Is Building A Listening Room From Scratch Worth The Effort?

Several years ago, my good friend Randy told me that he was about to start designing his dream house and asked if I would help with the dedicated listening room’s acoustic design, as well as suggest some new equipment. Randy is a serious music lover and vinyl enthusiast, but he didn’t have a good place in his current home for music listening. As I had just finished researching listening-room building techniques for my own home (my third dedicated room), I was happy to share with Randy what I had learned.

More than five years after that conversation, I finally had the chance to visit Randy’s listening room and hear the results of our efforts. Between a protracted and complicated build, construction delays, and the pandemic, it was a long gestation period. I also warned Randy early on that you never know how a room or system will sound until you set a system up and listen. You can do everything you think is right, but there’s always some trepidation until you actually listen to the room and equipment. 

I recommended that Randy’s room be built using the IsoWall technique, developed by Art Noxon of Acoustic Sciences Corporation (ASC). Art developed this very clever wall-construction technique nearly 30 years ago, and it has been used in building countless recording studios and listening rooms since. As I detailed in my article “Building a Listening Room” in Issue 293, I also built my room with IsoWall. After three and a half years of using my room for critical listening in equipment reviews, as well as listening for pleasure on a near-daily basis, I am beyond thrilled by my room’s performance.

My room measures 27′ x 17′ with an 11′ ceiling. Randy wanted something grander that would also serve as a theater room. Using the online acoustic calculator amroc at amcoustics.com, and the approximate size Randy had in mind, we decided on dimensions of 32′ x 20′ with a 14′ ceiling. Starting with such superb dimensional ratios is a huge advantage in achieving good sound; the ideal ratio of room width-to-length-to-height spreads out the room resonance modes more uniformly, avoiding pileups at certain frequencies and holes at others that makes the bass sound thick and colored. It’s impossible to overstate the advantage of good ratios. Randy’s wall construction is identical to that described in my “Building a Listening Room” article, with ASC’s damped resilient channel mounted to the studs, and then two layers of drywall with ASC’s visco-elastic damping material between the them. The walls and ceiling “float” on the resilient channel rather than rigidly attaching to the studs. The IsoWall technique confers three important benefits: It provides much-needed bass absorption through the flexible constrained-layer-damped wall construction; it prevents acoustic energy from being imparted to the wall, which would then release that energy over time (“wall shudder”); and it acoustically isolates the listening room from the rest of the house.

The interior acoustic design was by John Calder of Acoustic Geometry. I selected the Acoustic Geometry products for my new room after evaluating them in a completely untreated room in the rental house I lived in while my new house was being built. Randy’s design features floor-to-ceiling Acoustic Geometry Curve Diffusors, along with fabric covering the walls. Unlike my room, where the acoustic treatments are highly visible, the acoustic devices in Randy’s room blend unobtrusively into the décor or are hidden behind fabric. Acoustic Geometry supplied my conventionally sized 300-pound acoustic door, but Randy required a double 10′ door that Acoustic Geometry custom-made for the project. 

I specified the same AC power system that I used for my room—dedicated 20-amp lines, all wired with identical-length 10AWG. Shunyata Research founder Caelin Gabriel advised me on my room’s AC power, and I was happy to pass along his insights.

Now comes the fun part—selecting equipment. Randy has for a long time been partial to planar loudspeakers after falling in love with the sound of Acoustats many years ago. He also wanted the absolute highest value and greatest performance for the money possible. That narrowed it down to two contenders: the MartinLogan CLX and Magnepan MG30.7. That decision was made for us after we discovered that the CLX recently went out of production. I had heard the CLX and its legendary forerunner (the CLS) on many occasions but had experienced the top-of-the-line Maggie just once, and in a less-than-ideal room. But based on having heard many other Magnepan models, and Jonathan Valin’s enthusiastic endorsement (Issue 279), we went for the big Maggies. Between the large and well-treated room, along with the ability to ideally position the speakers within the room, Randy’s space seemed like a perfect environment to get the best out of the MG30.7. 

Although the MG30.7 has excellent bass extension, we decided to augment the bottom end with a pair of JL Audio Fathom f112 subwoofers and a JL Audio CR-1 crossover. Mating cone woofers in a box with a full-range planar speaker is asking for trouble, but I felt confident that the pair of Fathoms would be up to the challenge, particularly when used with the CR-1 crossover. Although the Fathom subwoofer has extensive front-panel adjustments for dialing in the sound, the CR-1 takes the control over the blend between the main speakers and subs to an entirely new level. In my previous evaluations of the CR-1, I also found that its electronics didn’t degrade the sound of the main speakers. The CR-1’s electronics are in the signal path, meaning that any colorations in the CR-1 will be imposed on the main speakers—a particular drawback for a speaker as resolving as the MG30.7. If the CR-1 had been less than transparent, it would have been a non-starter. Also, the subwoofers were needed for reproducing film soundtracks when the room was being used as a theater.

Randy decided to keep his Avid turntable and SME tonearm, Odyssey Audio Candela preamplifier, Odyssey Suspiro phonostage, and Odyssey Stratos monoblock amplifiers. I was concerned that the Stratos’s 180W wasn’t enough power for the notoriously power-hungry Maggies, so Klaus Bunge at Odyssey upgraded the amplifiers by installing entirely new electronics inside the chassis. Randy would replace his decades-old Krell CD player, add streaming capabilities, and upgrade his cables and AC power conditioning. For a digital source, I enthusiastically recommended the dCS Rossini CD player. The Rossini is available as a DAC or full CD player, with both models offering MQA decoding, full streaming functions, and Roon capability. Randy has a large CD collection and needed disc playback. TAS Associate Editor Neil Gader recently bought the Rossini DAC after reviewing it. DCS had never produced a product that was less than stellar, and the Rossini hit all the right buttons in sound quality, features, ergonomics, and value. We went with all-Shunyata AC power cords and AC power conditioning. Some of the interconnects were upgraded to AudioQuest, including the very important long run from the equipment rack in the back of the room to the CR-1 crossover, which was on a short rack along with the amplifiers between the loudspeakers.

Randy’s room does double duty, serving as both a listening room and theater room. The center-channel speaker is the MartinLogan Illusion ESL34A, a massive hybrid system with dynamic woofers mated with a curved electrostatic panel. The Illusion isn’t a center-channel speaker that you casually set on a lowboy equipment rack; it is a behemoth designed to work on the floor beneath a projection screen or large video display. The center-speaker’s electrostatic panel would provide better integration with the Magnepans than would a conventional center-channel speaker with dynamic drivers. Plus, the electrostat would deliver outstanding dialog intelligibility. The four surround speakers in the side and rear walls, along with four Dolby Atmos speakers in the ceiling, are also from MartinLogan. The video display is a Samsung 135″ modular unit called “The Wall.” 

After more than five years since Randy proposed building a world-class listening room and system (and lots of questions and decisions along the way), I finally got to listen to the result. Upon hearing the system, I was instantly reminded of something Jonathan Valin recently said to me: “Maggies do certain things that no box speaker, no matter how expensive, can achieve.” That was so true of Randy’s system; the sound was utterly detached from the loudspeakers, with the instruments floating in three-dimensional space. Box speakers can produce fabulous soundstaging, but the Maggies have a special kind of magic in that the images seem to hang in space completely untethered from the speakers with startling realism. I was also struck by the sheer beauty of the tonality and the complete lack of grain and metallic hardness in the treble. The midrange was liquid, luscious, and seductive, and the treble smooth and relaxed. Despite the tremendous sense of ease, the system was extremely resolving. But rather than sounding overtly detailed, the system’s resolution was more subtle and refined than I’m used to hearing from box speakers. Transients were lightning fast yet never etched; acoustic guitar, for example, was reproduced with thrilling dynamic immediacy, but didn’t sound hyped or fatiguing. The overall sound was goosebump-raising realistic. I had to remind myself that the MG30.7 is a $38,000 loudspeaker, not one that costs $200k+. If you have a big enough room, and a powerful enough amplifier, the MG30.7 delivers astonishing performance on an absolute basis and is surely high-end audio’s greatest bargain in reference-level loudspeakers.

Building a listening room from scratch is a serious and expensive endeavor, but as I listened to Randy’s system, I thought that the effort and expense of having a world-class environment in which to enjoy your favorite music day after day, night after night, was well worth the cost and effort.