Third stop: An audiophile’s dream
The third room we visit wasn’t designed for entertaining at all—it exists solely for the homeowner to listen to his extensive music collection in private. The spacious room is practically empty except for audio equipment. Firebird speakers from Talon (a company now owned by Rives Audio) stand front and center, with a Talon Thunderbird subwoofer run by a Rives sub-PARC in between.

Tube amplifiers from Conrad-Johnson and Jadis provide power through massive audio cables that rest on tiny, sawhorse-like supports to isolate them from floor-borne vibration. An Esoteric Audio DVD player, tweaked out and heavily modified by Alex Peychev Laboratories, provides the primary audio source, along with an APL digital-to-analog converter. All components float on Critical Mass Grand Masters isolation platforms. This room is the audio equivalent of an F1 car—something designed purely for performance, with no other significant considerations.
    
In this case, the client’s involvement with Rives Audio was at a much higher level. “Before each acoustic component was put in, I listened to about 15 CDs,” the homeowner tells me. “Then I listened to the same CDs again after they put the new component in. Richard has never led me astray.
    

“I wanted to hear the nuances and harmonic texture,” he continues. “I wanted to hear the interaction of the tail of one note with the attack of the next note. Before Rives consulted on the room, I got that only sporadically.”
    
Even in this sparse, single-purpose room, Rives used room furnishings as acoustic treatment wherever possible. The CD and book racks on the side walls are custom-designed with angles in order to better diffuse the sound—in fact, they bear a passing resemblance to the angled diffuser panels one sees on the sides of fine concert halls.
    
“Having big, flat, parallel walls is a recipe for slap echo,” Bird advises. “The CD racks help with that. We also used half-cylinder columns in the room to help diffuse the sound. There are three half-cylinders on each side wall and two on the front wall.” Judicious use of RPG absorber panels on the front wall and RPG diffusers on the back wall kills off any slap echo that the racks and columns miss.
    
The ceiling is also treated with acoustical panels, specifically RPG Hemifusors. Like the CD/book racks and the half-cylinder diffusers, the treatment on the ceiling eliminates the direct reflection of sounds from the speakers to the listening chair—a phenomenon notorious for smearing sound. “You will almost never see a design of ours with a flat, untouched ceiling,” Bird says.
    
Despite its completely different design, purpose, and equipment, this room has much in common with the other rooms Bird has shown me. Every frequency of sound seems perfectly controlled. Bass response is even, with no notes noticeably louder or softer than any others. Midrange sounds, especially voices, are natural and uncolored.

While there’s no discernible trace of slap echo, the room’s reverberance yields a broad soundstage that extends way beyond the sides of the speakers, and far behind them as well. Best of all, the treble is clear and present—a character I’ve rarely encountered in  listening rooms where the acoustic treatment is simply placed wherever it’s convenient.
    
Yet in each of these rooms, the character of the homeowner’s chosen audio equipment comes through clearly—whether it’s the impressive muscle of the big Vienna Acoustics tower speakers, the delicacy of the Magnepan planar speakers, or the precision and clarity of the Talons.

In fact, I’d argue that the acoustical engineering allows me to hear the differences among the systems more clearly and easily. Bird sums it up nicely when he says, “It’s not about us trying to achieve a certain type of sound. It’s about giving the clients the sound they’re after.”