Without even waiting for your response, I’m guessing NOT. Who does?!

Almost all of our living rooms are very bright sounding and have endemic slap echo in their sonic personalities. We all know this and pretty much have to live with it because our wives don’t want lovely charcoal absorbing panels all over the place to make our sound more like a studio than a gymnasium. How unreasonable of them!

To properly dampen the reflections in a room you have to treat roughly 25% of the square footage of your total drywall space. Putting up a couple 2×4’ absorption panels won’t make a dent. You actually need four to six panels that are over 5’ tall and about 4’ wide to TAME THE BEAST.

Speakers are designed in anechoic chambers. You don’t listen in an anechoic chamber. They are useful tools though. You can hear your heart beat in there.

So, with this in mind, what can we do to make our music systems sound as clear as possible and not have the artifacts of drywall caroms wreak havoc?

Bryston Speakers

Bryston has done extensive research on room behavior and the predilections of listeners. Bryston emphasizes that your speakers need to be Steinway Smooth instead of bright. That will be no surprise to you. Bryston speakers are indeed Steinway Smooth.

Bryston has determined that of equal importance, is to make speakers with a wide range of directivity. They should perform like a controlled flood light, instead of a spot light.

You don’t want a 180 degree flood light blasting away either. Then you’ll hear reflected sound a split second after the direct sound, hence more slap echo and abashment will ensue.

In double blind tests, listeners routinely prefer speakers that purvey a broad sweet spot.

This phenomena is called Power Response. Speakers that have a wide Power Response sound quite similar in frequency balance or output level- in a wide range of listening positions. They’re also more impervious to irksome sonic ricochets off room boundaries.

If speakers only perform to their optimum by moving them a scintilla east/west/north/south, odds are they’ll only sound good when your head is in a vice.

Audiophile Speakers

The vast majority of uber expensive audiophile speakers only sound outstanding at one spot in the room. If you move a seat or two left/right/front/back, they become pedestrian. Check this out if you visit Axpona. As soon as you hear someone say they’ve got their speakers “dialed in” you can read the code.

Heaven help you if you start reading forums online about what some characters have done to get their speakers to finally sound good. They wouldn’t have to endure such gyrations if their speakers were smooth and had a faithful Power Response.

Enjoying music shouldn’t be that tough! And, it ISN’T with great speakers like Brystons.

By the way, Bryston isn’t the only company that knows about this. Bryston is, however, the only company that builds to this regimen, in N America, and offers a 20 year warranty to back them up!

Whether you get modestly priced Brystons or brobdingnagian towers, they’re all Steinway Smooth and built with exemplary Power Response.