|
Audio Asylum Thread Printer Get a view of an entire thread on one page |
For Sale Ads |
Hey folks,Toying with the idea of building a new home. I figure that I may as well design a living room suitable for the music I love. Does anyone have any suggestions on books that discuss home accoustical design?
TIA :)
Follow Ups:
Look over the Audio Xpress (Old Colony Sound Labs) site. There's a pretty good room acoustics design program available there for reasonable price. As I recall you can use it to design room size and get analysis of room modes and freq., speaker location and even some info on acoustic treatment placements. (Not sure about that last item, BTW). Check 'em out.
Good coverage of acoustics including room node info and discussion of room shapes and proportions, plus methods of acoustic treatment and their impact.PS: it probably assumes use of normal dynamic speakers - if you're using dipoles or other speakers with different dispersion characteristics, you may need to modify things to meet the needs/characteristics of your particular speakers.
David Aiken
This book does not discuss speaker placement, and speaker placement is usually affected by room size. If you're building, you have the option of thinking about how you'd like to position the speakers in relation to the listening position (speaker width, listening distance, listening position in relation to rear wall, etc) and then use one of the speaker placement theories to determine the room size needed to support that placement. Stereophile Archives has Jonathan Scull's "Fine Tunes" survey of speaker placement info.I remember seeing a formula on the Genelec site in one of their FAQs which enabled you to calculate how far in front of the wall the speaker should be if you wished to avoid cancellations from the wall reflection. For my Dynaudio Contour 1.3 SEs with a -3 dB point of 37 Hz, that amounted to a bit over 10 feet if I remember correctly so that would imply a room around 22 ft long (Immedia - Audio Physic method), 33 ft long (rule of thirds), 44 ft long (placement at quarter length for bass reinforcement), or ... if you insert figures calculated from some other theory. As you can see, trying to work back to a room size from speaker placement info can result in some very different figures. It's probably easier to pick a room size that'll fit your house plans, ensure the room dimensions are reasonably proportioned, and then do the usual approach to speaker placement within that space since you're probably going to have to fudge things a bit anyway if you calculate the room size from a desired speaker placement anyway.
David Aiken
I remeber an article they did a couple of years ago where one fo the the reviewers talked about the perfect listening room. Then there was a fine tunes in one of the issues where George Cardas talked about improving concert hall acoustics. Both articles talked about curves to every wall and the substances that those walls should be made out of. If you have a friend with a bunch of old copies of Stereophile magazine, then dig through them. I know its not in book form, but it may be able to help you out.
This might not be what you are looking for, but you can get some good books at you local library. I just checked out the Handbook for sound engineers, It has lots of info on room acustics.
This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors: