GoodSoundClub - Romy the Cat's Audio Site

In the Forum: Audio Discussions
In the Thread: Romy The Cat's new Listening Room

Post Subject: A minor collapse of major prenup.Posted by Romy the Cat on: 3/7/2015

I feel strange tonight. I woke up at 2.30AM to feed the diabolically-smiling baby and as Thomas went back to sleep I keep walking back and forth of the listening room for 2 hours, having quite bewildering feelings. As Amy the Kitten moved with me we had virtual prenuptial agreement that consists of just 3 sensible points: 1) The listening room stays 2) Never challenge authority of Koshka 3) Never vote republican. Nowadays the things look and feel different. Koshka is dead. The stupid and on name-only liberals bring up candidates make us to vomit and the last election we went for a republican governor. The last was the listening room….

No, I did not yet converted the wood from bass horns to a custom baby cradle but I do admit that the integrity (and sound) of my listening room is slowly being compromised. Not that Amy does it intentionally or with some kind of detrimental intent. She rather does her normal female nesting, surrounding our life with pleasurable artifacts of her cuteness. However, if in our bedroom her cuteness manifest itself with a zillion freakishly-unusable pillows, puffy blankets and wall tapestries, (meaning with acoustically wonderful things) then in listening room her décor inventiveness goes from one very bad acoustic idea to another acoustically-worst.

The latest blow that my listening room endures is her attack on the small piece of wall behind my listening couch (use to be a listening chair). Whoever read my site for long time remember the amount of efforts I spent to discover the problem and find a great solution to the problem of my back wall reflection. Read the pages 10 to 14 of this thread and you will witness the discovery process. The curved, perforated arrays of fiberglass pipes was a phenomenal solution; it created a literally acoustically black hole in my listening room that made the sonic imaging in the room dark, deep and no-noisy. Even those seemingly random plastic red leafs were not a “celebration of my gayshness” but rather a very strategically positioned acoustic devises that set balance between absorption and diffusion at upper frequencies.

http://www.goodsoundclub.com/Site_Images/NewRoom_AcousticTreatment_15.JPG

With arriving of Amy the fiberglass pipes behind the listening spot are gone and replaced with irrelevant tapestry – a huge sonic snip. The line of fiberglass pipes at the peripheral of the midbass horns is replaced with books - another sonic snip. And the last nigh the wall behind the listing spot, the most important wall in any listening room (and particularly in mine), got it new permanent candidate – a wonderful silk screened brass rubbing,….. which is acoustic nightmare.

Amy loves brass rubbing and I need to admit that this and many other her visual preferences were “too Catholic” for my Ashkenazim point of view. However, as time went by it kind of rub off of me (pun not intended). Amy love of those things has nothing to do with Churchism. Any half British descendant and her undergraduate degree were Midlevel studies. She just love all sort of thing that in my inflated mind associated with nothing but no less then inquisition. However, traveling with her across Welsh, Scotland and England, visiting their cathedrals and consuming the British culture (about which I was uninformed before) I did fall in love with that island, those people and begin understand and appreciate Amy’s love to Midlevel British art. Nowadays the brass rubbing does not stake me as hard as before and I need to say that the brass rubbing that she put behind the listening sweet spot is a pronominal quality (the picture does not do justice). Still, it IS an acoustic disaster and I only grateful that she agreed did not put it into a glass frame.

I do not…. I love her, this is her house and I truly would like her to make her home to reflect who she is. The brass rubbing would not be my first choice at the most visually prominent wall of the house but if she feels that it has to be then I would not argue with it. However, this is supper important acoustic wall that shall be no only “pretty” but actually “functional”. I do not know if is worth trying to delegate the concept of “functionality” to women….

The Cat

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