Home Theater Sound Strategies: 3 Considerations for Small Rooms

As any home theater owner will attest, the size of the room greatly affects the quality of the theater experience. Although planning is necessary for the optimal design of any dedicated theater space, the size of the space dictates how the space can and will be tailored to make the most of the room’s features. Here are 3 points to remember when considering a small room as the source of big entertainment.

• Bound and gagged. Small rooms are much closer to the existing boundaries, which are the walls, the floors, and the ceiling; therefore, there is usually a fairly directional character to the echoes that are heard. Furthermore, smaller rooms with few furnishings will produce a recognizable reverberation known as “slap echo.” Adding corner panels or diffusive panels to a back wall can reduce reverberations without necessarily needing to expand the available space.

• A critical decision. Addressing smaller rooms specifically, a reverberant environment is not a good environment to try to listen to something critically or even to listen very carefully and hear the piece the way the people who made the original recording intended it to be heard. The idea of diffusers is to make the echo patterns in any dedicated sound room behave more like a smooth and even sound field, as one might experience in a larger, more open space.

• Bigger really is better. A small room is often defined in the home theater realm as less than 6,000 cubic feet. And diffusion is rarely suggested as a typical treatment in a small room. By converting a basement or other unused space with dimensions ranging from 20-25 feet wide, 25-35 feet long, and 10-11 feet tall ceilings, acoustics are no longer a concern.
When creating or converting small spaces for a home theater, there is a different set of rules than for large spaces. There are no nontrivial problems in small room acoustics that in most cases cannot be solved with a larger room. Small rooms tend to have some particularly tough problems that may not be solved with acoustic diffusion. What any homeowner needs to understand is that acoustic diffusion is not a universal process for any size room. Therefore, special considerations should be made when increasing the size of the room is not a viable option.