What are your thoughts on personal listening rooms?

I’ve talked to a few people about listening rooms and it’s funny when we get calls from customers that have been wanting to do a listening room for years and years and years and for whatever reason, now they have the money, they have the space, they have the space and the money, their lives have changed now where they can finally satisfy this want and I really encourage that they’re doing the whole room because that is the way you control everything.

The ceiling, the walls, when you do five of the six surfaces, when you control the energy with those surfaces your way, you can really get amazing things. We’re doing a THX theatre in Canada for a client: 25’ wide, 33’ long but 7 1/2-foot high. So a short ceiling, wide and long. We got to get our reverberation times at all frequencies at 0.45. The reverberation time in my studio is 0.3, so it’s real close to my studio and the room is almost three-times as big and I have 6,000 pounds of Carbon.

So you can imagine how much absorption we’re going to put to get those reverb times. So the client says he’s been told that ‘it can’t be done’. I said “well it can be done” but you have to be willing to spend the money on the treatment and he’s willing to do that. So it’ll be a great project when we get it all finished and measured and I think people are really going to be impressed. I hope. He doesn’t care that all four walls are going to be covered with treatment.