Archive for the ‘Acoustics’ Category
In many of the sports stadiums around the country are living examples of bad acoustic design. The acoustics in these places are so bad that when children play at being sports players, they mimic the bad sound. “Now batting…batting… batting… shortstop… shortstop… shortstop… Nomar Garciaparra…parra…parra.” This effect is known as echo and it results from sound waves reflecting off surfaces within the park.
The baseball stadium is surrounded by walls that make perfect acoustic reflectors. Often the sound systems are old and consist of a battery of speakers in a few places, or even just one area of the ball park that are loud enough to cover the entire space. When you have a single sound source projected over a wide area and surrounded by acoustically reflective surfaces, that’s a recipe for bad sound. Most homes, however, use this same set-up on a smaller scale for their home stereo or home theater system.
The speakers are at the front of the room and the room is enclosed by solid walls all around. Home theater surround speakers generally play a different audio track than the front speakers so they don’t do much to help this situation. Of course, the distances in the average home are smaller than those of the average sports stadium so the delay on the echo is much shorter and can be hard to detect as an echo. Even so, it still interferes with the quality of the sound reaching the listener’s ears.
Short-delay echoes have the effect of making sounds less crisp and distinct. They can blur the fricatives that help make human speech easily understandable. Acoustic reflections may also alter the tonal balance of the sound they reflect so that it sounds unnatural or just a little bit off. Many people will find that they have trouble understanding the words of a movie, both during quiet scenes and scenes where there is music or other noise occurring in the movie. The usual solution is just to turn it up. While this general helps make the voices more understandable, the volume of the effects and louder passages can then become overwhelming.
A better solution is to try to reduce the echoes that are causing the problem in the first place. In a baseball stadium, the solution would be to distribute speakers throughout the ballpark so that every seat is subjected to direct sound at a moderate volume from a nearby speaker. The direct sound would override echoes especially if the volume of distant speakers was reduced. In a home, that may not be an option. Instead, the echoes can be reduced through the use of room acoustic treatments. These acoustically absorbent panels can be added along open walls to absorb the sound rather than reflecting it back into the room as an unwanted echo. Adding heavy curtains, carpeting and other soft, acoustically absorptive decorative elements to the room can help as well.
After all the last thing you want when guests leave your home theater is for them to mimic the acoustic faults of your home theater room the way kids do with sports stadiums.
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