Continued from page 1
Acoustic Improvements – These encompass a whole host of different things, from acoustically treating
interior of
room, to quieting down your projector. Whenever you lower your noise floor, you effectively increase your dynamic range. In addition, acoustic treatments can dramatically improve dialogue intelligibility, bass response and imaging.
One of
best in
“bang for
buck” category is to put a 1” or 2” thick, acoustic panel on
two side walls of
theater to reduce
“first reflection”. The first reflection is
sound that leaves
front speaker and takes a longer path to your ears by bouncing off
side wall on
way. Since it takes a longer path, it takes more time and arrives later than
direct sound that went straight from
speakers to your ears. The net effect is a loss of dialog intelligibility.
Another, even cheaper, tweak is to optimize your subwoofer placement. For years people have been told “Bass is non-directional. You can put your sub anywhere”. That is, simply, BS. While low bass is fairly non-directional,
tonal quality and amount of bass is tremendously affected by subwoofer placement.
A simple trick is to place
sub at
listening position (at ear height), then move around
room (at sub height) until you find
place with
best bass quality. If possible, that’s where you put
sub.
Keeping
ambient noise level in your home theater is critical to maintain
"suspension of disbelief" you've tried so hard to achieve. In addition, lower ambient noise will enable you to hear
softer portions of
movie's sound track without turning up your home theater's volume so loud. This has
effect of increasing
available dynamic range (the difference between
loudest and softest sounds your audio system can reproduce).
One cheap tweak is to build a hush box around your projector to minimize noise from it. Make sure you use adequate ventilation to maintain proper cooling. That cannot be emphasized enough. As a partial measure, without having to build a whole box, you can place acoustic absorption material on
ceiling above
projector. If your projector is close to
ceiling, this will kill
noise that normally bounces off
ceiling and into
listening room. I hope this gets you started down
path to even more enjoyment from your home theater and saves you some money at
same time.
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Steve has 15 yrs in electronics. He is a CEDIA certified designer with ISF and THX certificates. Experience includes: installer and programmer; system designer; business unit director for an a/v importer; sales rep for a CE distributor; and principal of a $1.5M+ CEDIA firm. He's now senior sales engineer for Digital Cinema Design in Redmond, WA. See him at The Home Theater and Automation Guide