Home Theater Diffusion: How to Maximize Your Sound When Your Back Is Against The Wall

Most often when discussing home theater applications, the solutions proposed are for small and medium room. As home theater owners treat their dedicated spaces with bass traps and first reflections points, they begin to wonder if diffusion is a good option when faced with seating that is forced into the back wall. There are ways to maximize the sound quality of a smaller home theater space when seating space is limited.
• Battling the back row blues. Regardless of the type of sound system installed in a home theater, it is possible to generate less than desirable results with the seating arrangement in the room. For those viewers who are destined to dwell in the back row of the room, there is a greater need for treating the back wall to improve the overall sound quality. Adding panels to the corners, ceiling, and the front and side walls will do little to prevent the gloom and doom of the back wall blahs. Without creating a complete dead zone, the hanging of diffusion on the back wall will create a better home theater experience for all viewers regardless of their seat location.
• Boot the bass boost. Not all home theater seating includes the dreaded back-wall blunder. But, the smaller the room the greater the likelihood that such an arrangement is unavoidable, and the unsuspecting viewers are subjected to a behemoth of a bass boost. Diffusion is rarely the best answer for smaller rooms; therefore, whenever possible, it is best to strive for a slightly bigger room that has a greater chance for plenty of absorption, making diffusion not only possible but also practical.
• Rules of thumb. When deciding upon sound treatments, often times the homeowner simply uses his or her own judgment and makes adjustments accordingly. However, there are some ways that calculations may be made in order to generate a fairly accurate educated guess. As a general rule, for a 12-foot wide x 14-foot long room with an 8-foot high ceiling being used as a small home theater, the best course is stick to broad band absorption panels.
Although diffusion is a popular solution to sound difficulties in larger rooms, it is important to point out that the addition of diffusion panels to treat a home theater space depends on the specifics of the room. Only after other options are exhausted should diffusion for small rooms be considered, particularly because the process itself is fairly expensive.

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.

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