Weekly Q&A: Answers | Week of September 23, 2024

How to Start Improving My Room's Acoustics? Part 2

Question:

I want to improve the acoustics and setup of my room, but I’m not sure where to start. There is a lot of discussion of room ratios and acoustic treatment, but it is hard to put it all together.

Answer:

This is part 2 of our extended discussion of this topic. We will publish all the chapters together in some form when we’re done, but for now you can find Chapter 1 covering room dimensions on The Absolute Sound Substack page.

Room Structure

In this chapter, we’ll cover the structure of the listening room, assuming you are building a new room or modifying an existing one. We’ll start off assuming you are interested in a full room build, but there are some tips along the way for simple modifications.

It helps to start by noting that almost all modeling of a listening room uses the assumption that the walls (side walls, ceiling and floor) are very stiff. You may not plan to have your room modeled (we’ll cover this in a later chapter), but at least from the standpoint of predicting resu…