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Brilliant Advances in Technology: A Tech Blog

Welcome to my technology blog. My name is Kat, and I have been an avid fan of technology for years. In my professional life, I am a restaurant owner, but I have dabbled in everything tech-related from building computers to online marketing to basic programming. In this space, I want to focus on brilliant innovations in technology. When I am not at the restaurant with my husband, you can find me curled up with my kids watching videos on their tablets, checking out new video games on our favourite consoles or other tech-related entertainment. Get comfortable, and explore these posts. I hope they inspire you to learn or do new things with technology.

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Brilliant Advances in Technology: A Tech Blog

Three Steps To Building Your Best Home Listening Environment

by Mario Carmona

No matter how dedicated they may be, not all audiophiles have the time, budget or freedom to create a dedicated listening room--and your hi-fi might be set up in a multi-use living room shared with a number of other people and serving a number of other purposes. That doesn't mean you can't still enjoy great sound with a little effort, though! With these three simple steps, you'll be able to work with what you've got and build a deep soundscape that your whole family can enjoy.

  1. Identify your room's biggest sound issues. There are a number of common problems plaguing most potential domestic soundscapes. Smaller rooms can suffer from a lot of sound pressure at high volumes, meaning that you'll experience distortion as you listen. Larger rooms, on the other hand, often require more work to get the reverberations right--and bad reverberations are often the enemy of good music. To improve your sound pressure you're going to need to tweak the settings on your system to produce better sound at lower volumes, while to help deal with reverberations you could look into making or purchasing a set of quadratic diffusers and setting them up at the back of your room.  
  2. Find your 'sound triangle'. The single most important thing you can do is to decide where you'll mostly be sat when listening to music and to try and calibrate your whole system toward that point. The perfect setup is an equilateral triangle, with a speaker at each of two points and you at the third. If this can't be achieved, unequal triangles are often almost as good--but it's worth giving some thought to how the rest of the room is set up. Try to avoid having any items of furniture (such as coffee tables) within that triangle, and minimise furniture to the left and right of your position as you look toward the speaker wall.  
  3. Minimise hard, flat surfaces. It's been said that glass is the enemy of great sound, and there's some truth to that: There's a reason recording studios don't tend to have windows! In your own living or listening room, windows are probably a must--so it's important to ensure that you have good curtains you can close to muffle their effect. Avoid glass-topped coffee tables, glass-fronted cabinets and large glass objects such as home aquariums. In general, hard, flat surfaces like unbroken walls are no help to you if acoustics are your goal--break things up with asymmetrically-placed furniture, cloth hangings on the walls and plenty of angles for the soundwaves to bounce and reflect off.

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