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.

The presenter moved the system's Acoustimass bass module to what she said was a rather difficult sonic position. Indeed, it looked like a place I'd not care to stick a bass unit. Then she produced five clear plastic open ended tubes, each about 18 inches long. She then dropped them over the five Bose cube-type speakers.

Then she played the same music that we'd just heard. Of course the sound sucked. It was hollow and nasal sounding, the bass was uneven and generally thin, and any sense of stereo image was gone. She then said that this particular system had a dual memory and they'd already run the ADAPTiQ compensation for the room and system with the added problems. She clicked a control to kick in the alternative ADAPTiQ adjustment and the music was instantly listenable again.

It was listenable, but definitely not as near to what I'd like to hear as it was before screwing it up with the tubes. But that didn't surprise me. What surprised me was that I could stand to listen at all, given how totally screwed up those plastic tubes made the sound before ADAPTiQ compensation was applied.

I told the story of Bose's impressive demonstration to my friend Phil, the Einstein fan and occasional audiophile. He wasn't all that impressed at the clearly audible improvement obtained by applying the ADAPTiQ system to the tube trashed sound. "So it made absolutely horrible acoustics considerably better," he observed. "I'd be impressed by a demonstration showing that it could make something that already sounded pretty good even better."

That's a good point. I'll probably never know because of that little catch I mentioned earlier. I can't hook ADAPTiQ up to my system. Bose makes the new ADAPTiQ system available only as an integral part of its two premium home entertainment systems, the Lifestyle 28 ($2,499) and 35 ($2,999).

It's essentially free because those prices have not gone up since ADAPTiQ went in. In fact, current owners of Lifestyle 28 and 35 systems may be eligible to receive an ADAPTiQ upgrade (consisting of the microphone headset, CD, and instructions) at no cost. Contact Bose for terms of this offer.

You see, those systems already have major DSP functionality built in and the AX jacks on the back panel have always been bidirectional. All that was needed was the software and a microphone accessory. Bose has a very well staffed research and development team to do the design and programming. CDs are cheap to press these days.

I'd guess that the microphones can be cheap, too. They certainly don't have to be rugged since they'll typically be used once and then packed away. And in terms of quality, they need to be consistent and predictable rather than highly accurate the software can deal with less that perfect response as long as that response is essentially the same for all the microphones produced.

If you got to the Bose website (http://www.bose.com) and check out the ADAPTiQ section, you'll see that an important impetus for the development of the ADAPTiQ system is to provide an extra measure of comfort and confidence to Bose customers. That's not a small thing when someone is putting five speaker channels and a woofer box in a room. According to a Bose rep, the company regularly got feedback from customers who wondered if they really had done the right thing in terms of speaker placement and balance. Now, he suggested, Bose can promise, "Run the ADAPTiQ and you'll know everything is fine even if the speakers' locations are less than ideal."

A week or two after gathering the press around for the ADAPTiQ introduction, Bose followed up with a "press conference in a box." They do that now and then. This one was to introduce the company's TriPort headphones. These are regular passive headphones that use some of the technology from the Bose QuietComfort noise-canceling headset.

The audio performance of the TriPort phones is just okay. Nothing special. I've got a bunch of headphones sitting around and in terms of sonic satisfaction, I'd put the TriPort about in the middle of the pack. In terms of comfort, it's over the top! I mean they feel good enough that you might be tempted to wear them just to keep your ears cozy and filter out a bit of outside noise. Although they don't have any active noise cancellation, they definitely isolate and do it without excess weight and pressure.

They also look sharp in the glacier blue color that arrived here. They also come in slate gray (which I haven't seen but has gotta look pretty dull in comparison). Retail on the TriPort is $149.

--TK