The calling out reviewers video from Danny at GR Research:
https://youtu.be/8GVzN0_TCaMReviewer response videos:
https://youtu.be/zxlUYfpxNMYhttps://youtu.be/Au5O81TqjUsRecently, Danny of GR Research with his popular YouTube channel posted a video about Reviewers and Listening rooms which has caused quite a disturbance in the force.
In it he claimed that many reviewers weren’t either qualified or perhaps ready to hear his speakers and should consider visiting his listening room in Texas and get some schooling on how to listen.
This is where listening rooms come into the story because he states that it is non-engineered listening rooms that have prevented many reviewers from having any real credibility - at least in his eyes.
I’m sure many of your are familiar with Danny from GR Research and watched enough of his speaker videos to see where this is going to get a little sticky, and you wouldn’t be disappointed because indeed it has already.
Two popular YouTube reviewers have already published “response” videos with passionate opinions on the matter.
If you’ve been enjoying this drama as it unfolds, you have already seen the videos I am referring to. If not, and you’re still reading this, go check them out on YouTube.
When I saw this video from Danny I was stunned because quite a bit of what he said I have secretly thought myself for decades! Now don’t shoot me yet, I have more to go here…
Having built a few extraordinary listening rooms during that time, I have experienced what a engineered room actually does to the sound or put another way, what a non-engineered room actually does to the sound. Either way, the effect is 4 to 5 times larger than 95% of all audiophiles realize. Sure we’ve all heard about the room, and how some rooms are good and others are pretty bad, but proceed to ignore it because we’re not in a position to create an engineered listening space.
Fair enough, welcome to the real world where people have limited space and want to enhance it with music that sounds good.
Even those with less limitations on space who enjoy 5 and 6 figure speakers are similar. The evidence is all the pictures of said speakers on the internet standing up against an untreated wall in a bright space with either marble floors or large glass windows. These individuals who can clearly afford to construct an engineered listening space for their incredible audio gear don’t because they are the same as everyone else, just with more money. They want the same thing, pretty speakers in their living space so they can enjoy sound while/where they live. This is hifi, this has always been hifi.
So why don’t people realize how big the effect of the room is? Because most have never heard it. Even many brick and mortar dealers didn’t have engineered spaces that were working very well and now that they are disappearing — audiophiles are even less likely to hear an engineered space of any kind. It’s not going to happen at the audio shows in the lobby or hotel rooms with the furniture removed.
So it really comes down to this… there are two types of audiophiles on the planet. The ones who want to have attractive and good sounding audio gear in their home so they can have nice sound while they live in their home, and the ones who have heard what happens in an engineered space and have become permanently wrecked by it.
So we have two types of audiophiles, clearly with the first being the overwhelming majority.
The ones who were permanently wrecked by it including many manufacturers, found out that the differences in clarity are so profound that it becomes super easy to hear differences in cables and everything else — differences that the room would normally mask or distort. This resolution changes things. It makes it easier to create a better sounding speaker or amplifier or cable because you're listening to it in 4K instead of HD or lower. If you're a manufacturer who is trying to make audio gear that sounds better than most, this is the only way you can do it.
Let me give you a real world example. Constructing an amplifier and trying to decide how much negative feedback to use, if any, is going to be based on what you hear change with and without it. In an engineered listening space, what you would hear change is the depth of the sound stage. With lots of feedback it may be only a couple feet behind the speakers while without feedback it may be 30 feet or more behind the speakers leaving lots of room for the recording to spread out. Let’s suppose we put a feedback switch on the amplifier and let everyone marvel at how it magically makes the sound stage explode back in space and then take it into someone’s home and set the speakers 2 feet away from a wall. In the home, flipping the feedback switch will have so little effect on the sound that many won’t understand what it actually does!
Yes, all the extra effort to make amplifiers and speakers that blow your mind in an engineered listening space is somewhat wasted when the products you manufacture are used in the home. You feel like the product is being handicapped because you know it is. You know that most of your customers will likely never hear what the product is capable of and you desperately want to share what you’ve experienced with those who buy your products.
Many high-end loudspeakers are designed to sound as good as possible in the home and many are not trying to be perfect or have flat response because the engineers are painfully aware that the consumer will use the product in a largely untreated listening room.
Many high-end reviewers review product in the home in largely untreated spaces because it A) it’s what they have and B) it probably better represents what you will experience if you were to buy the product under review. Some of the reviewers are adding more and more treatment so their review will be more accurate to how the gear actually sounds, and at the same time less representative of what you will hear at home without treatment so there is no way to win.
This is in part what makes HIFI such a lottery when it comes to great sounding systems. Because the average rooms in your home will have peaks and holes of 12dB or more, and the frequencies of those peaks and dips will change from room to room and even from a change in the sitting position in those rooms. Making a speaker that was a bit lumpy in response flatter in response may actually ruin the customers sound because the lumpy response happened to fit the room where he had the speakers placed. A bass peak in the speaker might for example offset a null in someones room while a dip that might occur at 5K in a speakers response could well offset a peak in the room at that frequency yielding a flatter overall response than before it was “fixed”.
Since you can’t separate a room from a loudspeaker, ( the two are in reality a singularity acoustically speaking ) it might not be a bad idea to measure the room before doing modifications to the speaker so that one response can be overlapped over the other. This way the speakers response can be tailored in the right direction for the room it lives in.
Many audiophiles have no interest in an engineered listening space because they are not aware of what it can do to the sound. But… if everyone did have one the only acceptable loudspeaker response would be dead flat.
Myself, I have had the engineered space and am still wrecked by it some 20 years later. The room I presently have here at Decware is not to that level but is somewhere in-between and the differences are still clear in my mind so I can get a little of both worlds when I evaluate speakers and voice amplifiers in it.
And for the record, my idea of the perfect reviewer and the perfect audio show would be to review / show a product in both an engineered space and a regular room at the same time. I know it’s a fantasy but I’m allowed. I suspect that reviews would be hard to write since it would be like having two different speakers to review. If it were an audio show I suspect many people who walk into the engineered space to hear a pair of speakers would be blown away and then when they walk into the regular room with the same gear, it would sound broken — they would become discouraged — many would just find a new hobby.
This entire topic has more to do with speakers than with amplifiers because as I said, a room and a loudspeaker are in truth a singularity.
Steve