ACOUSTICS: using the room as an instrument
So often underestimated or misunderstood, acoustics can be a gamechanger, the difference between a room which is a pleasure to inhabit, and a space which feels unfriendly and noisy. Bright and hard surfaces won’t do your audio any favours, just as some modern décors do such horrible things with the squeals of playing children that you can end up with a beautifully sleek but effectively unuseable space for family rooms.
A well-treated space, on the other hand, gives your sound system the best chance to shine, while also creating a soft pillow of atmosphere even when the room is not in entertainment mode. David Moseley of Wavetrain Cinemas has told us that his clients often use their home cinemas for other purposes — reading or playing or just hanging out — because the acoustics are so calming compared to other ‘brighter’ areas of the home. It’s just a nice place to be.
A proper acoustic treatment can come at significant cost, although it can be minimised by a good initial design for the room, while in a darkened home cinema you won’t notice treatments anyway, or they can be hidden entirely behind acoustically-transparent fabrics. And if they do stay out on show, the good news is that today’s acoustic panels don’t all look like you’ve attached egg cartons to the wall. Pictured right are RPG Acoustics solutions as used in the Abacus Acoustic room shown above; these are gorgeous-looking surfaces incorporating Modffractal nested diffusers and a FlutterFree-W high-frequency diffusing plank that can follow curves.
“It’s Manfred Schroeder-based mathematics,” explains Abacus Acoustic’s Ian McGrath. “Schroeder was into microwaves and came up with a solution for broadband diffusive units that are in periods and wells, and what you get off it is a spherical wavefront — no key pitches in them. The first-order reflections from these arrays produce a broadband spherical wave front which lifts the reverberant level, giving depth to the direct signal while applying control of the decay rates. Old cinemas with their ornate walls and ceiling provided a lot of diffusion. Dr Peter D’Antonio — the founder of RPG — developed this into these intelligently practical products.”