New Construction

[JBP]

Are there any architectual features that can be built into the walls or ceiling of a HT to help improve acoustics and cut down on the amount of room treatment that will be needed? Something like stepped or angled walls? Thanks

[jdm56]

Any deviation from a nice, simple shoebox shape is just as apt to cause problems at it is to prevent them. Plus, it makes it much more difficult to choose room dimensions that will distribute resonances evenly, because the math gets very complicated as the room shape becomes more complicated.

[DrWho]

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On 8/15/2004 10:28:27 AM JBP wrote:

Are there any architectual features that can be built into the walls or ceiling of a HT to help improve acoustics and cut down on the amount of room treatment that will be needed? Something like stepped or angled walls? Thanks

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Well what kind of things are you capable of? The sky is the limit

I highly suggest you check out this forum:

http://johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/index.php

Draw your attention to the control room concepts and notice the shapes of the rooms. Using walls that are not parallel vastly reduces reflections and standing waves and all that. If you can, I'd suggest building a room with a sloped cieling (taller towards the rear) as I've found this has the biggest impact in a listening environment.

I'll have to pull out my textbook, but I remember a few studios that had the front and rear walls angled in a certain direction, but I can't remember which way they typically went.

Anyways, what kind of room is this going to be and is it going to be dedicated? 5.1, 6.1, 7.1 HT? 2 channel stereo? 3 channel stereo? What kind of speakers will you be using?

[Champagne taste beer budget]

The whole angled wall thing may work out, but it sounds like opening Pandoras box to me. IMHO, of course. Boxes are predictable, known and well documented. Unless you use some sort of known design layout, you may be on your own, or at the mercy of some specialized (read EXPENSIVE) design help if there's any problems with room response once you're finished. YMMV, IMHO, blah blah blah.

[DrWho]

To be honest, I would think that angled walls would be more like closing pandoras box...There are so many issues with parallel walls and having 3 pairs of parallel walls is why there's so many issues with box shaped rooms. Granted, if you go crazy with wierd shapes and extreme angles, then you're probably causing more problems than you're doing good. However, gently sloping walls will have huge results.

Just make the cieling taller by one or two feet in the back and the room 3 or 4 feet wider in the rear. You'd be surprised by how much this will open up the sound.

[artto]

Nothing wrong with angled walls. Even in very large concert hall spaces where room modes no longer have any impact, the best halls have many diffuse and non-parallel/angled/convex surfaces. The room mode calculation thing is usually required because most rooms in domestic, and even some 'commercial' environments are usually rectangular, having dimensions that are generally smaller than the longest wavelengths being (re)produced, which has the potential of producing the most undesirable conditions (acoustically).