Home Theater Sound Strategies: A Big Boom for the Large Room

Larger rooms are the preferred spaces for dedicated home theaters for most homeowners. When treating a larger room for maximized sound quality, there are certain steps that should be taken to ensure the best possible sound and greatest possible experience.

• Diffusion placement. First reflection and diffusion are common, if not necessary, steps in creating the best home theater sound experience possible. First reflective points are a good place for absorptive material and diffusion goes where flat plug behavior needs to be altered. Inherently, what any conscientious home theater owner is looking to do is change the shape of the wall because that is the easiest way to alter how sound is going to bounce off of it. The easiest way to change the shape of a wall to improve sound quality is to build a frame and bend a panel by squeezing it into a frame that is slightly smaller than the panel. The result is a flat wall that is no longer flat. The sound that impinges tends to get shuttled off, depending on which way the panel is hung – to the left, to the right, or up and down – varying the sound pathway. The reverberant field becomes more diffused and much smoother.

• Mixing it up. Diffusers are recommended as an all-or-nothing alternative to early reflections panels or other sound treatment. Diffusion does not replace other sound treatments nor do they solve all reverberation problems. A smaller room will characteristically have small volume and certain frequencies are going to reverberate a lot more than others. The goal is to make the reverberations shorter for all frequencies, including the troublesome low frequencies. With steps such as the placement bass traps in the corners, room echoes are minimized and problems that may be solved through diffusion are more easily identified.

• Points of reflection. To make the most of acoustic diffusion, it may be necessary to remove some of the stronger early reflection points. Some locations that should be considered when reducing reflection points include the front part of the room, the ceiling, and side walls, and behind the speakers. Once the echo is toned down and the overall sound results are good, any lingering reflection problem may be solved with diffusion.

There are no real quick fixes or one-step wonders when treating a large room for sound reflection. Although larger rooms are often easier to treat, they are not short on the sound challenges that plague most theater owners. However, by taking the time to identify the reverberation problems, remedies are easily achieved if the home theater owner is willing to contribute a few buck for materials little elbow grease for the cause.