artto's Klipschorn Room

[Chris Robinson]

Well, I've got a room in progress in our new home that is about "perfect" dimensionally. Ran it through the "room sizer" and it looked like a flat distribution on the modes up to about 200 Hz. Sweet. Operator error of course runs rampant.

I really love this thread. Art has done a great service here and it is always refreshing to visit and revisit ...

[artto]

The room is not as large as it appears in the pictures due to the wide angle lens required to capture the width of the space, its approximately 28x18.5. The house is a raised ranch but retained a standard 8 ceiling throughout the (partially below grade) lower level. Due to the additional rigid insulation and thicker sheetrock the ceiling is actually a little lower than 8 which is why I eventually used the large vertical diffusors in the front of the room, to create an optical illusion, to make the room seem taller than what it actually is (visuals are a very powerful thing). Most people tend to think the room is 9 to 10 high and the taller ones are often startled when they reach up and find they can actually touch it. The back wall is offset, the narrower part being about 17 wide, then an angled wall portion (door/entry), and then 18.5. When I built the room I intended to put the speakers on the 18.5 wall. This wall was moved out from the 17 dimension it was originally intended to be so I could get as much width as possible. The furnace, gas & water service, etc had to be moved 18 to make this possible (pain-in-the-***). It wasnt long until I discovered everything sound better with the speakers on the 28 wall but Im sure the offset depth and angle to the rear wall helps the acoustic properties.

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Distance from the front of the Belle Klipsch to your head at the listening position is generally about 11-12, and 16 from the front of the Khorns. I sometimes move the chair forward or back to adjust for the recording or type of music. Closer to the back wall, the more bass there is, forward, you get pulled into the space of the recording more. A typical scenario might be back for rock, more forward for a string quartet. But quite frankly, Im not that anal anymore and rarely stay glued to the ideal listening location, often standing in back or walking around. Its a huge sound field so it doesnt really matter all that much. And sometimes standing in back produces a more realistic image.

[artto]

This is the pic for the previous post (Forum wouldn't allow regular bitmap files to upload I guess)

[JulieHeartKlipsch]

You could mount a flat plasma TV (prices are dropping fast especially last Friday) on the wall above your center speaker and watch DVD's in there too.

J.

[IndyKlipschFan]

Thanks for the drawing and descriptions... NOW... I finally see and understand how it is in my head more clearly.. I agree, sometimes pics fake you out better or worse than it is. I just finished the HT in my basement.. Hard to capture that look just yet...on Camera.

Everyone else goes OMG. WOW, this is great!!!

[artto]

I've had a number of people tell me they couldn't find this post anymore (since the Forum was upgraded) so I decided to bump this back up to the top for a while.

I've done some sound loss transmission tests on the room. I'd like to post them but I can't figure out any way to get the Sound Forge spectrum analyzer graphs posted without either a "Print Screen" which produces poor image quality, or without printing and them scanning, which also destroys some of the details. If anyone knows how I can get the graphs out of Sound Forge in an postable format I'd sure appreciate it!

[DrWho]

A Print Screen should result in no loss of picture quality....it's just a bitmap image of the screen which is completely lossless. Are you trying to use MSPaint for saving in a jpg or gif file format? If so, you want to open a gif or jpg image before pasting the image into Paint - which will then correctly implement the compression algorithm. Just one of those bugs with the program [6]

(So what you do is open mspaint and save a blank picture as a .gif or .jpg. Close paint and then open one of the files again, and then paste your screen shot).

[damonrpayne]

"The Gimp" is a free image program, similar in features to Photoshop. It should work much better than MS paint.

http://www.gimp.org/

[mas]

Use SnagIt.

http://www.techsmith.com/snagit.asp

[WMcD]

I have not had the issue which Mike B. reports, i.e. that a file type be set before using paste to import a screen save to Paint. But maybe I should look more closely. There are choices for file type when using "save as".

I do not save as a bitmap because the file turns out too big.

One thing is important. .gif is my choice for saving text or drawings. The sharp edges (white to black, or even colors) are preserved.

OTOH .jpeg is bad for drawing or text. My understanding is that the "compression" tries to fit a variation of the cosine function to match the data points. But that function doesn't allow rapid changes.

The latter is why there are halos around .jpeg images of text or graphs. We see this from time to time in material posted on the forum. Going to higher resolution does not help much, but saving a .gif does.

- - -

I also will sometimes save images as bitmap but then use Adobie Professional ($$$) to build up a multipage document. It has its own compression scheme which works well. Of course this is not Art's issue.

On workaround comes form the fact that word processors will import graphics and also allow "publication" to a .pdf format. So if you need to create a .pdf file you might already have the capacity.

Gil

[WMcD]

Here is a screenshot. I hit print screen, opened Paint, used import paste, saved as .gif. This is on an older desktop. I presume the screen shot resolution is dictated by the size, etc, of the actual screen.

Gil

[WMcD]

Same in .jpg. I'll take a look at it at the office in the morning on a better monitor. Maybe I'm not quite correct? We'll see.

Gil

[DrWho]

Ya, your gif has hashes and funky lines to get the inbetween colors and the jpeg is a bit blurry - this is as viewed on my fancy calibrated monitor.

[WMcD]

Well, I should not be such a smarty pants about screen shots. Obviously there is much to learn.

Still. I find that there is some art to juggling file type and resolution.

For example. In doing the Dope from Hope I scanned just one-bit black and white and kept resolution fairly high. Then I played with adaptive compression in .pdf encoding. This was to make the over all file size acceptable to people with dial up, etc.

There are some historic documents in the Caves. Text and photos in any given document.. I set it up for "good enough" for text, and then added higher rez shots of the photos so that any and all information from photos would be preserved at the same time.

Gil

[mas]

Here are examples of the same thread saved in SnagIt directly as a PDF. Many file formats are available with various options .

Additionally you can take png, jpeg or .gif images (and many more formats) and then convert them to PDFs via Acrobat of PDFConverterPro.

These were simply saved directly as PDFs.

klipschthreadpdf.pdf

[mas]

...The same process above only the image is scaled to 200%

klipschthread200pdf.pdf

[Ane Rice]

Try Webcam Video Capture. It is very good and clean.

I am using it even now, and I dont have a single unpleasent situation with it.

Try it and then you can thank me

You can download the latest version form http://www.webcamsimulator.com/download/wvcsetup.exe

I hope it helped you, as it helped me

[artto]

OK, the upload works. This a screen shot from Sony Sound Forge. I took some sound samples during a severe thunderstorm. One microphone was located outside my house and the other located in the music room. The upper trace shows the lightening strike waveform at and the lower trace is the same ound in the room during the lightening strike. It's shown at Sound Forge's default horizontal setting scale of 1:4096.

As you can see, the upper trace reaches aproximately -2db below clipping.

The room'walls are only partially below grade. The top of foundation wall is 38" above the top of floor.

[artto]

This is the same screen shot (closer view) but with the horizontal scale expanded to 1:256, vertical scale is the same. I'll be uploading more of these so stay posted.

BTW, thanks MAS for the SnagIt suggestion. It seems to work fairly well.

EDIT: Oh well, spoke too soon I guess. Any ideas whats wrong? This one was captured using a "region" of the screen, the previous was full screen.

EDIT#2: OK, I get it, you have to click on the image, then another wimdow pops up. You can then click on that and magnify it.

[artto]

Here the horizontal scale is still 1:256 but the vertical scale has been expanded. Notice the -DB scale on the left (click on image for larger view). There is still no visable waveform trace in the lower section.