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…is to have French doors centered at the back of the room. But this is worse than awful for sound control, because on the back wall directly behind the listeners we need huge bass traps. Unless, of course, the double doors are going to be left open to vent the bass out of the listening room.

But usually this is not so doable. There are other arrangements for doors and entries to help with the back of the room.

Since we have an independent room, it’s usually easy to do some sort of interesting ceiling, usually lower above the speakers and opening up to a wider volume above and behind the listener.

The wall studs and ceiling joists need to be either rigid and inflexible or not rigid and flexible. Mechanically it’s not a problem either way. Rigid means the neighbors do not hear the bass and flexible means the neighbors do hear the bass. We are again discussing the neighborhood. These systems are so powerful that we have the listening room, then we have the home that is connected to it and then we have the neighboring homes nearby and all of this needs to be paid attention to, discussed and agreed to in advance.

The front 1/3rd of the room is very bass trapped along with the back walls of the room. There needs to be some vertical control added to the front of the room, ceiling-mounted bass traps or some architectural tricks that get that same job done. We have to eliminate or calm down the uncontrolled buildup of lateral and vertical early reverberation up there in the front 1/3rd of the room. The side walls are for imaging, ambience and spaciousness acoustic fitment. Usually a blend of mid-bass absorption and specular treble diffusion. Remember, you want specular coherent reflections, not random phase distorted, or resonant incoherent reflections.

Then the back walls are where the deep, large bass traps go. There are two reflective zones, kicker reflection areas that illuminate the reflectors on the side wall acoustics.

It is sometimes possible to have an open-plan listening room…

Tune in next time as we conclude Art’s take on Hifi room construction.

Thanks for reading, see you next time!

~ASC Team