We are all familiar with the sound inside a room. We usually have the speakers that will generate the direct sound, but we also hear the reflections from the walls. The scenario in a home cinema environment is no different. The purpose of designing a dedicated home cinema is to manipulate these reflections because they will determine the way we perceive sound.

The room’s walls can reflect, transmit, or absorb sound. The phenomenon that would take place depends on the wall’s surface. Our architectural acoustic designs take into consideration the way we perceive sound, and combine the correct amount of absorbers, diffusers and flat surfaces. We should not forget that a home cinema is classed as a sound reproduction room, so it has to sound as neutral as possible. By determining the right room treatments, one can avoid colouration from the early reflections. The early reflections could form a comb filter, and alter the timbre of the original recording.

We offer a fully customisable room design service, which is specific to the project. The prominent room modes are usually treated with bass absorption.  People believe that by placing porous absorbers in the corners, they are absorbing the modes. Modes have really high pressure in the corners; particle velocity is rather low. The preferred method here is the use of resonant absorbers.

Home cinema seating has its own absorption characteristics. These would have to be predicted or measured in the home cinema’s design stage. People tend to panel the whole home theatre, ending up with a very low reverberation time, making it sound “dead”. This is not how a home cinema room should sound, and the seating area needs to be taken into account, when calculating the room’s acoustic treatments.

Predicting the total absorption that the home cinema seating is going to have in the room is a very difficult process, due to the geometry of the seats. Different methods have been experimented in reverberation chambers, in order to find a tool, on how to accurately predict the absorption of the home cinema’s seating.

The acoustic result of a home cinema would vary between occupied and unoccupied seating. Home cinema seating could have a large variation of absorption, depending on the model used. The good news here is that occupied seating in a home cinema room would not vary as much, regardless the model of seating used.

By modelling the home cinema seating area as rectangular absorption material with dimensions a,b,c, we can then apply the relevant absorption coefficient. Careful selection for the rest of the room’s treatments, would allow us to design a home cinema room with a very good accuracy.