Most rooms ruin your sound quality because of acoustics. It can be hard to figure out the fixes, but Sonitus USA solves it for you with pre-engineered acoustical tuning systems. Now you can experience ultra-clear sound!
Get free valuable insights and tips from our experts.
Sign Up NowSchedule Free Consultation
What do I know about home theaters?
After working on over 1,000 projects during my 35 year career in the AV business, including key positions at Dolby and Lucasfilm THX, I have a bit of insight into the things that really affect your home theater's sound quality, and what you can do to improve them! Check out the top 10:
More than 50% of the sound quality you perceive comes from the acoustical character of the room. How come? More than 50% of what enters your ears is from sound waves that have bounced around the room surfaces after leaving your speakers! It stands to reason, then, that you should pay some serious attention to those room surfaces.
Acoustics may seem like a complicated and confusing art form, but by following some simple rules, you can in fact get great results. Apply absorption to about 15% of your wall and ceiling surface area. The absorption material should be at least 2” thick (5 cm) dense fibrous material and should be spread out evenly throughout the room. Apply scattering surfaces (diffusion) to another 15-20% of your wall and ceiling area. Diffusion should be at least 2” (preferably 4-6”) deep and interleaved with the absorption.
Use 2D diffusion (scatters into a plane) towards the front of the room and 3D diffusion (scatters into a hemisphere) towards the back and on the ceiling. Include some form of bass absorption, usually placed in the front or back corners of the room. Bass traps should be made of dense fiber foam material 18-24” deep. Models that have a semi-rigid front plate offer improved performance. For recommended layouts of these acoustic modules, take a look at this website: http://www.sonitususa.com/samplelayouts
When possible, try to get a hold of the absorption and scattering coefficients of the modules before you buy - appearance does not always equal performance. Products that look very similar may perform very differently, and you want to get the best value for your money!
There are dozens of tuning steps involved in setting up a home theater sound system, and you better get all of these right if you want a good return on your investment. Proper calibration starts with configuring the component settings and debugging any connection errors. You also want to verify that all the products work as advertised.
You then need to correct what the room's acoustical thumbprint is doing to mess up the frequency response of each speaker. That’s ideally accomplished by carefully measuring and analyzing their responses, moving them around for best results (see below), and setting correction filters in a digital equalizer. Some of the “robotic” auto-EQ schemes can work, but you should use these as judiciously as you would a microwave oven to prepare a fine meal. It could all come out rubbery and tasteless.
After equalization, you set the acoustical levels of all the speakers to film reference levels (85 dBC SPL for 0 dBr/-20 dBFS input signal; 75 dBC for internal test tones) by adjusting the channel level trims in your surround decoder or external digital equalizer.
Finally, you synchronize the arrival times of the direct sound from the speakers to your main seat. That is done by entering the speaker distances into the surround decoder or setting the appropriate digital delay times in your equalizer. Of course, you should also listen to your favorite program material to make sure it sounds amazing! A calibration that covers all these points takes up to three full days and requires sophisticated test equipment. It is not for the faint of heart - probably best entrusted to a trained audio engineer. You can reach out to www.pmiltd.com for assistance, or locate someone trained through the HAA https://homeacoustics.org.
Some speakers are just not up to the task of filling a theater with dynamic, accurate, and reliable sound. You need a system with enough horsepower the proper frequency response, and full sound power to get the full experience. Ideally, the three front speakers should be concealed behind an acoustically transparent projection screen at mid-height of the image, and they should fire down to all the listeners with consistent results at all frequencies. The front speakers handle the majority of the sound pressure; each one needs to produce 105 dB at the listening area. Those are serious levels!
Front speakers also need to fully and competently cover the entire listening area with no losses in any region of their spectrum. That takes some careful and sophisticated speaker engineering work. The surround and immersive speakers should also be of high quality, and their tonal and temporal performance needs to match the front speakers for best integration and immersive experience. However, their sound level requirements are eased off to between 99 and 102 dB depending on the channel assignments.
Finally, the subwoofer scheme needs to play up to 115 dB without fail and to produce that seat rumbling pressure throughout the entire listening area. That takes a lot more power than you may think! It is best handled by dividing and conquering using multiple smaller subwoofers instead of a single giant one. An ideal starting point is four subwoofers in the four corners of the room, fed by the same signal but with the ability to independently adjust the levels, delays, and frequency response. See the range of speaker systems at www.grimani.tv for products born and bred to produce high-quality results.
The best speakers in the world will not sound good if they aren’t aimed at the seating area. This applies to all speakers around the room, but it is particularly important for the Center speaker since it carries the majority of the film soundtrack information. Testing for proper aiming is pretty easy: play some pink noise through each speaker in turn. Verify that it sounds consistent throughout the listening area at seated ear height. You can get pink noise test signals from many different sources, including the TK51 disc, the Dolby Atmos Demo Disk, and the Apple TV Studio Six Digital app. Aiming the speakers is a matter of using the right brackets, installing shims, etc. - whatever it takes to point the speakers at their intended radiation zones.
You wouldn’t believe how much the sound of a speaker changes based on its position in the room. Even movements of 6" can have a profound effect! Your goal should be to position the speakers to achieve smooth, neutral frequency response as outlined above in “Calibration.” At the same time, the speakers need to be at specific places relative to the screen and seats. This can make for a maddening set of compromises and contradictions. You have to play within the limits of the rules. The following diagram shows idealized angles for all the speakers - if you didn’t have to worry about room acoustics:
You can in fact move all of these at least 6" (15cm), and maybe a bit more for some channels, without noticing much of a change in the sound positioning. So go ahead and experiment. A good spectrum analyzer with proper test signals will help you get through the process, and this is where digital room correction equalization and room acoustical modules will also help. Try https://www.roomeqwizard.com/ along with a simple but effective UMM6 USB test microphone.
The interaction between the room and subwoofers is even more dramatic. Changes of 1' (30cm) in subwoofer placement can have a 20 dB effect on the sound level at some frequencies. Take a look at this webinar for more than you ever wanted to know about subwoofer locations:
Don’t believe the legend that, since bass is omnidirectional, you can place a subwoofer anywhere. That may be true outdoors, but once you put walls and a ceiling around the subwoofer, it will be subject to acoustical standing wave resonances. Placement is everything. As previously noted, divide and conquer by using multiple smaller subs in the corners, fed by the same signal but with the ability to independently adjust levels, delays, and frequency response. A spectrum analyzer scheme is required, and some audio engineering chops really come in handy!
Film soundtracks and music can have a wide dynamic range of sound up to 100 dB. That means some sounds are very loud while others are very subtle. If you don’t want to miss the small sonic nuances that make up the velvet of the experience, you need to keep the background noise in your room at or below 20 dB (NC). 10 dB is even better but can be very hard to achieve. A simple test is to plug your ears with your fingers for at least 10 seconds, then unplug and listen. You will suddenly notice all the background noise.
Ventilation, heating, and cooling are common culprits, as are refrigerators, plumbing, traffic, wind, and other environmental sources. Bottom line? You need to get rid of all of it if you are to achieve audio nirvana. Shut off the A/C and fridge when you are watching a movie, or engage the services of good professionals to help reduce the noise (www.pmiltd.com).
The sound at various seating locations changes in much the same way that speakers change when you move them around the room. This is especially true for lower frequencies, as the standing waves and speaker-to-boundary interference effects are very location-dependent. Try moving your seats a bit forward or back in the room and take note of the effect. Using an analyzer with a good microphone will confirm your observations (see #5 above). While we’re on the topic of seats, a headrest with leather or vinyl surface placed near your ears will totally mess up the higher frequencies due to short sound reflections hitting back at your ears. Use lower headrests or seats with upholstery rather than reflective surfaces. You can also use headrests with perforated leather, but the perforation pattern needs to be appropriate to allow high frequencies to pass through. That means many small holes close together.
A lot is said about the sound quality of wiring - mostly by the industry that promotes expensive "high-end" interconnects and speaker cables. I won’t engage in that dialog here, but instead say that there are some important rules to follow that will make a good deal of difference in your room.
First off, speaker wire. Copper is not a perfect conductor of electricity; it introduces a small resistance to the flow of signal between your amplifiers and speakers. The longer the wire, and the thinner the diameter, the more resistance it creates. A good rule is to stay under 0.2 ohms for the roundtrip loop resistance from amplifier "+" terminal > speaker > amplifier "-" terminal. Given typical wire construction, this translates to: 16AWG for runs less than 25' 14AWG for runs between 25' and 50" 12AWG for runs between 50' and 100' Dual 12AWG (not 10AWG) for runs between 100' and 200'. For runs longer than 200 feet: Get the amplifier closer to the speaker!
Second, line level wiring. If possible, use balanced interfaces, which usually have XLR connectors but sometimes barrier strips or phoenix connectors. Balanced is less prone to hum, and it can offer lower noise floor. If you use single-ended “RCA” type connections, make sure they aren’t longer than 20' and don’t run alongside power supply or other high-current electrical signal wiring. Single-ended connections are not very good at rejecting unwanted interference, so they pick up noise along the way; just be careful where you run the wires. If you need to run long single-ended wires, look for wiring that claims to be low capacitance - about 20 pF/ft. For longer runs, you can also run “Balun” converters that use internal transformers to do their job.
See https://muxlab.com/product/stereo-hi-fi-balun for a very cool product that uses Cat5 wiring.
A lot has also been said about the superior nature of “separate" surround decoders and amplifiers versus integrated amplifiers and receivers. Much of that is legend from over 40 years ago! Today’s all-in-one receivers provide amazing sound, and in fact reduce interference from not having as many points of connection along the way. That being said, the manufacturers of separate components do put a bit more care into the quality of the componentry and input/output interfaces, so you may notice a modest improvement in sound quality.
The biggest benefit of running a system with separates is that you can insert a digital signal processor equalizer stage between them, or use a combination EQ-plus-amplifier product. This will allow you to custom-tailor your speakers to your room. You can fine-tune the frequency response, levels, and time synchronization in ways not usually available with receivers. Some people claim that adding an EQ will "pollute" the sound, but that is also legend from over 40 years ago. Products made today work incredibly well - I have never noticed any detectability in blind A/B comparisons. See these product lines: www.ashly.com , www.minidsp.com/
You bought great speakers. You have the amplifier that just got glowing reviews. You’re listening to high bit-rate music streams. Your wants are simple. You work hard. You spent a mint. You simply want better sound from your system. You’re told it’s in there, waiting to get out. It’s just not coming together. Get our free report and learn how to avoid wasting any more time and money.
