Room acoustics


How about a thread on room acoustics and ways to improve the in-room performance of your system and its speakers? Subjects covered could be the physics of room response, measurement of response in your own room, and how to deal with imperfections, above and below the Schroeder frequency, like damping, bass traps, speaker positioning, (multiple) subwoofers, and dsp equalization. Other subjects could be how to create a room with lower background noise for greater dynamic range, building construction, or what to do in small rooms.
I am a bit busy just now, but as soon as I have time I will try to kick off with some posts and links.
willemj
Your big problem will be that the measurements will be way off in the bass, and considered by the measurement formulas/methods to be impossible to navigate and thus.... not relevant. Even your measurement systems, a weighting, c weighting, ...they all ignore the bass. Bass is not looked at in professional environments and professional scenarios.

"Since the ear is insensitive to 500hz on down, we’re not going to measure it!"
http://www.noisemeters.ca/help/faq/frequency-weighting.asp
Seriously.

Yet your bass to midbass will be the the source of the vast majority of your room issues. As in: the heart of the matter.

the mid-high parts they talk about dealing with, anyone can fix those with a small bit of internet research. the odd throw rug, some simple diffusion, common knowledge stuff.

Bass traps, the vast majority of them, barely do much of anything at all. We hear the small bits they do and we take what we can get from them, happy for any minor improvement.

Going into a commercial box or Imax theater and listening to the surround systems in them is a horror show. Awful sound and awful acoustics. These are supposedly professionally done systems. It illustrates how little even the pros know about bass and midbass and how to tame it. Ultimately, billions of dollars involved in getting it right, and they can’t get it done.
On Mac OS you can use Fuzzmeazure to measure speaker and room response. Audyssey XT32 is or was an excellent automated system on Onkyo devices
The discussion about weighting is how much different frequencies should be weighted to measure total sound level. That is a different issue and not relevant here.
Shadorne,
Thanks for pointing this out: indeed there are other systems as well. REW is what I use and, I think, most people. Of course, there are also other automated measurement and equalization systems (I use one myself). My plan was to leave those for later.