Few audio retailers take their role as audio ambassadors to heart as much as Audiophile Experts, a store I’ve referred to a few times in PMA Magazine for one overriding reason: the owners, Stacy and Mathieu, constantly do interesting things to keep the romance alive with customers. What did they do this time? Out of great expense to them in terms of time and money, they’ve created what seems very close to being the ideal audio store listening room.

It never really occurred to me before, but a listening room, at home or in an audio store, will inherently, by its design and construction, not be equally suitable for competing components. This situation will invariably benefit or put at a disadvantage some components over others, even if they’re objectively of equal sound quality. Speakers, due to their unique dispersion patterns, are especially sensitive to their room environment. And unless a store is willing to redecorate its listening room for every new component being auditioned, conventional room treatment isn’t the most effective solution. So, what is?

A clever one was the one employed by Stacy and Mathieu, which was to make the listening room itself be the acoustic treatment. In other words, they took much of the room out of the listening room. To do this, they built two full-sized, acoustically-reinforced walls near the existing ones, to allow excess energy originating from the speakers to be evacuated from the listening area and dumped into the space between the real and the acoustic walls, where it’s absorbed into nothingness. In essence, the new walls act as huge bass traps to prevent nodes—those areas where colliding sound waves cancel each other out—from collecting inside the listening room and harming the overall the sound quality.

Of course, Mathieu and Stacy wouldn’t have left the work of creating the ideal listening room to chance; during a three-month period that began prior to the construction process and lasted throughout, complex computer simulations were done every step of the way to calculate frequency responses and potential node areas to determine the best courses of action.

This research brought about several acoustic enhancements: using the new back wall to store hundreds of LPs; a quartz shelf fixed to the wall for stability to support the audio equipment; a private breaker panel buffered by a 675,000-microfarad capacitor; a light dimmer that operates separate from the room’s electrical panel; the use of wall and component cabling by hi-fi company Luna Cables; and more. The result of all this is a room that can handle a much greater volume of air than it could in its prior iteration. Talk about dedication!

That dedication seemed to have paid off when I listened to the system set up for the occasion, which included a pair of the tall but slim KEF Blade Two Meta speakers—the evening also highlighted Audiophile Experts inauguration as a KEF distributor—supported by gear by Accuphase, LUXMAN, and Stable 33.33.

Listening to an LP of the Alan Parsons Project’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination: Edgar Allan Poe, I did get a sense of not hearing the room at all, but rather only the speakers and, obviously, the upstream components. Consequently, the music sounded “freer”—more open, more expansive, more expressive. I heard no anomalies around me due to room interactions. It was a convincing presentation. Audiophile Experts had managed to create a room that gave the illusion there was no room.

There was, of course, a room christened the Harmonia room, which replaced the room’s previous name, Richelieu. As Mathieu explained it to the crowd before the music spun, the name Harmonia was chosen to evoke the purity and balance of sound.

I can’t think of a more fitting name for this new special place. Great job, Stacy and Mathieu. You’ve gone beyond the call of duty to create one of the best listening rooms I’ve ever had the pleasure of being inside.