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.

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.

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