By Tony Trup, MSc, BMus, MIOA, MAES
This is a summary of an article which was originally published on our blog with advice on acoustics and setting up an audio suite or recording studio.
The room in which you listen to audio can make or break the experience. Even with the best sound system in the world, a poor set-up and room design can leave you wondering why you spent so much on the audio hardware in the first place.
In this article, we will take a methodical approach to determining the best listening and loudspeaker positions. We will also discuss acoustic treatment (absorption and diffusion), and we will dip into the topic of room modes.
Goals
Early reflections and the 20–20 rule
One of the primary goals in creating a good room acoustic for mixing, listening or home cinema rooms, is to reduce early reflections.
Reverberation time
The reverberation time is the length of time it takes for sound to decay in a given room. Just how much of the rooms coloration you want is a personal choice. Some audiophiles will opt to make their rooms fairly dead, while some do enjoy the added ambience provided by a room.
Watch this space for a more detailed discussion on reverberation times and its effects on human perception.
Set up
How you set up your listening room will depend on its size, shape and what other fixings or furnishings you have in the room. Most rooms are more like a shoebox than a perfect cube. That is, most rooms have four long walls, and two short walls.
Set up your listening position facing towards a short wall
Left-right room symmetry is crucial for a good stereo experience.
Theoretically, that the best listening position in any room is 38% of the way into the length of the room
Angle your loudspeakers in an equilateral triangle with your ears
Position your loudspeakers close to the front wall
Absorb early reflections
It’s all about the bass
Diffusers or absorbers?
Diffuser panels can be used on the rear walls instead of absorption if your room is longer than about 3.4 metres, but beware that this will result in a longer reverberation time. Diffusers can be used elsewhere along the side walls where reflection points may be causing peaks and nulls, if you prefer a longer reverberation time. This will be a personal choice depending on your preference for a ‘dead’ or ‘live’ room. Also note that most diffusers are only effective from about 600 Hz and higher.
Summary
In this article, we’ve talked about some general principles for determining the layout of your audio listening room, be it a mixing room, control room or home cinema.Here you can see a summary image showing many of the principles we have discussed above.
Some general rules of thumb are:
- Find your optimal listening position starting at 38% of the way into the long room dimension.
- Position your loudspeakers so that the listening position forms an equilateral triangle with them.
- Keep your loudspeakers close to the front wall.
- Apply absorption to the front walls and side walls near the loudspeakers.
- Treat early reflections at the side walls, ceiling, floor and rear wall.
- Treat the rear wall with absorption if you are in a short room. In a longer room, you could employ diffusion panels.
Precise measurement and design requires specialist equipment, software and knowledge. If you would like to speak to an acoustic designer about the design of an audio suite, recording studio or music room, feel free to contact us today.
#recordingstudio #audio #acoustics #architecture #studiodesign #musicindustry #audiophile
References
This article was written with reference to the following material:
Ethan Winer — The Audio Expert (Second edition)
Heinrich Kutruff — Room Acoustics
Niels Werner Adelman-Larsen — Rock and Pop Venues, Acoustic and Architectural Design, Second edition
This article was originally published on LinkedIn.
