Home Theater Sound Strategies: Taking the Confusion out of Diffusion

For any serious home theater owner, the prospect of creating the perfect listening environment can be a daunting one. Great sound is paramount to achieving the ideal home theater experience. The concept of diffusion tends to give many homeowners trouble because they simply do not understand the overall concept about what it is and how it comes into play when designing and creating a home theater. Most questions stem from those theater owners who want to know: what diffusion is, how diffusion can affect the overall ambiance in a home theater, and how diffusion affects the home theater experience.

• What is diffusion? An acoustic diffuser is a device that alters the reverberant characteristics of a room by uniformly scattering sound towards all potential angles of reflection, regardless of the angle of which the sound arrives. Reverberation, as related to acoustics, refers to echoes. When a sound field is diffused, the echoes are coming smoothly from every direction.

• How does diffusion affect home theater ambience? When comparing smaller listening spaces and larger listening spaces, acoustical diffusion is much more suited for larger room acoustic problems. To illustrate the point, treating a dedicated listening space resembles a concert hall that has a large flat ceiling high above the audience. To help disperse the bounce a little more, large curved surface panels are installed and the sound is then scattered in a more natural pattern. The illustration is a standard tool of larger acoustic treatments, but it is not a default one for smaller rooms. As is the case in many home theater designs, one size does not necessarily fit all. The same holds true for acoustic diffusion.

• How does diffusion affect the home theater experience? Acoustic diffusion is one step that home theater owners can take to improve their home theater experience. Knowing not only how but how much acoustic diffusion to incorporate into a theater space can make a noticeable difference in the overall home theater experience. Because not all dedicated spaces are the same size or have the same characteristics, the design and planning of any home theater space should always take into account the size of the dedicated space.

It is important to keep in mind that it is not advantageous to treat the entire room with acoustic diffusion. The treatment of an entire room would result in sound that is no more normal and typical than a room that is covered in 100% absorptive surfaces or 100% reflective surfaces. The overall sound would be very abnormal in the least and no movie or sound recording would be heard as it was intended. Regardless of the size of the room, sound is important and steps must be taken to ensure that the quality of sound is maximized through the appropriate steps.