Acoustically Treating a Music Room or Home Cinema

You have invested in an expensive, good quality hi-fi system and the speakers are sited in the optimum positions according to the instructions supplied with the set-up. Hello, there’s a problem! The music does not sound as good as it should and certainly not like it did in the show room. Despite repositioning the speakers and spending more money on new leads and what have you, there is no difference.

This because your room is out of tune and most likely not even designed for high end audio listening. The room will most likely have symmetrical walls and be either square or rectangular so you are going to experience room nodes. These are frequencies that the sound waves within a room resonate and vary according to the dimensions of the room. These acoustic nodes will distort the sound and enhance some frequencies and suppress others. This creates peaks and troughs that can create as much as a 6dB difference that can make the listener very unhappy with the quality of the music. There are many surfaces within the average room that due to their hard surfaces will reflect sound and this will clutter and distort the music being played so that it just does not sound right. Direct sound from the speakers will be apparent yes but there will also be reflected sound from the walls, floor and ceiling otherwise known as reverberation. The most influential reflection from any hard surface is the first reflection and this is the mirror point between the speakers and yourself. As previously mentioned, these can be from the walls, floor and ceiling and is called the first reflection because it is the first reflected sound your ear is subjected to. A bit like an echo. The room will have to be ‘tuned’ to reduce these reflections of sound that have a negative effect on your listening enjoyment and it is not until the room has been properly set-up that your audio equipment will perform to its full potential. This is where you require a high end audio solution and we can help you with this by designing the right amount of sound absorption that can be installed to optimize the room and stop that distortion of music and sound that is ruining your listening experience.

Some people say that high end audio sound absorption is only as good as its weakest link but more often than not, it is the room that is the weakest link.

Above are two sketch plans of a room. The one on the left is without the correct high end sound absorption from which you can clearly see how the reflection of sound can happen resulting in the listener being bombarded with a lot of reflected sound. Now the room on the right with the correct amount of high end sound absorption using our Wall SoundTrap Panels and Corner Orbis Acoustic Panels and these significantly absorb and reduce the amount of reflected sound reaching the ear as denoted by the lighter lines shown in room on the right. This enables the listener to hear more of the direct sound that is more refined and precise. Now you can really appreciate the superior qualities of good hi-fi equipment.

For help in designing the right amount of high end sound absorption for your room, please send us a scale plan of your room along with positions and names of all furniture and speakers.  From that we can work out exactly what you need to optimize your room so that you can sit back, relax and listen to the real music.

FOR MORE INFO PLEASE EMAIL tech@soundservice.co.uk