The standard advice for home cinema acoustic treatment goes like this: treat the room. Bass traps in the corners. Broadband absorption on the first reflection points. Diffusion on the rear wall. Measure the room with a calibrated microphone. Apply correction. Without these steps, the argument goes, you're fighting an acoustic environment that will undermine even the best equipment.
Rob at Gecko Home Cinema disagrees — or rather, he thinks the conventional wisdom misses something important.
The Received Wisdom on Room Treatment
The logic behind acoustic treatment for home cinema is sound (no pun intended). When a loudspeaker plays a note, it doesn't just send sound to the listener's ears. It sends sound in all directions, which reflects off the walls, floor, and ceiling before arriving at the listening position. These reflections arrive slightly later than the direct sound, with different frequency content (depending on what the room surfaces absorbed), and create a smeared, coloured version of the original.
Room treatment — bass traps, absorption panels, diffusers — is the standard tool for managing these reflections. Bass traps reduce the room modes that cause bass frequencies to be exaggerated at certain listening positions. Absorption panels shorten the reverb time, reducing the colouration from reflected sound. Diffusers scatter reflections to prevent focused echoes.
The extreme end of this approach is rooms that have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on treatment. Rob references a US installation where $500,000 went on acoustic treatment alone.
Rob's Counter-Argument: Steinway Lyngdorf RoomPerfect
Rob's position is that Steinway Lyngdorf's RoomPerfect room correction system makes a treated room unnecessary — not just partially unnecessary, but entirely unnecessary for most domestic spaces.
The demonstration he sets up is direct: a live room with a long, clearly audible reverb time. He claps his hands and the ring-down is obvious, even through the recording. This is not a good acoustic space by conventional standards. The reverb time is too long. There are reflections everywhere.
"The accepted wisdom is that you can't get good sound in that room. This room is very live. It has a long reverb time. And we can create a better sound in here than you'll hear from any other system."
His claim: the Steinway Lyngdorf system in this untreated, live room will sound better than a conventional high-end system in a properly treated room. And it will do so because RoomPerfect is doing what treatment does, but in the digital domain and with greater precision.
What RoomPerfect Actually Does
RoomPerfect is Lyngdorf's proprietary room correction system, developed specifically for use in real domestic environments rather than acoustically ideal spaces. The key distinction from most room correction systems is its measurement methodology.
Most room correction systems measure from a single listening position. They optimise the frequency response at that point, which often means pulling down peaks and pushing up dips in the room's response. The problem is that this creates a "sweet spot" — the corrected position sounds good, but move a metre in any direction and the correction no longer applies.
RoomPerfect measures from multiple positions throughout the room — not just the listening position but a broad sweep of the space. From this multi-point data, it builds a model of the room's acoustic character and computes a correction that works well across the room rather than at a single optimised point.
The result, Rob argues, is a system that can function in a room that would defeat conventional treatment-and-calibration approaches — because it's computing room behaviour comprehensively rather than compensating for it at a single point.
The Practical Implication
The most significant practical consequence of Rob's argument is about where Steinway Lyngdorf can be installed. If a dedicated, treated room is not required, the system can go into:
- ▪A living room with hard floors and reflective surfaces
- ▪A bedroom
- ▪A garage conversion without extensive acoustic panelling
- ▪A basement room
- ▪Any carpeted room (the carpet provides the primary soft-surface absorption)
"If you want the best possible sound, we can put it in your lounge, your bedroom, your garage, your basement room. We can do it again and again and again. We can get great sound without all the trouble of acoustic treatment."
The caveat he mentions: some spaces are genuinely beyond help — "a goldfish bowl or an orangery." An all-glass space, or a perfectly symmetrical all-hard-surface room with no absorptive materials at all, would challenge even RoomPerfect. But a typical domestic room with a carpet — even a very live one — falls within the system's capability.
What This Means for System Cost
The financial implication is real. Acoustic treatment for a dedicated cinema room ranges from a few thousand pounds for basic DIY panels up to tens of thousands (or more) for professional room design and treatment. If that cost can be eliminated from the equation — because the room correction system handles what treatment would otherwise address — the investment can go entirely into the AV specification.
This is the economic case Rob is making, and it's specific to Steinway Lyngdorf. He's not arguing that room treatment never matters. He's arguing that with this system's room correction capability, you can achieve a result better than a less capable system in a well-treated room — and that the saving on treatment more than justifies the premium for the electronics.
Key Takeaways
- ▪The conventional approach to home cinema requires acoustic treatment — bass traps, absorption panels, measured reverb time reduction
- ▪Steinway Lyngdorf's RoomPerfect system measures the room from multiple positions throughout the space, computing a correction model that works across the whole room rather than at a single sweet spot
- ▪Rob's claim: in an untreated live room, Steinway Lyngdorf performs better than a conventional high-end system in a treated room — making the treatment itself unnecessary
- ▪The practical consequence is that Steinway Lyngdorf can be installed in any room with normal domestic furnishings (including carpet), not just purpose-built treated cinema spaces
- ▪The financial saving on acoustic treatment (which can reach £50,000–$500,000 at the high end) partially or fully offsets the premium for the Steinway Lyngdorf electronics
Frequently Asked Questions
What is acoustic treatment and why is it normally recommended for home cinema?
Acoustic treatment refers to physical materials installed in a room to control the behaviour of sound reflections. Bass traps (placed in corners) absorb low-frequency energy that would otherwise create resonance modes. Absorption panels (placed at first reflection points on walls and ceiling) reduce the reverb time, preventing early reflections from smearing the direct sound from speakers. Diffusers scatter reflections to prevent focused echoes while maintaining some acoustic liveliness. Together, these create an environment where what you hear is primarily the direct sound from the speakers rather than a blend of direct and reflected sound.
What makes RoomPerfect different from other room correction systems?
Most room correction systems (Audyssey, YPAO, AccuEQ) measure from one or a small number of listening positions and apply correction to optimise the frequency response at those specific points. The correction degrades as you move away from the measured position. RoomPerfect measures from many positions throughout the room and computes a correction model based on the room's overall acoustic character, not just its response at one point. This multi-position approach produces more consistent performance across a wider listening area.
Can you use Steinway Lyngdorf in a living room with hard floors?
Rob's demonstration specifically addresses this: yes. The key requirement is some soft surface material — carpet being the most common — which provides primary high-frequency absorption. A completely hard, reflective space (all glass, all stone, no soft furnishings) is more challenging. But a typical living room with carpet and upholstered furniture falls within RoomPerfect's correction capability, even if the room has a longer reverb time than a conventional treated cinema would.
How much does acoustic treatment normally cost for a home cinema?
Costs vary enormously. A basic DIY approach using acoustic foam, rockwool bass traps, and proprietary absorption panels can be achieved for £2,000–£5,000 in materials. Professional acoustic design and fabrication of custom panels for a dedicated room runs £10,000–£30,000. Commercial-standard acoustic design for a room at the highest level — as referenced in the US installation Rob mentions — can exceed £50,000 and in some cases reach six figures in USD.
Is the RoomPerfect argument specific to Steinway Lyngdorf or do other systems work similarly?
The multi-position measurement approach and the specific sophistication of RoomPerfect are specific to Lyngdorf audio products (Steinway Lyngdorf uses Lyngdorf electronics). Other room correction systems offer various degrees of correction capability, but Rob's argument is specifically that this system's correction capability exceeds what competing high-end systems with acoustic treatment achieve. Other correction systems (Dirac Live, Trinnov, ARC) have their own strengths, but the claim about performing better in an untreated room is specific to RoomPerfect's multi-position approach.
