In Reply to: What sound changes when going from carpet to hardwood floors? posted by artemus on July 28, 2015 at 11:08:29:
From a professional perspective, you haven't provided enough information to make an informed guess, other than to say that hardwood flooring will reflect - rather than absorb - more mid and upper frequencies than your carpet. How much more in what frequency ranges depends on the type of carpet and pad you currently have. Whether or not this will be an "issue" also depends on what the other surfaces of the room "look like" acoustically, and the furnishings.
Fortunately, you can calculate an approximation of all of this by finding a table of absorption coefficients of various materials at various frequencies, and using the Eyring RT60 formula (not the Sabine formula) to see how making that change will approximately affect your reverberation time. Such tables are readily available from books on acoustics, ASTM and ISO, and manufacturers of surface materials. (You're not likely to get data from your sofa, rug or wall hanging provider. LOL)
Note that, as a separate but related exercise, you can also use the absorption coefficients (keeping in mind the variation of absorption with regard to the angle of incidence of the sound) to calculate an approximation of an average specular reflection from the floor to your listening area. In other words, you can calculate/simulate the spectral difference between your current flooring and the new flooring.
That's most of the long answer. The short answer is, as I wrote, you havenn't provided enough data. So, I'll just say that the new floor will be more reflective at mid-upper frequencies (~500 Hz and up), increasingly so with higher frequencies.
A couple of months ago, I recommended four books which I think every "audiophile" should own. Some posters poo-poo-d it, saying that's for engineers or room acoustics designers or such. Yet, many of the thread topics in the General/Speakers/High-Efficiency Speakers forums are directly adressed in those four books. So, I'm going to bring that thread back up. I think it's in General.
:)
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Follow Ups
- RE: What sound changes when going from carpet to hardwood floors? - Inmate51 14:33:45 07/29/15 (0)