Is room treatment a science?

I gotta do room treatment next.  Prolly be a year or two but gotta do it, methinks.

Yes of course acoustics is based on science and nothing else.   Lots of good books on how to tackle it correctly. Applying it to a specific room to achieve a specific goal is the challenge. 

Big problem. It’s not really science.

Lol! Science. Clearly a stranger to you. Allow me to introduce you to the subject.

Sound travels in waves. Like all waves when they encounter changes in density they reflect or refract. In other words sound bounces off walls just like light reflects off a mirror.

Another thing waves do is cancel and reinforce. When two wave crests meet we get reinforcement and the resulting wave is greater= louder. When they cancel we have a null or dead spot. 

The length of a sound wave is related to its frequency. The higher the frequency the shorter the wavelength. The wavelength of sounds we can hear ranges from around 50 feet or more at the lowest bass to less than an inch at the highest treble.

So in the scientific view of acoustics we have a lot of different waves propagating back and forth across the room. Our scientific goal is to minimize the cancellations and reinforcements in order to hear the original signal as clear and undistorted as possible. 

One way to do this is attenuation or absorption. We can do this with a medium such as a fiberglass panel. Sound waves move the fibers in the panel. This movement transfers the mechanical motion of the air into mechanical motion of the fibers according to Newton's Law, with the thickness of the panel determining the peak frequency of absorption. Because, remember, wavelength.

Too much of this and the room sounds dead. If only there were some way of spreading the waves around, dispersing them more evenly, so we can keep that spacious sound without so much of the troublesome reinforcements and cancellations. 

Science to the rescue! Since we know sound is waves we can build panels to diffract the waves. They can be small flat surfaces of differing heights or large flat surfaces of differing angles. All these things audiophiles will have seen- and who knows maybe even you too. Now you know the science behind them. 

Why did mc misquote me? Why is he putting words in my mouth? Maybe because I was attacking his foolhardy trial and error routine, which is the opposite of scientific. Maybe a ....reading comprehension issue, who knows? Careful, don’t blow a head gasket. 🤯

My two suggestions are, talk to GIK Acoustics or learn everything in Floyd Toole's book:  Sound Reproduction: The Acoustics and Psychoacoustics of Loudspeakers and Rooms


https://amzn.to/35WboEV


and ignore the trial and error people. :)


Best,

E