What about Acoustical Room Dimensions?

#1

I would like to tell about one (to my opinion) interesting thing, concerning to room acoustics. Being an acoustician, when I have heard somebody (an architect or interior designer), who did presentation about his wonderful stereo, home cinema or recording studio acoustics, I have asked him, why did you take these dimensions of your room? There were many different answers and a simple thought came to my mind, that among all possible stereo positions (for example) for the room there will be a number of such, which have a given value of FR deviations for low frequencies range. Let's call this number as Spread Number. As we have initial room dimensions set, which could be reduced by a little bit (this is always limited by some conditions), than there are many options, where each set will correspond his SN. And it means, that there is set with minimum and maximum SN for these initial room dimensions, deviation limit, kind of LF sources (stereo, for instance), don't you? Evidently, set for maximum correctly to call Acoustical Room Dimensions. What do you think about it?

#2

sure, a recursion process to get to a set of "best" options would be nice. there are several room sizing programs, and some include proper speaker / location specifications as parameters, and iteratively work to identify the best size and locations. and some can work with existing rooms (more common for homes) and propose best locations. what would be really useful (for existing) is an application which can scan the room for response, resonances, etc to feed the processing (like REW for example :-)

).

for new (green field) rooms, then being able to compute the best sizing would be excellent, and perhaps some real world data on proposed structure would add more reliable results. adding in the ability to include baffle / speaker / absorption parameters would also save a lot of time...

my current process of using several spreadsheets, BEM/FEM analysis, etc takes a significant amount of time to get to a good result.

some happy reading on some current thinking on this topic.

#3

Thank you, Glenn for this article. To my side, the idea to use FEM for The Room Acoustical Dimensions was realized by me and my colleagues (ACCON acoustics Finland) almost 6 years ago for LF range. Since then in my life were many events and I couldn't finish this research by creating Ccode. But I want somebody have finished this method, because the idea is simple and clear.

#4

have you considered partnering with ODEON etc to see if it's something they could implement into their already expansive package of room simulation functionality? get a license fee instead of building and maintaing it yourselves? partner with the other ACCON groups in the EU?

#5

For my work on large acoustics projects, it's quite enough for me to use my legal EASE, CaraCAD, REW, INSUL, ARTA, RTA, ETF (by Doug Plumb) and some handmade calculators. The number of small room acoustics projects now is so small in my country, that there is not necessity to purchase ODEON (not cheap) code for these aims. Anyway, thank you a lot, Glenn for the advice.

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