New Demo Home Cinema Room Week 4
Acoustic Treatment Continues
This week saw us only able to spend a couple of days on the home cinema demo room due to home cinema build commitments and then meeting up with some really cool potential clients.
We love that we get to meet so many great, fun, interesting people who want to experience something special in their homes.
The week started with mounting more of the Vicoustics MD55 and Vifoam tiles and Wavewood Diffusers.
The aim for this room in our calculations is to get around 20-25% coverage. This isn’t counting the Diffusers into our calculations, they reflect and scatter sound and so work in some respect in almost the opposite manner to our absorption tiles.
Too much absorption and the room will sound dead, sterile, and be uncomfortable to spend time in.
We want it to sound ALIVE, but PRECISE - It’s a balancing act, which is why thought and preparation is applied.
The acoustic tiles will really only help with sound above 250Mhz and only starts being really effective at 500 Mhz and above. It’s too thin and not dense enough to help with the BASS and Sub-Bass frequencies.
In case you were curious here is how different sounds are typically defined; The audio spectrum is the audible frequency range at which humans can hear and spans from 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz.
AUDIO SPECTRUM
Sub-Bass - 20Hz-60Hz
Bass - 60Hz-250Hz
Low Midrange - 250-500 Mhz
Midrange - 500Hz-2KHz
Upper Midrange - 2KHz - 4Khz
Presence - 4KHz-6KHz
Brilliance - 6KHz-20KHz
The range being from 20Hz to 20KHz, Neither of which you can probably hear, 20Hz you can feel in your stomach and 20KHz your brain may be able to make out but it’s likely you won’t perceive it.
Years ago whilst doing my THX Training in Australia I found out that I couldn’t hear much above the 13KHz sound frequency.
Generally People under 50 years old should be able to hear up to 12KHz, people under 40 should hear up to 15KHz. With youngsters often able to hear up to 20KHz.
For reference human voice/speech is in the 300Hz to 3,400 Hz (3.4 KHz) range.
Acoustic Treatment Front Soundstage
Painting
The acoustic treatment and tiles are not aesthetic, we paint the surroundings dark so that when we put up our fabric wall you can’t see through the fabric to the wall behind. We use a Matt Black, our OCD is struggling with some of the foams not lining up, we broke our foam cutting machine and have had to order a new one. It might surprise you what we use to cut the foam with, next week you will see how it’'s done and with what equipment.
Subwoofers Arrive
I love BASS, so whilst I was designing our demo room I knew it had to have two Subwoofers.
Two Subwoofers aren’t to make it louder or sound deeper, although they will add punch. No, instead we use two to help make sure that all areas of the room get to hear the bass sounds as correctly as possible.
Room Modes (also called Standing Waves) are when low frequency sound (Bass) bounces between parallel surfaces and cancels itself out at certain frequencies and/or locations in the room. This causes Peaks (heightened volume) and Nulls (diminished volume) at listening positions within the room.
With Two subwoofers (or more) and advanced calibration of the room we can minimize the effects of Room Modes.
This is another reason why room design is so important.
In a poorly designed room one listener could be sitting there complaining of hearing no Bass at all, whilst the person sitting just a few metres in front could be overwhelmed with too much bass, all in the same room.
Dual Subwoofers
2 x X12 Paradigm Subwoofers
Remote Control from RTi
We also received our Remote Control from RTi. It’s an RTi T4x (Sounds like something from Terminator) and is combined with their XP3 Processor. We will use this to control all of our Audio Visual equipment and lighting control.
The Remote is RTis top of the range and is able to control;
Infra-Red
RS232
Zigbee
WiFi
433 Mhz (RF)
It will be programmed for one touch control, so that with a single button we can turn all of our equipment on, dim the lights and set the scene for watching movies.
