Home Theater Acoustics
By Terry Montlick Laboratories LLC
The most important component is your room.
Room acoustics have become the bottleneck for quality home theater sound.
Every other part of a home theater has dramatically improved in recent years.
Inadequate room acoustics will spoil the sound of even the finest audio system.
Proper home theater acoustical treatment addresses:
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Reverberation - Today's surround sound motion
picture soundtracks have the reverberation carefully accounted for during
the sound mix. Too much reverb ("liveness"), and your sound has low fidelity
compared to the original soundtrack. Worse, excessive reverberation reduces
dialog intelligibility, so you can't hear every word clearly.
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Early Reflections - Also called "first
reflections," these come from mirror points on your walls and ceiling, which
create additional virtual sound sources. When these reflections are heard
within around 15 milliseconds of the original sound, the ear combines the
sounds into one. This smears out the front sound stage, and result in poor
imaging and localization.
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Diffusion - Diffusion causes sounds to uniformly
bounce around the room. Some of it is good, resulting in realistic surround
sound. The surround sound channels should not be precisely localizable,
unlike the front left, center, and front right channels. These front
channels are designed to emanate from the screen. The surround channels
create an ambiance that puts you in the center of the movie. Not only does
diffusion make surround sound better, it evens out the reverberation in your
room, making sounds decay cleanly and uniformly.
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