Second stop: A magnetoplanar media room
Our next visit reinforces a point I’ve heard many theater designers stress: The gear in your theater is pretty much up to you and your installer. Most theater design firms will make gear recommendations if you ask, and probably all of them will let you know if you’ve made some poor equipment choices. But by and large, they’re there to accommodate your tastes, not to impose theirs.
    

From a technical standpoint, this room’s speakers—giant Magnepan panels that produce sound using ultrathin sheets of polyethylene film suspended between magnets—couldn’t be much more different from the Vienna Acoustics Mahlers, which like most speakers use a dome tweeter and cone woofers.

To Rives, that didn’t matter—the point was to make the client’s beloved panel speakers sound their best. In fact, the firm didn’t even demand major rearrangement of the room. “We try to integrate the acoustics with what the client already has,” Bird says. “We prefer to complement the decor rather than work against it.”
    
This room is especially unusual in that it combines hardcore audiophile gear—the Magnepans, vacuum-tube-based amps and preamp from Audio Research, high-end CD playback electronics, and an elaborate Clearaudio turntable for vinyl records—with a TV and home theater audio gear from Sony, plus subwoofers and surround speakers from Vandersteen Audio. “We call it a media room,” the homeowner tells me, “although the priority leans toward music rather than to home theater.”
    

Again, the room employs extensive acoustic treatment, yet none of it is readily visible. Acoustical panels from RPG Diffusor Systems line the ceiling and the side and back walls, but you don’t immediately notice them because they’re perfectly integrated with the rest of the decor. Most people would assume they’re design elements rather than acoustical components.
    
Rives’ most striking touch, though, is the record cabinet. Rives’ engineers wanted to keep the client’s record collection close at hand for him, but didn’t want large, flat cabinet doors that might create slap echoes. Knowing that shelves full of records, CDs, DVDs, or books make good diffusers, they specified open cabinet doors covered with acoustically transparent fabric. Sound can pass in and out through the fabric to take advantage of the record collection’s diffusive characteristics.
    
Despite the extensive acoustic treatment, the Magnepans retain their naturally spacious, diffuse sound. Meanwhile, the bass sounds perfectly even, precise, and powerful—something one rarely hears in audiophile systems. “It was a lot of sweat getting all those panels installed,” the homeowner confides, “but the result is just amazing.”