SF AIDA OR EVIDENCE PLATINUM W MOMENTUM PRE & AMP

Yeah, 'if done right' is the key. The room should be precisely tuned too, in this case especially so, I assume.
Hell, I just put one Walker resonance control disc on my Nakamichi deck, somewhere in the middle, and there was a small but noticeable improvement in clarity, and the deck already sits on Boston Audio tuneblocks. Imagine what can be done to a room and speakers together.

Inna wrote, presumably referring to what I said about reverberant energy:

"Yeah, 'if done right' is the key. The room should be précisely tuned too, in this case especially so, I assume."

Actually speakers that generate spectrally-correct (or nearly so) reverberant fields are less demanding of room acoustics, and are far less likely to need room treatment in order to sound good. This is because whether the room bounces back a little energy or a lot, it's going to enhance the experience rather than degrade it.

Let's take a grand piano as an example. Plunk a grand piano down in just about any room and it will sound great. Yes it will sound even better in a recital hall than in your living room, but you don't have to fix your living room before it will sound great right there. Why is this so? In large part because the reverberant energy of the grand piano is spectrally correct. Likewise, outside of extreme situations, a speaker that gets the reverberant field right doesn't require you to "fix" the room in order for it to sound good. But if the reverberant field is spectrally skewed because the speaker is putting out significantly more off-axis energy at some frequencies than at others, then well-thought-out room treatment becomes a much higher priority.

The choice is not between having reverberant energy in the room or not. If we're not in an anechoic chamber, it will be there. The choice is between having the reverberant energy be beneficial or detrimental, and how much so, and this is largely a function of the speakers' off-axis response characteristics.

Imo, ime, ymmv, etc.

Duke
speaker designer

Duke, I am sure that you are correct. However, you use the term 'room treatment' while I say 'tuning' speaker/room pair. Are we talking about the same thing? I don't know. I share Michael Green's idea about tuning the entire system.
Grand piano will not sound good in smaller room, but guitar will. Tuned guitar. Grand piano will sound more or less acceptable, if you are lucky.
You move one chair out of the room leaving everything else as it was and the acoustics changes, sometimes significantly. No speaker design can compensate for what must be done working with the entire whole. At least I think so.

Hi Inna,

We might not be talking about the same thing, I should have paid closer attention to your wording.

What do you mean by "tuning" the speaker/room pair?

And you're right, (acoustic) guitar would have been a better example.

Thanks!

Duke, you are a pro, I am a listener. I can try to put it as a layman. I thought that the speakers/room system as presented by you is a bit mechanical. I believe it to be more as a kind of diad, a symbyosis of a sort, singing with one voice that contains the interactions of all reproduced instruments. As an instrument, in a manner of speaking.
And every instrument must be tuned. What does it mean in practical terms? I don't know, we better ask Michael Green. He tunes studios and performance halls. He 'listens' to wood before making platforms on which particular singers stand when singing, puts his panels wherever he feels they should be, moves chairs etc.