Rooms for improvement. (Surveying The Soundscape).

It's a commonplace that your room--including its dimensions, its contents, its layout--is a major component of your music or home theater system. And it's unnerving to think that the brocaded settee you inherited from your grandmother might play as large a role in the sound of your system as your $1200 interconnects.

This discomfiture fosters products intended to deal with listening room acoustics. They come in two general varieties: passive acoustical room treatments and active electronic room compensation. Most people try acoustic treatment first. It's usually cheaper and even creative. You can get good results with personally inventive approaches (like the medium pile, twisted loop carpeting that covers the wall behind my main speakers). Acoustic treatment also gives a nice hands-on feeling when you're installing, adjusting, and tuning. Presumably, at least, you're ultimately rewarded with a feeling of accomplishment when the stuff's properly in place and doing its job to your satisfaction.

The electronic compensation approach suggests the possibility of measurably correct sound, particularly given the computational power that's now available in microprocessor form. No longer do you have to fiddle with manual sliders on a multiband equalizer and check levels with a hand-held meter. The electronic room balancing process, like so many others, can be effectively computerized. This usually leads to technical complexity and costly hardware, possibly even putting a personal computer into the loop. Even so, the correction algorithms often sharply limit the listening space where that correction is fully effective.

And that's where Bose has stepped in with a rather slick implementation of electronic room compensation that promises optimized sound at five listing spots rather than one, easy almost automated setup, and an astounding price of $0. That's right. It's free. There's a little catch of course. I'll get to that in a minute.

Bose calls its new system ADAPTiQ (they want you to say "Adapt I.Q.") and it works like this. The user puts a on a headset that has two small microphone capsules at ear location. That headset has a long cable to plug into the system. The user then puts a CD into the system and plays it. The CD contains both audible instructions to the user and computer program instructions to the system.

As the 15-minute process rolls along, the user consecutively sits in five self-selected likely listening positions. The ADAPTiQ system puts out test signals that the microphones pick up and send back for analysis. The analysis takes place using all five locations' signals. Then the system does a full-range averaged frequency adjustment to optimize the overall system response at the five listening positions.

Bose demonstrated this at the ADAPTiQ unveiling. We didn't go through the tuning process, Bose had done that already for the somewhat small and rather odd-shaped hotel room in which the system was set up. It sounded just fine. Then the presenter shut it off.