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.
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.
