Some hobbies have a way of becoming obsessions. In retort you may claim, “it’s the person, not the hobby, that’s obsessed,” to which I say you don’t take your hobbies seriously enough. As far as listening to music is concerned, when you find yourself noticing new songs, beats, instruments, or whatever in your favorite album that you’d never heard previously, the tendency is (or should be) to push the hobby as far as you can.
That was the underlying premise for the movie room in the first place. Sure, it’d be a place to watch movies or – on Thursday nights – Grey’s Anatomy, but primarily it is where Sam and I can sit on any given night and listen to all kinds of music. The Bell Curve, typically reserved for things not-fun, applies to hobbies too. Some people collect coins, some collect coins and go to coin trading shows, and still others take out second mortgages to pay for an ultra-rare, double faced quarter. See what I mean? A bell curve of obsession.
Enter the pictures above and below, specifically the chunky items in them. These are dense panels of rockwool and fiberglass insulation, generally meant to make a building warmer but also incredibly effective at absorbing certain sounds. In particualr, the low ones.
You’ve certainly experienced walking down a road when suddenly you hear a “boom…boom…boom…BOOM…BOOM…boom…boom” which accompanies a kid in a Honda Civic driving by with the music blasting. These are the coin collectors. In reality the music sounds nothing like that, or at least isn’t supposed to, but somewhere along the line the conventional wisdom became “more is better.”
The problem with listening to sounds in confined spaces is that they bounce off of surfaces – walls, ceilings, floors – and interfere with music to sound skewed. Sometimes this is sounds like an echo, other times voices sound muffled, and so on. The trick is to make the music sound as close to what it originally sounded like, given that the band isn’t there in the room with you. This describes the coin collectors who go to trade shows.
Which leaves those to the right of the Bell Curve – who labor over equipment, where it should go in the room, and are convinced that clunky pieces of insulation will be in the best interests of their audiophile pursuits. Enter me.
It has been a labor of love trying to convince my wife that everyone should strive for great sound. I will go to great lengths to place Sam, actually Sam’s head, in the perfect spot in the room and have her listen to a song, to which she often concludes “I don’t hear a difference.” Sigh.
I think Sam needs to start collecting coins.