very very well indeed. In contrast, as impressive as it could be, the SZ setup is very much scaled down in feeling and visceral impact, indeed nearfield and monitor-like.

Station B (near Balcony)

I then fired up my trusted Melos 222 Preamp and a variety of SET amps (Gotham GAC-2 and Mogami 2543/9), which drove the Ruark Crusader II (here and here; with Gotham 50025) . Source was the el cheapo but excellent Philips AK601 (1543 chip). Both the ICL/Softone 300B and 2A3 as well as Sun Audio 300B (mine is "mismatched", using the VT-25 kit with its 5K output tap) delivered excellent all around performance with the Ruark. In many ways, the even more flea-powered SET amps delighted even more: the DIY 45 amp (WE 412A driver, Tango trannies)) was just pristine, with intimations of WE sound (as much due to the driver as the great 45 tube); ditto the Sun Audio VT25 amp (GE ST tubes), somewhat darker but possibly even more mesmerizing and sinuous. I didn't listen to any of them for very long (the point is to run them a bit), but I loved everyone of them. I also got the Micromega Solo to work. The 1-bit sound is less resolving than the 16-bit Philips but it is richer and musical.

What's Behind the Sound The most interesting aspect of the sound to me is how much the low powered setup and much smaller system mimic the larger one. We are talking about much the same room filling sound. If I don't tell you which system and loudspeaker are playing, you would not know. Amazingly, even with around 1-2 watts (the VT25 and 45), and despite clipping on louder material, the scale is still large! This leads me to conclude the the bigness of the sound is mostly due to the room, not the loudspeaker nor equipment. My friends in NYC, none of whom stream, half-seriously suggest that the result shows the superiority of CD playback over streaming, but they are highly mistaken, as at the end of 2020, as quoted above, the same sound was obtained with streaming. Indeed, it aligns with my past experience in this place, where almost everything sounds good. No near-field monitor room, this!

The Room Factor

All this leads me to ponder what makes the sound different, and how my rooms differ. I gave it much thought.

• Room Dimension Much has been made about the ideal room dimension. Indeed, it does matter. And many a serious audiophile with the space and means has gone through extreme trouble to expressly create a dedicated listening room of "ideal dimension", which is usually reckoned to be somewhat (but not overly) rectangular, with high-ish ceiling, and with no two axis of similar dimension. Thus examined, I have to tell you that none of my spaces approach this ideal. The HK old house room is somewhat low in ceiling, closer to cubical, and was actually carved out of an L-shaped living-dining room with a partition made out of two heavy duty steel bookcase-cabinets. My NYC LR is also a large square, though I use only half of it in my usual near-field listening (most recent pic below), with the whole room used only with augmented horn systems (below, like here). My SZ room is smaller, and also closer too to a cube than a rectangular box (pic below).

• The Larger the Space, the Better? Sound treatment? While it's definitely true that small spaces don't yield the best sound (at best, near-field), larger spaces bring about other factors. Reverberation Usually severely frowned upon, most audiophiles try their best to veer closer to  a more absorbed sound. Before I moved into my HK old house, I surveyed the vacant LR (prior to partition), lots of glass on two sides, clapped my hands and determined that it was somewhat reverberant. Aside from the partition, I did not do anything to treat the room. I just had too much stuff and basically tall racks lined the periphery and lower racks filled the center. After stuffing everything in, sound was excellent! No reverberation upon clapping! My own thinking is, some reverberation is better than a dead room! The former you can work with, but the latter is a dead start, and dead end. Dedicated Audio Room The conventional audiophile wisdom is to have a (large) room with only the gear and one prime spot for listening. It's silly to me. What you want is room filling sound which you can enjoy as you move around, like what I have in HK, and not just "perfect sound" at one spot! After all, concert halls and live music venues have all-enveloping sound that don't just cater to one spot. And all the expensive treatment can be avoided if the area is more "lived in". It's my observation that stuffed rooms and lived-in rooms usually sound way better than "meticulously crafted" audiophile ones. Stupid Tweaks One main reason for the puny sound that is often heard in an audiophile's room can be attributed to all sorts of stupid tweaks that unnaturally slim down the sound  for the sake of of "clean bass" and "imaging" (to name a few audiophile "virtues"). The more spikes, platforms and tweaking devices one uses, the higher the risk of a threadbare sound. Judicious is not a word that the majority of audiophiles understand. While everything may have value if well applied, more is often less. Context Yes, the HK old house space is considerably larger, and the B&W is definitely much larger in bass cone area, so better sound should be expected. However, the smaller Ruark is not much bigger than my SZ Sansui, though its huge sound in the space is confounding. It's not just the equipment, it's safe to conclude.

• Three Phase Electricity It'd be reasonable to think the 3-phase electricity is partly to be credited. There may be something in this, as my former rented "village house" residence had equally great sound. There are city dwellers who go through draconian measures to obtain 3-phase. Somehow though, I don't think that's the whole story. In my NYC main listening room, sound is just as splendid but it surely is not 3-phase (big horns though).

• Floor Material I cannot help but notice that my HK old house has Tile Floors, which I think is helpful to the sound, more reflecting and reverberant perhaps, but a plus in scaling. It should be noted that my "newer space" in HK also has tile floors, and despite the non-optimal dimensions, the Yamaha NS-1000 still functioned very well there (with a hefty feeling)! In contrast, my SZ room and NYC LR are all wooden floored (the latter partially thinly carpeted), and provide more of a "monitor sound".
  

Conclusions As I have outlined above, there are many factors governing whether a room sounds good. It's not easy to collate them into dogmas, and I'm highly sceptical of "conventional wisdom". But I think I'm willing to say a few things, YMMV:

• For sure, the room determines the sound as much as the equipment. Just like a concert hall heavily governs what you hear.

• I believe a room should have a lot of things in it, "lived in" that is.

• I believe Tile Floors are better than Wood Floors.

 

NYC LR. Half used. Note Wood Floor with Thin Area Carpeting

NYC LR. Full Room Use.

SZ Room, Wood Floor.

HK Newer Place. Small, with Yamaha NS-1000. Tile Floor not visualized.