Wes Phillips fra Stereophile hadde følgende å si :
"They're called Furutech Room Diffusers [FRD], and they're handsome and lightweight. The top, bottom, and back are made of wood, the side panels are lightweight plastic, and the interior is carefully shaped air-foam polystyrene. The front of the panel is covered in pure silk. They can be mounted on the walls, stand on the floor, or be suspended from the ceiling. Best of all, I think they'll fit behind your wall hangings."
About a week later, I returned from a shopping trip to the co-op and could barely open the door. Mr. UPS had jammed eight 28" by 6" by 48" cartons into my entrance hall, which didn't exactly give me passage into my apartment unless I Sherpa Tensing-ed over the tops of them, which I did.
On opening the cartons, I discovered that J-10 was right on many counts. The FRDs are handsomehandsome enough that I have two of them mounted behind the speakers without textile drapes (they come with invisible brackets, which were a cinch to install). They don't so much look like acoustic treatment as they do some kind of unfussy dcor. Jonathan was right that they fit unobtrusively behind my wall hangings, too. Most visitors never notice them.
After I unpacked them, I moved them all down the hall to our dressing room. Then I played an early mix of Veljo Tormis' Muistse Mere Laulud, from Cantus' There Lies the Home (CD, Cantus CTS1206, to be available from Stereophile's new e-commerce page in October), listening for intelligibility and timbral detail. Then I tried different combinations of the panels, based on Furutech's instructions.
My first experiment was putting an FRD between the loudspeakers along the front wall. This absolutely nailed the center image and (again) deepened the soundstage. I then trotted out another two panels and placed one behind each loudspeaker. As I'd expected, this broadened the soundstage, but what stunned me was how much inner detail was now readily apparent in John Atkinson's recording. That detail had always been on the disc, of course, but the "triple install," as Furutech calls it, made it far easier to discern. It quieted a lot of "room chatter" I hadn't been consciously aware of. It also tightened up bass response to some extent.
Adding panels to the rear wall really tightened up the bass, and brought down the room chatter even further. This is a hard one to explainit sounds as if I'm finding more and more detail (it almost seemed as if that was the case)but what I think was actually going on was that the naturally existing detail had less competition from the room's reinforcements of particular frequencies. But there was no sense of deadening the room, as when you keep adding heavily absorptive materialsthe room remained lively and articulate, even while "noise" (in the information-theory sense of nonsignal) was reduced.
My last addition was two panels, one at the first-reflection point of the sidewalls, whichagain!opened the soundstage. Well, not perzackly. The soundstage was about as wide as it could get, but the FRDs on the side gave me more of the room the soundstage existed in. On recordings like There Lies the Home, this put me in a pretty big roomthe Great Hall of Sioux Falls' Washington Pavilion of the Arts and Sciences seats about 1800, and I heard all that space. Studio recordings lack this kind of scale, of course, but trust mewhen it's present, you want to hear it.
Are the Furutech FRDs the last word in acoustic treatment? I don't think so. I still think my listening room needs work in the deep bass. It's a big room (13' by 28' by 8') and it frequently has big speakers in it. I think the room is capable of much deeper bass. However, bass traps are massivea panel 24" wide by 45" tall by 3" deep just doesn't have the ability to do much to the long wavelengths of deep bass. That's the job of a real bass trap. I think some unobtrusive corner traps might be in my future.
Also, at $460 apiece, the FRDs aren't cheap. Well, that depends on how you look at it, I reckon. Putting eight RFDs in my listening room would run about $3700, and they improved the sound of a $60,000 hi-fi by a significant amount. I seriously doubt I could have spent $4k on any component and realized the same difference in sound. Besides, I suspect that the original "triple install" got me more than 85% of the way toward the final result. That's a $1400 investment in my hi-fi that I know I couldn't realize with an equivalent component expenditure.
I also can't emphasize how unobtrusive the RFDs are. They don't look like something you dragged home from the studio (not that that's a bad thing). I likes 'emI really likes 'em.
If you're wondering about the title of this column, distillers refer to "the angels' share" as the amount of liquor that evaporates when alcohol is aged in wooden barrels. The part that disappears is the angels' share. Well, a certain amount of your music disappears into your roomand the right room treatment can cheat the angels from taking too big a share. The Furutech RFDs can keep those pesky angels at bay.