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In the Forum: Horn-Loaded Speakers
In the Thread: Bill Gaw: over 50 years of high-end audio experience and time aligned horns.
Post Subject: Epistemological Trauma in Bill’s BasementPosted by Romy the Cat on: 10/30/2025
I think Bill missed in his explanation one small, but I consider
it a metaphysically enormous point.
Everything I’ve ever known about acoustic treatment applies
only to situations where the treatment lives near boundaries — walls, corners,
or the fragile psychological border between sanity and audiophilia. Please take
me seriously here. Like all of you, I have spent thousands of dollars on
“solutions,” which is a polite way of saying I once paid a fortune to vandalize
my own living room with foam, diffusers, tubes and other expensive garbage.
Then I spent years joyfully throwing it all into the trash, one shameful
acoustic panel at a time.
I’m not against acoustic treatment itself. I’m against the cult of acoustic
treatment — this quasi-religious belief that salvation comes in fiberglass.
Above 100 Hz, fine, treat all you want; below it, we enter a zone where people
stop listening and start sterilizing. They turn their listening chairs into
dental chairs. They keep stacking larger fiberglass blobs, chasing a bass
response that never arrives, and in doing so they murder the beauty of
reverberation above 100 Hz — drying it out like yesterday’s martini. It not
even mentioning that the flatness of response is just another ridiculous belief
that looks like dominates the feeble audio brains.
There was a time when I traveled the world, visiting the
flashiest listening rooms filled with enormous bass traps. And I always wanted
to vomit in those rooms — so desiccated they were in the viola and cello range.
Back then I formed a theory that the whole idiotic world of the audio industry
deliberately patronizes one very specific sonic pathology: design SS amplification
meant to work in the over-dry rooms. That was twenty-five years ago.
When I first said it publicly on Audio Asylum, the resident
couch philosophers — men whose intellectual horizons extended exactly as far as
their speaker cables and their partners (an army of pre-court manufacturers
dick-suckers) — erupted in predictable moral panic. Within three posts I was
downgraded from a “free thinker” to an “adolescent alcoholic,” and then, for
reasons unclear to both Freud and God, to a “gay communist nihilist.” The
internet, as usual, performed its ritual exorcism. Back then I was angry.
Today, post-individuation, I mostly laugh — or more often, I’m simply too bored
to acknowledge the noise of lesser minds.
So, when Bill told me he was working on his “new acoustic
treatment,” my soul quietly screamed, please, not again — not another ritual
sacrifice to the god of broadband absorption.
Because to me, everything in his room above 50 Hz was already perfect. It’s one
of those rare rooms where even conversation sounds aesthetically correct — the
acoustic equivalent of good Burgundy.
Now, I’ve always found his low bass laughable. I blamed that
pathetic JBL powered subwoofer — a device so topologically compromised it
should come with a warning label: “May cause existential despair in sensitive
listeners.” I didn’t even dignify it with analysis. After all, I’m not just an
opinionated fool on the internet. I’m an experienced opinionated fool — one who
once built a mono 23 Hz Helmholtz resonator and a dedicated sub-20 Hz ULF
channel, just to see what kind of metaphysical truths might be hiding below
audibility. I spent months tuning that monstrous thing, like a monk adjusting
the resonance of the universe, and learned exactly nothing — except how deep
self-delusion can go when measured in hertz.
So, when Bill started talking about acoustic treatment below
50 Hz, I felt that familiar irritation — the kind that bubbles up when the
universe insists you’re still an idiot. I thought it was another audiophile
hallucination, men mistaking myth for method.
Then came the demo. And damn it, it worked.
I don’t know why. Maybe he doesn’t either. He said some
British guy told him that if you place a tuned absorber — say, centered around
100 Hz — a few feet away from the wall, the air gap behind it somehow extends
its absorption downward. The engineer in me said, nonsense. The
philosopher in me said, fascinating metaphor. The human being in me
said, play another track, I’m having an identity crisis.
And yet there it was — this ridiculous, almost insulting
improvement.
My mind went into full-blown epistemological panic. Everything I thought I knew
about bass suddenly evaporated. It wasn’t just the sound that shook me; it was
the collapse of my theory. For an audiophile, that’s worse than hearing a blown
tweeter — it’s hearing your own intellect clip at 0 dB.
Maybe it wasn’t the panels at all. Maybe Bill’s system —
that terrifying labyrinth of cables, filters, and one hundred digital channels
— simply misfired in a way that pleased the gods. Maybe he accidentally pressed
one of his forty-two billion buttons and the universe whispered, Fine,
here’s your miracle.
I left his house not enlightened but slightly humiliated and
profoundly entertained — as if Kant himself had walked in, patted me on the
shoulder, and said: “See, my friend, experience always precedes understanding.”
And so I add one more paradox to the long list of audiophile
humiliations - perhaps true knowledge begins the moment your subwoofer stops obeying your
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