Thread: Building a listening room

Welcome to AS Emmett!

Welcome to the Forum

A very warm welcome to Audioshark Emmett.

A great sounding audio room takes quite a commitment in terms of time and money. I know this to be true because I’ve built a couple of audio rooms and written about the experience here.

The good news is you are starting with a space of almost 11500 cubic feet in volume – which is great. Large spaces are much easier to work with as they naturally have a flatter low frequency response.

The challenge with audio rooms is rarely rolled off top ends. More usually the challenges are at low frequencies and based on your room dimensions I’m picking you will have a bump at 75-80Hz where clubbing of room modes occur.

However, given the concrete walls and floors, you are dealing with a highly reflective space and untreated reflections (especially early ones) can muddy the sound. Clap your hands in the room and you will hear flutter echo as soundwaves bounce back and forth between parallel untreated surfaces. The longer the sound lingers the more critical the need for acoustic treatments.

That said, not all reflections are bad. A judgement needs to be made. Because of this I tend to agree with Nicoff’s advice – talk to professionals in the field. In the finish you need a room that promotes the quality of your speakers – not the deficiencies of the room.

Originally Posted by Emmett Scully

Hello,

I want to have a go at making and selling boutique speakers, so I'm going to build a listening room. I wanted to ask the knowledgable people here for advice.

The goal is to have a room which will allow for the clearest evaluation of speakers. To this end I want the walls to be reflective, but for there not to be any issues with the sound which would mask the sound quality.

The internal dimensions in feet are 14x22.5x36.5
The walls and floor will be concrete.
I'm thinking the roof could just be galvanised sheets.

My question is; how can I get a good in room frequency response, i.e. not too rolled off at the top end.

This needs to be cost effective and non-resonant.

Maybe Plywood over the concrete would even the response, and then the right paint over that might improve matters further.

Any thoughts?

Wow, that would be a very nice sized room to work with. The clearest evaluation potential for speakers in any given room is to ensure the speakers are positioned in AN optimal and preferrably THE location within the room. This is how speakers are tuned acoustically to a given room. By dialing them in acoustically which comes by finding the ideal position.

If/when this happens your speakers bass will transform from an average bass into a superior / musical bass few seem aware of. Moreover, at the time a few other ancillary benefits wil to light including a significantly more balanced and warm presentation and with not just more pronounced, impacting, deeper, and more well-defined bass, but you should also hear more bass notes that were inaudible when the speakers were placed in an inferior position.

It's not easy finding an optimal or the optimal speaker location and in fact it can be perhaps the most difficult thing to accomplish in high-end audio. In one room it took me 9 months of moving the speakers around 1/2 inch here or there before finding it. But bear in mind I was only moving the speakers a few times each week. But I'm convinced every speaker / room combination has an ideal location for acoustically tuning them and for the diligent types, they will find it eventually. And if you do, it's pretty incredible to listen to with every listening session.

The best news is it's free and does not require any custom room acoustic treatments whatsoever. All one needs is a reasonble room and by that I would include:

- a solid flooring system. Concrete is excellent. If any sub-flooring goes on top of the concrete it should not be free floating but anchored or glued to the concrete.

- wall-to-wall carpet and pad.

- a minimum amount of carefully chosen chairs, sofa's, ottomans, etc.

- some artwork on the walls preferably without reflective surfaces but no big deal if they do.

- with a room that size I would definitely consider a few smaller trees purely for aesthetics perhaps at the front wall behind the speakers, etc.

But that's really about it. Besides most of your time will be spent trying to find the optimal speaker positions anyway.

Sounds like you have a plan.