Beginner improvements for room acoustics; very helpful Darko video on reverb and RT60

@onhwy61 I think small rooms are not helped by RT60, but Darko's room and many others are not small. I'll look for criteria regarding "small." You're raising a good point, and it would help everyone to know at what point RT60 is not applicable.

I’m pretty sure RT60 would be overkill as my apt living room is on the small side and I do listen in the near field (about 8.5’ from speakers). When I snap my fingers the sound has no trail or spark to it, like in his video comparison. Once, when Tony Minasian came over, he walked around clapping his hands and talking and said my place was fine as is.

I’m lucky in that my old apt has that awful popcorn ceiling treatment that goes some ways to ameliorate reflections up there. Throw in some artwork on the walls that must do something, and I’ve never had that reverb effect to deal with.

The one thing that piqued my interest with Darko’s video was the diffusion aspect. Due to my room layout, the right side is about a yard from a wall of large side windows with those dreadfully dated vinyl, vertical blinds. As a result, the right side of the soundstage always seemed a bit livelier than the rest and at times seemed to be a bit more forward in presentation with some CDs.

I opened the blinds at about a 45° angle, facing the speakers. With the blackout curtains behind the blinds to help absorb and not reflect off the glass pane, I played some music and, lo! the stage was now evenly uniform. How I missed this all these years makes me blush.

Minor though it is, elements of the players have shifted a bit to the right and back and it’s calmer now overall. Goes to show that even something as minor as what I did can have that kind of effect.

All the best,
Nonoise

From an acoustic perspective, any normal sized domestic room is small.  In other words in low frequencies the room is dominated by resonance modes rather than a uniform diffuse sound field.

From an acoustic perspective, any normal sized domestic room is small.

I suggest you watch the video. Darko clearly states that this is not about low frequencies. If folks watch the video, they will see why RT60 is relevant.

In most small domestic rooms it's not that big of a deal. Darko is not someone to go to for acoustic advice or really any advice IMO. If you're doing HT in a dedicated room it's a good idea because it can help get better sound field over more seats.  I've done some measurements using REW for interest only.

REW

RT60 is a measure of how long sound takes to decay by 60 dB in a space that has a diffuse soundfield, meaning a room large enough that reflections from the source reach the mic from all directions at the same level. Domestic rooms are usually too small to have anything approaching a diffuse field at low frequencies as their behaviour in that region is dominated by modal resonances. As a result RT60 is typically not meaningful in such rooms below a few hundred Hz. Use the RT60 Decay, waterfall, spectrogram and Decay plots to examine the decay of low frequencies in domestically-sized rooms.