Saving Graves US

• Acoustic Panels
• Bass Traps
• Acoustic Foam Panels
• DIY Acoustic Panels
• Church Acoustics
• Studio Acoustics
• Home Theater Acoustics
• Restaurant Acoustics
• Acoustic Insulation
• Room Acoustic Treatments

Buying a home theater system can be a fairly sizable investment. For a lot of people, part of the pay-off is sharing (some would say showing off) the new system with friends and relatives who come by to visit. When you do play your new home theater system for others, you want them to be impressed with the sound quality the same way you were impressed at the showroom when you bought it. Often, though, the home theater system, once it is installed in your home, sounds nothing at all like it did in the showroom. It’s not retail trickery; it’s room acoustics.

Room acoustics is the interaction between the walls, ceilings, floor, and even furniture that is in your room and the sound waves emanating from your loudspeakers. To understand room acoustics, it is sometimes helpful to think of sound waves as ripples in still water. If you drop a pebble into a washtub full of water, you get perfect concentric ripples radiating out from the center. These ripples are like the direct sound waves coming from your speakers. Eventually the ripples hit the edge of the washtub and they bounce back. Sound waves also bounce back or echo after they hit the walls and ceiling of your room. The harder and smoother the surface the sound wave hits, the stronger the echo.

If you watch the ripples in the washtub closely, you’ll see the returning ripples crossing over new ripples that are still making the outward journey from the source. Where they cross, their effects interfere with each other. As the high point of the returning ripple crosses the high point of a new ripple, they add together and reach higher than either ripple by itself. Likewise when the high point of a returning ripple crosses the low point of a new ripple, the two cancel out and the water level is almost the same as if there were no ripples at all. Sound waves interact similarly.

The difference with sound waves is that they are very complex. A single sound can be made up many different frequencies at once. Think of a high pitched female vocal accompanied by a drum beat, a bass guitar, and the ringing notes of a Les Paul guitar. All of these instruments have different ranges and they are all playing simultaneously. In terms of our ripples, that’s like a number of pebbles of different sizes being dropped into the water. Some sound waves that you’d get from your home theater system may extend over a distance of fifty feet or more for a single wave. Others are measured in tiny fractions of an inch. All of these sound waves are bouncing around your room and interacting. That interaction causes distortion and changes the way the audio sounds to listeners standing in the middle of all those reflected sounds waves.

The key is to control and reduce the rebounding waves as much as possible. This is done by adding acoustic treatment panels to the areas causing the reflections. Acoustic treatment panels are like a shallow beach to water waves allowing the ripples to dissipate and lose their energy without rebounding back into the room. Acoustic panels come in many shapes, sizes and colors designed to blend into a room’s décor. They often need to be only a couple inches thick and can be made to look like decorations.

With a little acoustic treatment, your home theater will sound as good as it did in the showroom, and you can start inviting your friends over again to show off your new purchase.