Our New Demonstration Rooms - Audio T Reading - Swallowfield
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A warm welcome everyone from Audio T Reading and wishing you well from our new leafy abode in Swallowfield. For more than 25 years at our old premises in Reading town centre, it was a pleasure to welcome hi-fi enthusiasts to the old shop and offer them the opportunity to audition a range of high-performance equipment – from fantastic starter systems to pretty pieces of bespoke audiophilia – in the comfort of our demonstration rooms. During that time, we were thrilled to have an outstanding main demo room, one of the best sounding rooms across the land for assessing and enjoying music reproduction. When the time came for us to leave town to our new home in Swallowfield, we were somewhat moved and reluctant to switch off the lights and close the door to our old demo room for the last time…
reading’s old demo room with room treatment - on dynaudio’s confidence event night 2022
TRADING PLACES – QUEENS WALK TO SWALLOWFIELD
But with fond memories aplenty, gracefully close that door we did (eventually) and firmly in our thoughts from then onwards has been to focus our efforts on designing a new main demo room; one that would honour the attributes of the outgoing facility while taking big steps forward to enhance the auditioning experience for our visitors to come. But what would those advancing steps look like? Would the best way, to some extent, involve trying to replicate the studio-esque room acoustics we had at Queens Walk, Reading? For example, in our new demo room, should we proceed to redeploy the multitude of room treatment panels that unmistakably adorned our previous listening chamber? Or would it be best to draught in certified room-analysis experts to acoustically measure the properties of the room and suggest a sonic treatment plan to best fit? And so on...
audio T Reading’s new demo room in swallowfield 2024 - sans room treatment
SILENT TREATMENT – KEEPING IT SIMPLE
Well having considered the aforementioned possibilities and many more, we decided for the foreseeable future to proceed without any of the more extravagant sonically room-beautifying options. Instead, we took aim at making a “real” room… one that when built (which, hooray, it now is!) would still be class-leading yet, on balance, would show up its flaws as well as its strengths. Why have we chosen this particular pathway? Well, a key reason is that the vast majority of us consume our music and audio in environments that are non-ideal and often double up as our living quarters. Our home listening rooms may not be the perfect shape and build for audio reproduction; They may have ceilings that are very low or exceedingly high. Modern homes tend to have internal stud walls that are thinner and form enclosures that resonate more than traditional solid walls. Older abodes may possess lovely but acoustically awkward structural features such as bay windows or grand chimney breasts, the likes of which can create added sonic effects like lingering echoes and other audible distortions. Given all of this and more, we decided it would not be truly representative of our customers’ home auditioning settings to offer a demo facility that is close to acoustically perfect.
taking the mic - the focus position for lyngdorf’s room optimsation
WABI-SABI – DISCOVERING BEAUTY WITHIN IMPERFECTION
This leads us to another important reason for auditioning within a real room with its own vices and virtues; It provides us with an opportunity to assist you not just with expertise on the excellent equipment that we offer, but to demonstrate the knowhow we have developed for setting up optimally performing hi-fi systems in less-than ideal room conditions. We can show you the positive effects of placing your loudspeakers favourably in challenging spaces to obtain stunning sound, and we can illustrate how to make stepwise changes within a sub-optimal listening room that may not even require you to reach for specific room treatment items – simple tweaks that can make a rewarding difference and actually cost you nothing but your time. We can show you the mechanics of how to position yourself relative to the speakers, which should always be one of the first resorts to achieving good sound. And we can demonstrate how to sonically work with your room instead of fighting against it. As an additional sharing, in our perfectly imperfect new demo room, we can elucidate the sonic virtues of room optimisation; for example, ‘Room Perfect’ is a proprietary room-correction feature of Lyngdorf’s TDAI-1120 and TDAI-3400 advanced audio players. We can also show you how ‘Space Optimisation’ works on Linn’s Majik DSM and Selekt DSM digital music systems – the latter being fully customisable, e.g. with a choice of Linn DAC plus other tailored options.
lyngdorf’s tdai-3400 media player featuring room perfect - atop of Lyngdorf’s cd-2 cd player
FUTURE PLANS – AUDIO T READING IN SWALLOWFIELD
Our new main demo room not only serves as an ideal setting for auditioning sensational hi-fi equipment, but it also provides a great opportunity to learn about in-room system setup and gain knowledge about listening rooms in general. Ongoing plans will soon see our main listening space evolve into a state-of-the-art audio-visual demonstration room, with four studio-quality in-ceiling speakers – Dynaudio’s S4-C80 – already installed for Dolby Atmos and sounding awesome. And as part of the next phase of development here in Swallowfield, work is underway to construct a second, smaller, demo room that will have its own unique sonic character and provide further opportunities for audition and optimising audio systems within a smaller room setting.
the most important part of your system… is you! - just ask bowie
As we bring this web log to a close, it’s clear that there is plenty of chatter within our hi-fi circles just now putting ever increasing emphasis on your listening room, even suggesting that this is the most important part of your hi-fi system. To a large extent we concur that there is truth to this, but despite all of our sharing here about listening rooms, we believe that the most important part of any hi-fi system is you! Please do come back here soon for a deeper dive into this…
Thank you for reading, Rishi and Gareth – Audio T Reading
Our new Swallowfield store is accessible via the 600 bus route from Reading town centre and is very easy to reach by road with the A33, M3 and M4 all nearby. On arrival you’ll find ample free parking right on our doorstep, perfect for those rainy days, and our showroom and demo rooms are all on ground level. Our picturesque surroundings provide many places to enjoy a countryside walk, a riverside stroll, or a picnic. Plus there are local sites of interest to explore such as the Blackwater River, Wellington Country Park, Siren Craft Brewery and a host of cute village pubs with gardens. Why not come and make a day of it!
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The products featured here can be found or enquired about at the following Audio T stores:
