Proper Room Designs/Dimensions for Best Acoutics

Keep asking.

Handy - if you have any good audio stores near you, you might want to take a look at what works for them.

One audio store I frequent that appears to have a very good setup for their very expensive systems - has one room as follows

- 16ft x 30ft with a 9-10 ft ceiling
- the speakers are positioned across one 16 ft wall
- they are approximately 7-8 ft from the wall behind them
- the listening position is around 8ft from the other 16ft wall

They are using the massive Sonus Faber's.

They appear to use very little in the way of sound absorbing panels or bass traps - other than carpeted floors and pictures on the walls.

Imaging is the best I've heard

Hope that helps

panels

I live close to Nashville and my dealer also has a great listening room. They have a couple of panels on the walls, with a trayed ceiling and some corners that are 45 degree angles, instead of 90's. I have heard Wilson speakers, with Martin Logan's sitting right beside them and am amazed how good the sound is. They have a lot of concrete also, covered with carpet etc. People with basements for sound rooms, have no idea how lucky they are-specially, if they play vinyl.

Handy - don't let yourself get hung-up on 90 degree corners - they are easily remedied
- you can probably make a very effective bass trap with sonotube and soft coverings, like carpet
- a solution I currently employ was to build two panels almost floor to ceiling height and 15" wide with soft materials and place them at approx 10 degree angle to the side walls in the corner - approximately 4"-5" from the wall behind the speaker

But the effectiveness of this also depends greatly on the speaker.

e.g.
- one speaker had a rear firing 2" port and the bass resonance was really bad until I "adapted" the port to fire downwards.
- another had a front firing port, which was not so much of a problem - other than at the wall behind the listener
- my current speaker has a 2" x 9" port, so the bass is much less of a problem than most other rear firing ports and the screens take care of what issue there used to be.

I would not personally use 45 degree corners because
- they too can create even bigger problems - reflected sound
- from a resale perspective it just looks weird

Another approach is to use reflective panels e.g. two panels at slightly different angles closer to 25-30 degrees to the side walls
- that way any reflected sound gets scattered
- the rear of the panels can be covered with soft materials (carpet) to absorb sound reflected from the walls behind them.

One member with a large room reported that using carved wooden screens worked very well behind the speakers.

Unfortunately there's a ton of different ways to skin this particular cat.

I would build a rectangular room and deal with any issues as they arise
- a larger room seems to mitigate a lot of "Small Room" issues
- Materials used for floor and ceiling play a huge role in keeping echoes to a minimum
- a larger room can cause echoes, but gives you more "tuning" flexibility e.g. using reflective panels and absorbing panels
- a smaller room reduces options to absorbing panels and too many of those can lead to a dead, or flat sound.
- but speaker choice has a lot to do with the final acoustic tuning requirements and options.

I'm currently looking at deflection panels at the moment - finding one that is "pretty" on the WAF scale and easy to install is a challenge.

Hope this provided some food for thought :-)