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Two channel and home theater room under construction

Some of you have followed my threads about getting a new room in which to listen. Well, it's underway. I've got to work with the parameters of the space -- 26 x 15 x 8 ft ceilings -- but I was able to accommodate some suggestions. Two photos at bottom of system page:https://systems.audiogon.com/systems/9064/edit

There will be 5 dedicated lines. Three at the end of the room where my audio gear will be, and two more at different locations in the room just in case the gear moves or other things need to be plugged in further away. There is one line along the sidewall in case I can get my gear away from my speaker's front wall. The lines are using 10 awg romex. Hard to fulfill some of the other electrical desiderata because we are not using a special electrician and it was just too hard to do too much. I did get a sheet of requirements to them (regarding breakers, silver paste, etc. Some was done.)

The drywall is all 5/8". The ceiling has insulation, a layer of drywall, an RC channel, and a second layer of drywall below it.

It looks like the room will have to also contain a TV and an AVR, but I'll mount the TV flush on the wall behind the speakers and have something to cover it with. The electronics for the TV will be on a separate line.

For the short run, because we have pets, we're going with LVF flooring and area rugs over concrete. The LVF will hopefully have something under it -- cork might be good. In the short run, some area rugs. In the longer run, a wall to wall carpet, not too thick.

It's very hard to think through other things until I can get set up and listen, but hopefully the fundamentals are being put in place. It's a room not dedicated to audio, but it will be friendlier than my current space with 6 foot ceilings.

hilde45
hilde45's avatar
hilde45 OP
5,262 posts
 
Thanks all! Yes only doing resilient channels on the ceiling. I hadn’t really considered doing them elsewhere because the other walls are concrete, or at least two of them are. I realize that it’s best to have all the walls the same in terms of their resonances, but that is very hard to do when two walls are concrete, one is brick with drywall in front of it and one is just drywall. I am expecting that I will be doing some measurements and using some audio panels to deal with some of the asymmetries. Until I have a chance to listen and measure there’s only so much I want to do ahead of time. And, of course, we need to buy furniture flooring and other stuff.

 I would say this project is somewhere between me building a listening room for myself and the family getting a basement ready for multiple uses; so it’s hard to go OCD in an audio direction given those other parameters.

We are hoping to be done in two weeks, knock on wood! It will be tricky to try to integrate the audio visual and the two channel.
hilde45's avatar
hilde45 OP
5,262 posts
 
@tomic601 My current room has an RT60 which ranges from 440ms-225ms between 40 hz and 150 hz and then is more or less between 150 ms and 200 ms from 150-12k hz.

In this new room, I'm not sure what I'll get. I suppose the numbers don't mean that much to me because I don't fully understand how they correlate to what I hear. Typically, I look at the SPL graph and the impulse graph to gauge tonality and levels of reflection. RT60 has not yet played a big role in my measuring and I'm honestly not sure how to deploy that tool. Hints welcome.

What I can say is that my current setup seems very balanced in terms of tonality and is pretty spacious sounding in terms of sound stage. With a new ceiling that is about 1.5 feet higher, I'm hoping for a slightly larger and more open soundstage -- more room between instruments and a larger presentation, overall. The width and length of the new room are not that much greater, whatever that implies, sonically.
erik_squires
16,653 posts
 
AFAIK, resilient channel is for isolating noise, not for improving room acoustics.

Consider running a sub panel to the room.  You'll have higher current and lower voltage drop, and you can put a balanced transformer in. 

I would not personally ever do a dedicated room with multiple, long 120V lines.  It's a waste of time and resources. The math favors 220V with an 8 or 6 gauge line.
hilde45's avatar
hilde45 OP
5,262 posts
 
Erik -- there will be a subpanel and three of the dedicated lines are 6 feet from the panel. And you wouldn't believe how little it cost to add them. If I don't use them, I don't use them. But I'll never say, "I wish I had..."
tomic601's avatar
tomic601
13,165 posts
 
I always shoot for control room standards for RT60. You are in a very unique position to measure, listen and tweak the room as you add treatments, furnishings… the journey of doing this while tracking your RT60 and trying to correlate to what you are hearing is massive. A true leg up on becoming an even better critical listener with modern tools in the arsenal. Your ears and happiness are #1.
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