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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
randy-11
1,913 posts
 
a larger number of subs can give xlnt results

Great topic and posts willemj - room equalization is an important issue, much more so than most of the threads on here

... mre tidbits follow
randy-11
1,913 posts
 
The very best reference book and how to that I know of is:
Master Handbook of Acoustics. by F. Alton Everest, and‎ Ken Pohlmann.

As an audio cheapskate, I save $20 and checked it out from my local library.

randy-11
1,913 posts
 
I have an open floor plan so this will not work for me, but if you have an enclosed listening room you can use an online calculator to get the room modes (freq.s where the sound amplitude "stacks up" i.e. wave superposition).
http://www.mh-audio.nl/sg.asp

toddverrone's avatar
toddverrone
840 posts
 
I've actually just started using REW and was pleasantly surprised at the measurements. I do need to tame my frequencies below 200Hz, but there don't seem to be any consistent peaks now that I've brought my orange tree in the room for the winter. The very large pot of moist soil seems to have done a beautiful job as a bass absorber. Before that, I had a few peaks that wouldn't decay..
My question is this: how do I know where to put bass traps when I make them? My guess is to generate bass tones at the problem frequencies, then walk around with an SPL meter looking for areas with the highest measurements. I'd love other ideas..
willemj OP
1,036 posts
 
Indeed Randy (I have an open plan as well), but real life rooms are almost invariably more complex than simple models. Therefore, rather than measure dimensions, I prefer to measure (and adress) the response.
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