Posted this in another forum but I thought may be of use to some people here so I'm sharing my re-building of my HT.
Been pestering Ricky (a HT pro builder here) on how to improve my Home Theater acoustics. He's been extremely helpful so, nung nahiya na 'ko, started doing some research on my own. Siyempre, nagpaalam muna ko sa kanya before doing this WIP since I may be revealing his trade secrets. But his work quality is really pro and much info are out there anyway so he gave me permission. Generous guy.
First thing I learned was that my Home theater is an echo box: All walls finished in concrete palitada while ceiling is plywood. Kaya pala sometimes I could not understand the dialogue; because standing waves bounce everywhere in my room causing many really bad minute echos. Current layout is:
To solve that, I had to find the reflection points (where sound bounces before hitting the listener's ears) and put sound absorbing materials on those points.
So, I measure the room, speaker locations, and seating area. Then, went into some high school geometry calculations.
Those were basic calculations of ratios of triangle legs where the hypotenuse of each would be the incident and reflection lengths the sound travels bouncing off each wall. So, for each wall and the ceiling, I calculate the point where each speaker's (and there are five not counting the subwoofer) sound would bounce before hitting the listener. And, since I have a sofa where audience would listen, I took the point for bounce to the left end of the sofa and the one for the right end. Each wall and ceiling would then end up with five "ranges" each bounded by two points (ten points in total).
This is getting a bit complex for pencil and paper so went to Excel and drew the diagrams in Powerpoint (sorry, don't have Sketchup nor CAD).
Then planned on where the acoustic panels (sound absorbing material) should be placed.
The plan is, first to construct the panels by making rectangular frames with my scrap palo china then filling that up with fiberglass blanket then covering with (hopefully) acoustically-transparent textile. Rockwool would have been better but more expensive. I'm not a real audiophile anyway so removing the echos is enough for me.
I will then hang those panels at the appropriate locations. When time permits, I will start installing drywalls using light steel framing. While doing that, I may as well reroute the cables so I can remove that coffee table in the middle to allow for more legroom/laying-around-room. That coffee table actually houses the amplifier and DVD player so all cables terminate there. But that drywall-cable part will be on a have-time basis. For now, I need to make the panels.
So that SWMBO will get encouraged, I managed to coax Ricky into selling me a very nice old stock retracting screen to show off to SWMBO how nice the image would be. My existing screen is actually a piece of white cloth hung from the ceiling. SWMBO was pleased.
To be continued.
