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Five Tips for Better Home Theater Acoustics
AcousticSmart founder and owner Richard Charschan provides five expert tips on how to improve the acoustics of your home theater.
By Richard Charschan, AcousticSmart
It’s hard not to over-stress the importance of having the proper acoustics in a high-end home theater. You could spend a quarter-million dollars or more on the best speakers and electronics in the world but if your room hasn’t been effectively treated for audio, all of that expensive gear won’t sound much better than a home-theater-in-a-box system you could pick up on a sale at the local big-box store.
That’s not an exaggeration. Having a lot of hard surfaces in your theater can cause sound to bounce off the walls, making it difficult to hear dialogue. Poor positioning and inadequate acoustic treatments for your subwoofers can muddy the sound of not just the bass but of the whole system, draining the life from a movie’s soundtrack. And having the HVAC system kick in during the middle of a quiet scene can be distracting, pulling you out of the movie experience.
It all comes down to a very simple equation: Bad acoustics = a bad home theater.
While acoustics are important, you don’t need any kind of technical knowledge to understand the basic concepts. What follows is a non-technical, jargon-free introduction that will help you to discuss your theater with your home cinema builder, integrator, and designer.
1. The shape of the room can have a big impact on sound quality. Always try to avoid having a square room or one with low ceilings.
2. Avoid having large areas of reflective surfaces. Hard, solid walls should be covered with fabric-covered acoustic treatments and other materials that reduce reflections, diffuse, and help control the sound issues of the room. Use materials like glass, metal, and stone sparingly and only after careful consideration of their potential impact on the sound.
3. Conversely, you don’t want too many soft surfaces in a theater since they can make the audio sound dull or dead. The goal is to strike a balance between reflective and absorptive surfaces, so the sound is tamed but not subdued.
4. Plan the type of HVAC system in advance and how it’s vented into the room to minimize or eliminate any unwanted sound. Install the HVAC system on a separate zone, if possible, to minimize noise and help with noise reduction outside the cinema room. Two supplies and two returns ensure plenty of airflow for a comfortable and quiet environment.
5. And make sure the walls and doorways are constructed, caulked, and sealed to prevent noise from outside the room seeping into the theater and spoiling your movie-watching experience. Similarly, you’ll want to make sure sound doesn’t leak out of the theater into the rest of your home.
To help illustrate these concepts and highlight possible solutions, I’m going to refer to some real-world examples from my company’s theater designs.
Creating a room that essentially “floats” within the shell of the home theater space is probably the best way to control a room’s acoustics since it allows the space to be shaped for optimal sound and also helps keep vibrations that originate inside the theater contained within the space while neutralizing vibrations from the rest of the home.
The first two home theaters both use some form of floating construction.
The Reyes Theater
For the Reyes theater, created for baseball legend Jose Reyes, the existing room was gutted down to the studs, with new walls then attached to the existing studs using isolation clips with rubber dampeners. This helped prevent the transmission of any sound between the room’s exterior and interior walls.
The Norman Theater
The back of the Norman theater features lounge-like platforms that float independently of the rest of the space. This type of construction can actually enhance the impact of low-frequency effects by causing the entire platform to move to the vibrations while simultaneously blocking those vibrations from being transmitted to the exterior walls.
The Lord of the Rings Theater
The intricate design for this fantasy room created major acoustical challenges but also offered multiple opportunities for taming those challenges. Designed as a price-no-object theater for a major Lord of the Rings / Game of Thrones / Dungeons & Dragons fan, the room was filled with hard surfaces that needed to be tamed. A large part of the solution was to create the walls out of acoustically transparent material printed with photorealistic stone, which made it easy to keep acoustical treatments (and speakers) out of sight.
The Ellipse Theater
For the Ellipse theater, the client wanted a room full of curved surfaces – which is usually a major home theater no-no since all of those curves can make it hard to control how sound travels around the room. To minimize those issues, we made the mostly flat area around the screen absorptive, to tone down any booming or reflective sounds. Absorption was worked into the room’s curved recesses as well.
The good news is that your guests don’t even have to know your theater has acoustical treatments to appreciate the impact they have on their movie-watching experience. Acoustics have come a long way from tacking egg cartons and random pieces of fabric up on the walls to include a tremendous number of design options that will blend seamlessly into any décor.
Not only have treatments become design-friendly but they’re opening up creative opportunities that didn’t even exist before. You have nothing to lose, in either performance or aesthetics, and everything to gain by investing in the best possible acoustics for your home theater.
AcousticSmart founder and owner Richard Charschan was manufacturing acoustic panels, along with other architectural specialty products, when he received a special request from a high-end audio dealer. Their client wasn’t satisfied with the sound quality and wanted to return the entire system. Richard arrived and placed panels in strategic places to both absorb the reflections of the space and enhance the sound by tuning the audio in the client’s room correctly. Needless to say, the client was impressed and AcousticSmart was born. Richard divides his time between running AcousticSmart and being a home theater evangelist, spreading the word about the importance of having a professionally designed, built, and calibrated dedicated environment for watching movies. Learn more at acousticsmart.com.
To learn more about these amazing home theaters click on the links above to be taken to the AcousticSmart website. While this article is about the acoustics of home theaters and design the home theater system and platform used to deliver the picture and audio is by Kaleidescape. Click here to learn more about Kaleidescape movie players and servers.
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