Room Correction Done Right: In the eighties, at the dawning of Digital Electronics for HiFi equipment, I remember one of the most impressive sonic demonstrations that I heard attending a CES in Chicago.
In those days, held in small downtown Chicago hotel rooms, was a demonstration of Digital Electronics by B&W. It wasn’t anything they sell nor would ever market. It was a demonstration of Room Correction for Frequency and Phase Response done with, at the time, very expensive and sophisticated digital electronics.
John Bowers personally walked me through the demo. The Room Correction System was never marketed by B&W but was done as a Future Technology Study to show what can be done. When I listened to the demonstration without Correction and with, I was Stunned.
Of all the demonstrations I have been to at CES, that was the demonstration that made the most difference. The small hotel room came alive, the walls expanded, and the speakers disappeared. The imagery of the music instruments or voices was solid, and the echo information made sense, and had a cohesiveness as though I was in the hall where they did the recording.
Fast forward thirty odd years to 2015, when we setup for the demo of the Lyngdorf TDAI2170 Amplifier with Room Correction, that experience was repeated. Of course, now, the audio equipment has improved a lot, and I have become a lot more critical. I have to admit, the Lyngdorf sat here gathering dust for six months not listened to, because I had been prejudice against Class D or Digital Switching Amplifiers. There have been some very bad digital switching amps, and some good ones. The best ones still would fall short the least expensive Naim amplifiers, which I hold as the pinnacle of analogue designs.
I don’t claim to be hear macro second delays that Digital Switching Amps have, but I can tell the music is affected when there are massive global negative feedback applied, or that when a Class A amp is added to the Switching Amp and that make it run hotter than it should.
Are the two amps fighting each other while generating not just excessive heat, but dynamic range that just sound awful. Certainly, one thing for sure, the advantage of Digital Switching Amp is lack of noise, and I have never heard that from any of them. . . . until the Lyngdorf. The Lyngdorf TDAI2170 firstly, is Digital Done Right. From the lowest detail in music to a crashing Crescendo, the dynamics just sound right. And there is the Digital Sonic Signature, between notes, there is really a SILENCE.
With the right Digital Electronics is a sophisticated Room Perfect Correction device that literally, move the room boundaries far away without touching your wall. Lyngdorf’s Room Perfect outperforms $20K worth of room treatment. Electronically, the Lyngdorf learns over 99% of your room including all the reflections of your floor, ceiling, and walls by measuring your room with a calibrated mic. The unwanted reflections are cancelled, thereby rendering as though your floor, ceiling, and walls don’t exist. Only the music and its echo information captured in the original recordings is heard. No wonder the walls disappear, the sound field becomes more intimate yet expansive, the high frequencies now lack fizziness and are as pure as can be. Soloists stay focused in the middle between the two speakers. Incredible! But unmistakable.
Come to Pat’s Audio Art and listen for yourself.
