GoodSoundClub - Romy the Cat's Audio Site

In the Forum: Audio Discussions
In the Thread: Big room vs small room

Post Subject: Symphony Hall acoustics for home listeningPosted by skushino on: 7/14/2012

Last week in a different thread I posted:

"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."

I'm not a headphone guy, and this is the first time I heard about hardware or software to replicate the acoustics of the great symphony halls. Question - do you have direct personal experience with these devices? What are the downsides, if any? Can you point me to a specific device / product / software? The power to define acoustic space, being able to dial in the acoustics of a small intimate lounge for jazz, or a large reverberant church for choir, or a treated hall for orchestra, is very appealing.

I'm interested in having this kind of control for my home listening, although it seems to defy the laws of physics.

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