My New Room - Part 2

The photo of my new room above was taken last night. It has a skewed perspective, like when you look into a funny mirror. I used Photoshop to merge a few photos together to produce the panorama. I guess that was all what it could do with the photos I provided. The lens used was a little too wide.

Anyway, back to the new room. The wait for the sofa set turned out to be shorter than expected, it was delivered last week. I have also put up bookshelves and CD racks at the room corners behind the sofa. The bookshelves were filled with magazines, boxes of my hifi stuff and documents and trays of CDs.

With all these additions, I could sit down and have a more complete evaluation of how the system sounded.

A few things that I dreaded before I moved in did not quite happen.

First dread was excessive brightness. that did not happen, not even when before the sofa and the bookshelves were added. When I did not hear excessive brightness I grew concerned again instead of feeling relieved. I was afraid that, with the sofa and the bookshelves, too much absorption could occur and I would end up losing treble volume and sparkle.

In fact, though without brightness, the treble in the beginning was diffused and lacked definition. On cymbal work, for example, there was no sense of the stick hitting metal. I was so happy that I did not hear excessive brightness I missed it all together. Until PuchongWong pointed it out to me. This was probably caused by too much reflection/echo. The definition actually improved with the sofa and the shelves in.

There was also another aspect to it. The treble got better when I placed Shunyata Dark Field cable lifters under the loudspeaker cables, two per cable, close to the cables ends. The effect of the Dark Fields was not night and day, but it was significant enough. My speaker cables didn’t lie on carpet, so rather than the ‘Dark Field drains away static electricity build-up’ angle, I tend more towards Jim Smith’s assertion in his book, ‘Get Better Sound’, that cable lifters reduce resonance in the cables (induced, for example, by the vibration transmitted by your speakers to the floor when they play). I also found that 2 pieces of Dark Fields per cable were enough, adding a 3rd one made the sound a little too dark for my liking.

However, the area that I dreaded most was bass boom or a fat bottom. I had very little experience and success dealing with bass in my old room. In the new room, probably due to its bigger space, the bass did not sound too excessive to start with. But it sounded lumpy and blur, and if I pause a track at the middle of a loud bass note, I could hear it go on a short while more.

I piled what I could find – boxes and luggage full of books, magazines and stuff that were not yet unpacked, into the four corners of the room, which are the places that created the most amount of reflected sound (not just bass but the whole spectrum. You can stand close to and speak into a room corner. You might be surprised by what you hear, I was). Later I also piled on some Auralex LENRD bass trap that a friend loaned me. I put the bookshelves at the corners and stuffed them with magazines and boxes. All these, plus the plush sofa, solved the problem somewhat.

The bass region could use more work for its definition, extension and focus though. However I can live with it right now. All the ‘ad hoc treatment’ I put on will be replaced with more proper and permanent solutions in due course.


Soundstage wise, it was wider and deeper than what I had in my smaller old room. The soundstage though, did not extend much beyond the left-right speakers and beyond the front wall. Both were confirmed by listening with the hitting-on-wood-block-and-walk-around tracks on the ‘Throne’ CD, intended to test stage width and depth. I would also like the images to be better anchored. More work on speaker positioning needs to be done.

My other concern was my 60-watt Pass Labs XA60 monoblocks. Would they be powerful enough to drive the EgglestonWorks to satisfactory level in the bigger room? In fact, before I moved, some friends were already teasing me to get a bigger amp. To my pleasant surprise, the little XA’s played fearlessly. The Pass Labs–EgglestonWorks pairing retained its tonal quality, details and speed. In terms of dynamics and loudness, I can still enjoy Hugh Masekela’ ‘Hope’, Charly Antolini’s ‘Crash’ and the torture tracks from the Manger disc. Though they would sound a little stretched at time, I think for at least 90% of my music, these little guys are fine.

So, there are more things to be done. And I’d definitely value observations from friends who come and visit. In the meantime, I’d enjoy the music too (don't forget the music) :-).