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Re: Room treatments for my first dedicated stereo room

Posted by David Aiken (A) on December 22, 2004 at 19:32:46

In Reply to: Re: Room treatments for my first dedicated stereo room posted by Chris_F on December 22, 2004 at 14:30:11:

My feeling is that the size of the 'sweet spot' is actually more determined by the direct sound than by the effect of early reflections. What early reflections do, if they are too close in level to the level of the direct sound, is to degrade soundstaging and imaging. With many speakers, soundstaging and imaging drop off in quality relatively quickly as you move off centre anyway, and treating early reflections won't prevent that happening. That's why I feel the size of the 'sweet spot' is determined more by the direct sound.

As far as size of absorption area goes, consider the sound source as a point source which radiates in a spherical or cylindrical pattern depending on speaker type. Your ear is a pretty small area on the spherical spread of the direct sound at the listening position. Now, if you allow a 'bend' in the sphere/cylinder at the reflection point and then take a look at the spherical/cylindrical spread of the reflected path at your ear, you'll find that the sphere/cylinder at the ear is noticeably larger in radius and size than at the point of reflection on the room surface, but the ear area is still the same. You don't have to worry about reflections that don't meet the ear so it's only necessary to threat the surface area that throws a reflection path to the ear, and remember we're only talking first reflections - paths with a single bend.

If you use the mirror technique to identify the early reflection points, then you can map out the area you want to cover simply by repeating the technique several times, once for each location that someone is going to sit in. That will mark the range along the wall you need to cover. As far as height goes, the range should include the bottom of the lowest driver, the top of the highest driver, and your ear. Pick the highest and lowest of those 3 items and place absorption to cover that range - go a bit higher and lower if you like, but you definitely don't need to go floor to ceiling. That should give you an area of absorption that will work on the early reflection for a particular wall for every listening point that will be used. The actual 'sweet spot' may well prove to be considerably smaller than that listening area.

David Aiken

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