I never understood why people tell room acoustics is expensive! How much is a pack of rockwool?
It's about 10 bucks per m², up to 30 when you take nicer material and more thickness. The rest is optics - you can spend as much as you like for that.
The earlier you plan acoustics during building/setting up your room the cheaper it is.
Could you set a 60dB range, maybe 90-30dBSpl?
Your reverb curves are not bad. You have a problem around 300Hz and a rise in the 2-5kHz area - the most sensitive area of the ear. And of course the high frequency fall off. Low frequencies are pretty good - american light walls house?
So the first goal would be to lower the over all reverb - BROADBAND! So only use deeper absorption - don't use any if that's not possible.
There are so many places where you could add absorption! Corner wedges are efficient for what you need (lower reverb >80Hz) and you have a lot of possibilities around your ceiling to install something there! Use the area behind your speakers and esp the corner of your right speaker. Put something to the shelves behind your listening postion!
Here is my cinema baffle - there is 40cm absorption and all the speakers behind it. Google for home cinema - they often do great integration of room design and acoustics.
You can make complete walls out of these wood stripe panels in all kinds of colours. Even hide doors with them. Or just use white fabric to cover stuff. You can just enlarge the soffits, fill the corner with absorption and wrap white fabric around. Add some soft LED lights for some benefits for the room.
It takes some creativity but your whole space and life will benefit from better acoustics!
You can make complete walls out of these wood stripe panels in all kinds of colours. Even hide doors with them. Or just use white fabric to cover stuff. You can just enlarge the soffits, fill the corner with absorption and wrap white fabric around. Add some soft LED lights for some benefits for the room.
It takes some creativity but your whole space and life will benefit from better acoustics!
Attachments
Sometimes these room-acoustics related plots tell you more than just information about room acoustics. In this case, it appears that the crossover transition band between the bass bin and the midrange horn could be a bit wide or even perhaps a bit too low in frequency for the midrange horn to continue to control its vertical polars.Here is my RT60 plot:
Recall that I said that the loudspeakers were doing yeoman's duty keeping early reflections off the nearby walls, above. In this case, it looks like the midrange horn may be losing its polar control around 320 Hz and is putting a bit more nearfield energy into the ceiling/floor than might be desired.
If you get a chance, you might try moving the crossover point up perhaps 50 Hz by tweaking your PEQs--then looking again at the RT60 plot (particularly the peak in the EDT [early decay time] curve) to see if moving the crossover point up a bit starts to smooth out the peak in the EDT curve at 310-320 Hz. This will likely result in a pretty subtle shift in the overall sound quality, but you should be able to hear a bit more "damped" room response across this low midrange band, perhaps a bit smoother and more consistent in terms of vocal timbre or other low midrange instrumentation.
In general, I don't really think you need much more absorption in-room. I think other advice to lower the RT curves even more are forgetting that you have full-range directivity control. Another key insight to what's occurring is the decreasing EDT curve with frequency, which says that the early reflection issues are under control (unlike direct radiating loudspeakers that others might use in their listening rooms that lose most of their horizontal directivity control below 800-1500 Hz).
JMTC.
Chris
The main thing is that you have obviously done something, whether intentional or not to make your room better than most.
We see too many great systems posted here in rooms that look like echo chambers. Yours is better.
Chris has made some very good suggestion for small tweaks to what you now have.
We see too many great systems posted here in rooms that look like echo chambers. Yours is better.
Chris has made some very good suggestion for small tweaks to what you now have.
The mid horn (PRV Audio 18”w x 10”h WG45-50) and driver (PRV D2200PH) drop precipitously at exactly 400 Hz, so I’m not sure what’s going on with the loss of directivity control, unless it’s something endemic to the LaScala bass bin, which in my case, is driven by a JBL D2225H.
My next measurement session will be to focus on the left driver and tune that as needed. I’m curious how that reads with the lack of a corner. I’ll be sure to move the coffee table out of the way to rule it out as a source of reflection
Usually, the reason for a precipitous decline in SPL on-axis on the low end is because the horn completely loses directivity control. In straight-sided horns (like the one you've got), this occurs typically at the frequency where the longest dimension of the horn mouth corresponds to a half wavelength of sound. For your 17.71" x 9.84" mouth dimension horn, that occurs at about 400 Hz (if you subtract the mouth flange width).
That doesn't mean that the horn is putting out nothing at 400 Hz...rather it means that the horn isn't putting out much on-axis, but instead the horn is putting out almost all its output into an almost 360 degree polar pattern--in both axes (vertically and horizontally...as long as the driver's diaphragm remains acoustically loaded). So if you raise the crossover point a little, you might be able to avoid that energy being deposited all over the room--nearfield.
The La Scala "W" section bass bin polars only get narrower, somewhat slowly, as the frequency rises above 400 Hz. Since that bass bin doesn't have a truncated mouth like the Belle, it actually behaves quite well at higher frequencies and doesn't collapse down its directivity pattern as much as the Belle, Khorn, and Jubilee bass bins experience. So the La Scala bass bin should handle a slightly higher crossover frequency quite well.
Chris
Last edited: