Home Theater Acoustic design - Theatre room Acoustic Companies and designers -

Room Acoustical Design

Surprisingly room acoustics are usually the last thing that people consider when designing their spaces. Whether those spaces are private residences, home theaters, hospitality rooms or restaurant facilities.

Many times it is after construction and furnishing that they discover that they can not understand even close conversation or movie dialogue intelligently.

We know that it is imperative that the room acoustics are addressed as soon as possible and to find attractive and effective solutions to problematic areas before the design is complete.

The design engineers at Innovative Theatres begin working with the project architects and designers at the very early stages of project design to ensure that the theater or facility will have the basic building blocks of performance at the project onset.

In this section we will talk briefly about some basic theater room and
mixed use facility acoustical principals.

For more detailed information on the range of acoustic technology and design available through Innovative Theatres please review the following topics:

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Room Design

The room can be the most important audio component and, as such, it can make or break a truly satisfying listening experience. The shape and size of the room, and how things are arranged in it, are major influences on the quality of bass we hear. The amount of absorbing material and furnishings influence how ‘live’ the room sounds, and this affects ‘imaging’ and ‘space’. All rooms are different, so a guaranteed recipe for success doesn’t exist. However, it is relatively easy to avoid the worst mistakes. Let us separate the issues;

Room size and volume. These determine whether you need large or small loud-speakers to satisfactorily fill the space. Obviously, the needs for background music are fundamentally different from those for a home theater. It is the main determinant of how much subwoofer power is needed, and here it is important to note that, if the home theater room is open to other parts of the house, the subwoofer requirements will be influenced by the entire coupled space, not just the one where the audience is. In general, larger rooms will have better-sounding bass, but they will need bigger, more powerful subwoofers to fill the volume.

Room shape. Rectangular rooms are fine. Splayed walls, or other exotic shapes are not necessary for good sound. L-shaped rooms and three-sided rooms force us to be more creative, but can also work well. The shape of a room has a lot to do with room resonances at low frequencies. In perfectly rectangular rooms, the resonances can be calculated with good accuracy so that, if there is a problem, we have a chance of identifying what is causing it, and fixing it. In non-rectangular rooms, it is not possible to easily predict what will happen, requiring higher math and a big, fast computer. Notions of certain room dimensions or proportions that are somehow ‘ideal’ are fanciful, since the quality of bass that is delivered to our ears is determined by where the loudspeakers are located within the room, how many there are, and precisely where the seats are located.

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Acoustical treatment. At some time in our lives, we have all been in a totally empty room, an experience in ‘untamed’ acoustics. Sounds are extremely ‘live’ − they reflect and reverberate. Clap your hands and the impact is repeated hundreds of times, as the sound is reflected among the hard, flat room boundaries. Talk, and voices take on an artificial ‘richness’ in the lower frequencies, and intelligibility is reduced because each utterance is prolonged by overactive reverberation. Put some carpet down, and things improve dramatically. Add drapes, some furniture, and the room is transformed into a much more pleasant space in which to live, converse, and listen to music and movies. Fill the room with too much ‘stuff’, including lots of upholstery, cushions, heavy drapes, etc., and the place can become overly dead and stuffy. In a normally well-designed room, If you really get serious about optimizing the room acoustics, be prepared to modify the décor. The goal is to make the room neither too live nor too dead. A happy medium is the objective.

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Corner Bass Trop

Getting Good Bass. To most people, good bass is a big deal. While novices are easily impressed with the quantity of bass, more experienced audio folks want more. They want deep, tight, clean, non-resonant (i.e., not boomy) bass and, ideally, they want it at all seats in the room. Two-channel stereo, which we have enjoyed for the past 50 years or so, is optimized for a single listener in the ‘sweet spot’ – it is fundamentally antisocial, even though most of us violate the position rule, and simply enjoy the music without enjoying the stereo imaging that is also part of the total experience.

Multichannel audio is fundamentally different – it is social, an experience to be shared by multiple listeners, seated at different locations in a room. After all, it originated in cinemas, where hundreds of customers pay to share an audio/visual event. In very large rooms, like concert halls and cinemas, bass can sound good almost everywhere. However, in rooms the size of home theaters, resonances cause some bass frequencies to be too loud and others to be too soft – depending on where the subwoofer is located, and depending on where the listener is seated.

The dimensions and shape of the room determine the resonances. The location of the subwoofer determines which resonances are energized. The locations of the listeners determine which of these will actually be heard. Complicated, eh? It is a situation that can be improved by adding more subwoofers. So, there are three variables that we can play with: the number of subwoofers, subwoofer location and listener location. Simple rectangular rooms allow us to make some basic assumptions, and to predict from calculations what might happen. For these rooms we have some standard recommendations, which we will talk about.

Rooms with complicated shapes, or that have large openings to other rooms, are mysteries until they are treated, designed or re-designed properly. The solutions here are more complicated. Although most rooms and room arrangements exhibit problems, others don’t. If you get a good one, thank your lucky stars. If you get a bad one, don’t despair; it can be fixed.

The keys to superior theater performance come down to many factors:

The room size and shape
The applied acoustic reinforcement materials
The interior design
Theater sound equipment selection, positioning and calibration
The film screen selection and positioning
The video projector quality and calibration
The source components
Automation and programming
The wiring

For more information please contact Innovative Theatres 323-850-7900

The above company logos are a few of the products that Innovative Theatres recommends and integrates.

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