chowkwan%priam.usc.edu@usc.edu (Raymond Chowkwanyun) (04/16/91)
Do you believe that your room is the most important component in your system? If so, read on. This is a review of the RoomTune (sic) room treatment. Summary for Those on the Run: ---------------------------- RoomTunes give you a lot of control over the way your room sounds. The benefits are bigger soundstage and fuller, richer sound. Four of them would be all that is needed for most rooms. At $129 a pair, RoomTunes provide an economical way to make over your system. The most difficult part of using RoomTunes is giving up some cherished notions you may have about room treatments. The livelier the room, the better RoomTunes work. This means the fewer couches, rugs, and curtains the better. That goes counter to what we've always been told. If you want details, you'll have to read the Full-Bore review. Full-Bore Reivew: ---------------- You can't buy RoomTunes without buying into the RoomTune Philosophy which says that lively is good. More accurately, lively is good, it's resonance that's bad. It would help here if I set up a "Conventional Wisdom" straw man so you can see what it is that the RoomTune Philosophy is reacting to. Conventional Wisdom says you should have some rugs and curtains in your room, maybe even a couch to control standing waves. And conventional wisdom was correct. These soft furnishings control boominess. Extending conventional wisdom are such ideas as deadening the speaker end of the room to control early reflections that muck up the soundstage. Products like Tube Traps also further the conventional wisdom. Unfortunately, conventional widsom is also wrong because the same treatments that control bass boom are also killing the higher frequencies resulting in a dull, lifeless sound. RoomTunes seek to control the bass without killing the midrange and treble. A RoomTune is a tubular object with a reflective side and an absorbtive side. A starting configuration would be to have one in each corner of your room with the reflective side facing *OUT*. The idea is that the absorbtive side breaks up standing waves while the reflective side keeps the higher frequencies alive. So how does this work out in practice? My listening room is also my bedroom. I have a full size mattress on the floor in front of the speakers. I started by removing the duvet from the bed. Yes indeed the sound is richer and more involving. Next I removed the bed from the room altogether. The room is now very live. Wooden floors. Quite a lot of windows with no drapes. The sound is gorgeous. Rich and full of dynamic range. And not a hint of bass boom. I am using 6 Deluxe RoomTunes. These are monolithic in shape and cost $200 the pair. My advice: save your money and buy the regular RoomTunes unless the monolithic shape has great Wife Acceptance Factor for you. Another advantage of the regular RoomTunes is that you can stack them if your ceiling is high enough. My room is very long and very narrow so my resonance problems are side to side. I put two RoomTunes against each side wall, the first about 3 feet from the front of the speaker. The remaining two RoomTunes I used to block off an alcove on the right rear side of the room. I noticed a clustering of the sound about the left speaker but not the right. The left side of my room narrows at my listening position by two feet. By putting a RoomTune against this corner, I was able to free up the sound from the left speaker so that the entire soundstage was now behind both speakers and they effectively disappeared. I leave it to the physicists to explain. Something to do with diffraction off the corner to my left perhaps? So I ended up with a corridor of RoomTunes with the speakers at one end and me at the other. All with their reflective sides facing into the room. Another experiment I tried was to use the absorbtive side of the RoomTunes to control early reflections. This seemed to work well when the bed was in the room. But when the bed was out of the room, the soundstage was actually clearer when I used all RoomTunes with reflective sides facing into the room. i.e. maximum liveness. Anyway, you get the idea. Experiment with RoomTune placement as you would with speaker placement and you can come up with interesting effects. They are very light so it is easy to try out different arrangements. Details, details: ---------------- What are room tunes made of? There is a wooden frame and inside there is some carcinogenic material. Fibreglass? The reflective side reflects light as well as sound. Aluminum foil? What's the difference between RoomTunes and Tube Traps? According to the RoomTune people, Tube Traps only absorb sound whereas RoomTunes reflect as well as absorb. OK, Tube Traps have reflective material but that just makes one side less absorbtive than the other. I've never experienced Tube Traps so I can't say. Obviously the RoomTune people are biased but reports out of Winter CES say RoomTunes displaced Tube Traps in 90% of displays. Those manufacturers are not biased - they want the best presentation for their products they can get. The cheapest Tube Trap costs $166. And that's for one. You can get a pair of RoomTunes for less. And RoomTunes come with this real neat Philosophy you see that says ... -- ray