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In the Forum: Audio Discussions
In the Thread: Reinforced live sound in audio listening room

Post Subject: Listening room acousticsPosted by skushino on: 7/7/2012

I've been reading about the acoustic characteristics of the world's great symphony halls, like Boston and the Concertgebouw. Did you know that Sabine, Berenak, and Cyril Harris mathematically defined those characteristics, using metrics like RT-60, clarity, intimacy, warmth, spaciousness, and background noise? The reverb time for the great halls is around 2 sec for symphonic music, around 1.5 sec for opera (due to voice clarity). For smaller rooms used as monitoring studios (~ 3000 - 15,000 ft^3), the suggested reverb time is around .35 - .9 sec.

The audio community standard wisdom for treating listening rooms seems to be as much bass trapping as possible. This seems completely opposite of efforts to prolong reverb time. Given a desire to extend bass reverb time, wouldn't it be better to minimize bass treatment, while treating some reflecting surfaces for MF and HF absorption? In other words, even if it is physically impossible to recreate symphony hall acoustics at home, if one wants to at least suggest longer reverb at LF, compared with MF and HF, bass trapping seems to be the wrong direction.

From the pictures of your listening room, and your past experiments with RT60, is this consistent with your experience? bty, I posted in this thread because it seems like a room with some effort at recreating symphony hall acoustics would also be a wonderful venue for live chamber music.

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