Let me try this another way. Imagine a highly reflective room with a pair of traditional 2 way speakers and 1 listening chair in a fixed location. The room is 20’x20’x15’ tall.
There are at least six (eight if we include the ceiling) first reflection points. Being points, they are infinitely small. The audio legend is that these specific points are more important, by far, than any other place in the room. In this room we may place 1’x1’ absorptive panels.
My argument is that the legend/myth is wrong. The first six reflection points are not going to be noticeably better than any other place to put an absorber or diffusor.
Lets go through a bit of a mental exercise. We’ll consider two sides to this.
First, the very sparse case in which we treat six points and only those. At six absorbers the room remains too lively to make much of a difference.
Let’s consider the opposite situation. We have 40 panels of the same 1’x1’ dimension. Now we can make enough of a difference in the reverberant field to affect the sound quality. We put 20 or uniformly spread across the wall behind the speaker, and 10 on each side on the speaker end.
Let’s say by chance, four of these panels (2 on the rear, and 1 on each side) are exactly on the first reflection points in terms of the listening chair. In this case, removing those four panels and randomly relocating them will make a very small, if any, noticeable difference.
And this illustrates my point. Treating the initial reflection points is actually not as important as treating the room. The audiophile using a mirror to place a panel exactly on that spot is wasting his/her time. What is more important, by far, is getting a critical mass of room treatment so that the reverberant field becomes well controlled.
There are at least six (eight if we include the ceiling) first reflection points. Being points, they are infinitely small. The audio legend is that these specific points are more important, by far, than any other place in the room. In this room we may place 1’x1’ absorptive panels.
My argument is that the legend/myth is wrong. The first six reflection points are not going to be noticeably better than any other place to put an absorber or diffusor.
Lets go through a bit of a mental exercise. We’ll consider two sides to this.
First, the very sparse case in which we treat six points and only those. At six absorbers the room remains too lively to make much of a difference.
Let’s consider the opposite situation. We have 40 panels of the same 1’x1’ dimension. Now we can make enough of a difference in the reverberant field to affect the sound quality. We put 20 or uniformly spread across the wall behind the speaker, and 10 on each side on the speaker end.
Let’s say by chance, four of these panels (2 on the rear, and 1 on each side) are exactly on the first reflection points in terms of the listening chair. In this case, removing those four panels and randomly relocating them will make a very small, if any, noticeable difference.
And this illustrates my point. Treating the initial reflection points is actually not as important as treating the room. The audiophile using a mirror to place a panel exactly on that spot is wasting his/her time. What is more important, by far, is getting a critical mass of room treatment so that the reverberant field becomes well controlled.