Don’t be scared by the idea of dealing with physics in your home theater. Acoustics can make or break your home theater experience. Here’s everything you need to know about acoustics and how to improve them.
Acoustics, Explained
Acoustics are the way sound travels around a room and interacts with its environment. Sound is a wave, so those invisible waves travel outward from the source and come into contact with their surroundings. Those impact the way you experience sound, and can make for a really great or awful experience, depending on how you deal with it.
An easy example of acoustics is echo. In an empty room, sound bounces off the various flat surfaces and reflects around the room, creating a reverberation. As an example, when you move into a new apartment, every little sound will echo until you’ve furnished the rooms. But once you get your furniture moved in, that echo gets dampened, and the space feels a bit less like a massive cave and more like a home.
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The shape, size, and materials of a room can have a dramatic impact on the sound quality when you’re listening to speakers in it. For example, you might find the bass is too pronounced in certain spots or there’s too much echo from the walls. A relatively cheap solution to these issues is to whip up some homemade acoustic panels—have you ever tried it?
So when you have a living room, or any other dedicated home theater room, you’ll want to have material in the room to absorb sound, as well as diffuse sound, to ensure that you can clearly hear the audio.
Echo Can Be Irritating and Distracting
Echo, sound reflection, reverberation, whatever you want to call it, it’s something you want to keep to a minimum in a home theater. The effect of sound bouncing off the walls is unpleasant when you’re trying to enjoy a movie, and it’s even worse if you’re talking to the person next to you and your own voice echoes at the same time.
Bad enough echo can even make it hard to hear what’s going on in what you’re watching, since you’re hearing echoes of everything happening before the audio you actually want to be hearing. Sure, you can try to struggle through it, but your home theater will be a lot more enjoyable if you actually address the echo.
Too Much Dampening Can Make Audio Sound Lifeless
As much as you don’t want your room to echo, you also don’t want to go all-in on just sound absorption to change the acoustics of your home theater. If you just put up sound absorbing panels and try to dampen echo, the sound in the room is going to sound lifeless. In a recording studio, this is fine. But in a home theater, you want to feel immersed in the sound coming from your speakers.
The way to fix this is by including sound diffusers in your home theater acoustic treatment. Putting a diffuser up on the wall opposite your speakers will make your audio sound much more lively. This is because rather than a simple big reflection of sound in one direction, or full absorption of sound, a diffuser reflects sounds in a lot of different directions, so you feel more immersed in sound.
The Shape of Your Room Impacts Acoustics
Most of the time when it comes to setting up a home theater, you will be working in a rectangular room. Thankfully, this makes the way sound waves interact with your room very predictable, and placing your speakers to get the best sound for you will be simple, as well as doing any acoustic treatment. You can easily figure out the direction sound will travel in based on where your speakers are set up, and place diffusers and sound absorption panels accordingly.
However, if you have a room with a more irregular shape, it may take some experimentation and thinking to figure out how sound bounces off surfaces and how to treat it accordingly. There can be some benefits to irregularly shaped rooms. Not having parallel walls can prevent standing waves, which tend to make mid and bass tones sound off.
Additionally, larger rooms will echo more than smaller rooms, since sound has to travel further to hit walls, and will cause very noticeable reverberation and delay. So, if your room is quite large, you may require more acoustic treatment to deal with the amount of echo.
Speaker Positioning Can Be Crucial
The way your speakers are positioned impacts both the way sound travels toward your ears and the way it interacts with the room. If your speakers are too close to the wall, it can cause audio distortion and make bass frequencies sound boomy and muddy. Having your speakers at the wrong height will make your audio sound less clear, since it’s not making its way to your ears most efficiently. Angling your speakers incorrectly will also reduce clarity, and impact channel separation.
Ben Lovejoy / How-To Geek
To make sure your speakers are positioned well, a generally good rule is to angle your speakers at approximately a 30-degree angle from where you’re going to be sitting, keep your speakers as far from the wall as possible, and have your speakers at ear level. Adjust everything accordingly until you get the ideal sound.
Good Acoustics Make for a More Immersive Experience
When you properly treat your home theater for the best possible acoustics for movie-watching and listening, you get the most immersive experience possible. Being able to fully enjoy the sound system you have set up means you can lose yourself in the media you’re enjoying without feeling distracted by echo, distortion, or uneven levels.
This is especially true if you have a surround sound system set up. If your room is excessively echoey while you have surround sound, the cavernous sound of the room is going to be intense. If you want to actually feel like you’re surrounded by the film you’re watching and not like you’re experiencing a movie in a giant cave, treating your room accordingly is going to make all the difference.
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What Can You Do to Improve Your Acoustics?
The first thing to address in your home theater would be getting your speaker positioning just right. With stereo speakers, an easy principle to follow is setting up your speakers at a 30-degree angle from where you’re sitting and hitting that “sweet spot” of sound in that triangular formation. Make sure your speakers are at approximately ear level, and far enough from the wall to keep bass from sounding intense and unclear. After you’ve figured that out, you can address the echo in your home theater.
Ben Lovejoy / How-To Geek
Set up sound absorption panels and diffusing panels in your room where sound bounces in order to address echo and immersion. Generally covering 25 to 50% of your walls with sound absorbers is a good idea, and setting up a sound diffuser on the wall parallel to where your speakers are will ensure the sound isn’t too dampened and lifeless. Bass traps in the corners are also a good idea for making sure you’re not left with boomy, muddy sounding bass.
Even though you can’t see it, issues with acoustics can be easy to figure out with just a baseline knowledge of how sound works. Knowing that, you can make your home theater sound as good as possible with some tweaks and adjustments.
