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In Reply to: RE: open spaces in room? posted by siramazing on February 17, 2008 at 12:27:58
Messy question and no clear answer—apart from go full height for the walls—because the openings are likely to have plusses and minuses attached to them.
On the plus side, openings such as archway entrances to other rooms give bigger air volumes which helps with the sense of spaciousness, they reduce wall area which weakens the room mode or standing wave between the wall with the opening and the opposite wall, and they introduce another room mode at a lower frequency than you could otherwise obtain in the room.
On the minus side the increased total space is likely to increase reverberation time which can interfere with the clarity of some music, reflections from the coupled space enter the room and can cause problems including cancellations and suckouts, and non-symmetrical openings create non-symmetrical reflection patterns which can unbalance stereo imaging. The fact that the room can't be sealed also makes it harder to pressurise at bass frequencies and you lose some room support at very low frequencies as a result (loss of 'cabin gain'). There's a chance that 1' openings at the top of each wall, which are effectively 'slot openings' into other spaces, will act as a Helmholtz resonator and produce narrow band bass absorption. Helmholtz resonators have a narrow bandwidth and if this occurs you may be lucky and have the absorption bandwidth not match the frequency of any musical notes, or you could be unlucky and have some bass notes go missing in action.
Short of having some high level acoustic modelling software it's probably impossible to predict what the results will be in your room. It's unlikely you'd get away with no adverse results but if the adverse results you get aren't critical to you, the benefits may outweigh the negatives. On the other hand it could be a disaster.
So the choice is between having the walls full height with predictable results and having them stop 1' short with unpredictable results which could possibly be quite damaging.
I've got an L-shaped room which has 2 permanently open archway entrances, one into a hallway and the other into an alcove adjacent to and open to the kitchen and dining/living room area. There are problems with the room but, on balance, I think I gain from the archways. Archways aren't narrow 1' openings, however, and mine are 5-6' wide and taller than most doorways so they're going to function quite differently to the openings you're contemplating. As I said, the results are going to be quite difficult to predict.
When faced with a choice between a predictable and an unpredictable result, I'd tend to favour the predictable in this case.
David Aiken
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