I’m building an extension to my house and one of the new rooms will be a dedicated Listening Room. Anybody have experience with this? Recommendations? Ideas? Questions?
My initial intent was to make the dimensions match the Golden Ratio, as described in this article:
Given 8’ ceilings, that would make the room 20.5’ long and 12.8’ wide.
Due to existing lines in the house, it will work much better if the room is 17’ long. That put me on a bit of a hunt and I found this video:
Based on that, I calculated that going 8’ x 17’ x 13’ would actually yield a room with better acoustic properties than the Golden Ratio:
Anyway, that’s about where I am now. We’ll hopefully finalize the plan with the architect next week.
Initially, I’ll move over my current main system. I plan on upgrading it all over time but that’s last on the list. I think the room and treatments will make more of a difference and provide a better environment to appreciate any upgrades more.
Also if you have the budget it would be nice if you could optimize that room for noise. Bet that would be awesome to reduce noise floor (if done correctly).
There is a lot of debate, all you really want to avoid is exact multiples of the same length, because it causes room modes to stack up, any set of lengths with a small number of common divisors is probably going to be 90+% as good as the best possible (By whatever criteria you decide best is based on).
I think the fact that it will be a dedicated space with no other gear, appliances, people or animals will go a long way. The noisiest thing will be the air conditioner but that’s something you learn to appreciate in Arizona.
That’s a big thing, make sure the AC is a mini split if possible, those generally tend to be the most quiet and less intrusive ac I’ve seen in listening rooms/studios (from my experience). I have to have a window unit on my room, hate it lol. Although if you want a ducted system or a sealed one will depend on how the room is designed, since that could affect room pressurization or acoustics with the duct
Yeah. As you said, as long as you’ve avoided exact multiples, you’ve avoided the worst problems. Right now it doesn’t cost me anything to move one of the walls a few feet one way or the other so I might as well pick a distance that is good by some criteria.
And speaking of AC, make sure it’s electrically isolated on a separate circuit far away from your audio gear lol, you don’t want to hear it electrically either. I’d also make sure to dedicate a few separate circuits for the room specifically for audio and nothing else of course (but that one is obvious lol)
Looks like it will be sweet. I might say I wouldn’t likely do everything all at once, it can be easy to go overboard for treatment so I’d make sure to check at each step, since that seems like pretty heavy treatment for a hifi setup imo (then again my perspective has been skewed recently with speakers that suggest less room treatment than more lol)
It might be a good idea to treat your low end first so that your fundamentals are in line. Then work your way up in steps as m0n suggested. All I see from the pics are a bunch of broadband midrange absorbers and some diffusion (afaik it’s recommended to treat that last once all your other freq are good to go)
It’s probably not apparent on the plan but it starts with 2 Soffit Bass Traps stacked in each corner. They should be effective down to about 40Hz. The lower panels on the front and rear walls are also all bass traps. Treating below that is probably not cost effective (or even doable) in my room. The room node calculator I used predicts a node at 33Hz which I may just have to tame using some EQ or Room Correction in my miniDSP SHD.
That’s good advice. I do find I like a slightly overdamped listening room, though. There’s something about it that’s calming and focusing even though it might not be “ideal”.
The drawing from the architect looked a bit like the window would be off center so GIK accounted for that. I’ll make sure my builder puts it smack in the middle of the wall so we can have a symmetric arrangement of the panels.
The graph on their website suggests their effectiveness dropping rapidly below 60. So you could be missing out on anything below that. Same applies to the 244 and monster bass traps. I personally think it’s a bit misleading. I believe it’s doable in your room if you use diaphragmatic absorption just to tackle the low end. But you’d have to sacrifice space and you’re right, it’s expensive…
