“Because our furniture doesn’t resemble traditional audio racks, we’ve found that’s allowed folks to integrate vinyl and audio into their homes in ways they wouldn’t have otherwise,” says Walker Tovin, brand manager for Symbol. One example, the Aero media cabinet, has a midcentury vibe and can be customized with swivel bins for tucking records out of view, but not out of reach. They offer polished versions of the archetypal wooden record stands and crates, but their specialty is custom furniture that can be seamlessly worked into a dining room or living room scheme. Symbol Audio, based in Nyack, New York, is a design and audio company helmed by a crew of audiophile makers seeking sleeker, more sophisticated options for media storage in listening spaces. Organizing the voluminous collection boils down to a serious strategy: “By genre, then by decade of the artist’s first release, then alphabetically.” “Inevitably I’ll want to listen to records at the same time that my husband wants to watch television. The set up works well, though the sound, as it does, still carries. I’ve also used a record cabinet to create a partial wall that differentiates the music room from the foyer.” “This is really just to create a sense of a separate space from the rest of the house. The solution for now, Griffin shares, has been to wrangle two large record cabinets against the longest border of the room to create two “walls.” “One is made of several rattan room dividers which sit behind a pony wall,” says Griffin. I’ve rearranged it countless times,” she says. “I’ve been fooling with my music room forever. Griffin, who lives in an open-concept home and utilizes a VPI Prime turntable and Wharfedale EVO 4.3s speakers in her setup, had to get clever with creating sound-friendly borders to define her music zone. She regularly flashes what’s headed for the turntable via her Instagram handle (Spinning recently: Warren Zevon, Roger Daltrey, and El Chicano.) It is like tuning a guitar to a major chord, the side walls become the strings and the end walls are the bridge and tailpiece.Pam Griffin, an anthropology professor in California and doyenne of vinyl has a personalized 12-by-13-foot listening space and more than 5,800 records.

The sound confronts the entire surface of the end walls at the same time, rather than progressively as with height and width. The progression of size at the ends of the room is a area relationship. 1.272 is the square root of 1.618 or Golden Ratio. The ratio of front height or width, to rear height or width, is 1.272 to 1. In the example above, the ceiling height would be 12.72 feet. The cross-section area at the rear of the room is 1.618 times the cross-section of the front. The relationship between the height and the width of the room, at any point, is Golden Ratio. This decay is exponential, or higher, at all frequencies. The “sound” of this room is a decaying hologram of the original, not a slap. The trick to a Golden Trapagon shaped room is it eliminates the problem of parallel walls and the slap and sharp nodes associated with them. You will be able to hear a center focused voice clarify when the sweet spot is hit. Box speakers generally require a bit more toe-in than planear speakers. This can be done by ear and usually a 1/4 to 1/2 inch tweak will do. Once the speakers are set as close to perfect as possible, you must angle them slightly toward the listening position. The importance of symmetrical speaker placement in a small room cannot be over emphasized. It does not refer to the room in any way. The near field listening position is determined by the “center to center” distance of the speakers and the distance to the listener’s head. It is frequently used in the recording studio to position the microphones and the voice in the mix. Near field listening gives the perfect stereo field. In the near field position the speakers and the listener’s head are the points of an equilateral triangle. Final focusing can be done from the near field position (Diagram B) Placing speakers in this manner will set all the nodes in Golden progression. The Near Field Listening Position and final focus For those who must know more…

Listening room