nordfanatic wrote:do you need acoustic room treatments for?
If you put your nice speakers (with an almost perfectly flat frequency response) in a (smallish) room (with hard/reflective walls) and perform some measurements, for example with frequency sweeps, you'll find the acoustic response of your room is far from flat. Some frequencies will sound louder, others softer and this will also depend on where you are in the room. For standings waves (room modes) this will often be in the bass range.
Apart from this you will also get reflections. Your brain is very good at filtering out certain parts of sounds it doesn't need, but if the original sound and the reflection reach your ears very close in time (because both your speakers and your ears are fairly close to the wall/object that causes the reflection) your brain can't filter it out and it will muddle up the original sound.
If you treat your room for mixing duties, you will normally do this for one specific (optimal) listening position. The figure below shows typical positions where treatment for that kind of application would be applied.
Note that this optimizes the room mostly for one listening position; sit somewhere else and the sound will not be as good (but still better than in an untreated room).
Another option (not quite as good as room treatment, but certainly more acceptable to the wife
) is using some kind of room correction device; I use a KRK Ergo. You usually place this device between your sound source and your speakers and then perform a set of measurements. The software (or the device) measures the acoustic response of the room and then modifies the incoming sound from your sound source in such a way that when it is played back via your speakers it is perceived as having a much flatter frequency response.
With the KRK Ergo device (and probably others) you set up both a 'focus' position (the sweet spot in the figure above) and a 'global' correction and you can switch between those two and 'off' (the difference is quite noticeable) with a button. The focus position optimizes the sound for listing in one particular spot (which might actually make it worse when listening in a different position of the room) while the global position tries to get the best average frequency response in the whole room (which is not as effective as when in the focus position, but certainly sounds better if you have people in multiple locations in that room).
The following image gives an idea of what the acoustic response (in blue) for a room might be like and what correction (in green) could be applied to get rid of the most troublesome spikes and dips in the response.
The KRK Ergo device I have is a scaled down version (it only does 0-500 Hz) of a product of Lyngdorf, which produces a version used in hifi setups (which does 0-1000 Hz). Incidentally, Lyngdorf has been acquired by Steinway a while ago. If it is good enough for Steinway, it is good enough for me.
As mentioned before in this thread a carpet, sofa or some heavy curtains behind you might already sound a lot better.
Btw. I think there is an Open Source/free software room correction product. You would run the outputs of your Nord to a pc and then the (corrected) output of your pc to the speakers/amplifier. Might not be a long-term/convenient solution, but might give you an idea of what can be done.
