There is a build doing the rounds that spends its first paragraph on acoustic treatment rather than gear, and it deserves the attention. Dedicated closed-off room, roughly 18 by 14 feet, and the owner treated the ceiling, the walls and the floor. Not foam squares on the front wall. His description of the result is the giveaway: no echo, and bass that does not go boomy or muddy.
Gear is a BenQ W2720i onto a 120-inch screen, a Denon AVC-A1H doing the processing, KEF R11s across the front. Good kit. But the reason that room will sound better than most rooms with more expensive kit in them is the treatment, and that is the thing almost nobody budgets for at the start. It is the least photogenic money you will ever spend and it does more for what you hear than the next amplifier up.
The floor being treated is the unusual part. Most people carpet a theater and consider it done, which handles some of the high frequency slap but not much else. Doing the floor properly alongside the ceiling is what kills the vertical flutter between two hard parallel surfaces, and that is exactly the echo people try to fix afterwards by stuffing panels behind the seats where they do the least good.
The order matters too. Treat first, then set speaker positions, then run room correction. Doing it backwards means your correction is spending its budget fixing reflections you could have absorbed for less. Anyone here treated a finished room after the fact and found it worth the disruption, or is it a build-time-only job?
Gear is a BenQ W2720i onto a 120-inch screen, a Denon AVC-A1H doing the processing, KEF R11s across the front. Good kit. But the reason that room will sound better than most rooms with more expensive kit in them is the treatment, and that is the thing almost nobody budgets for at the start. It is the least photogenic money you will ever spend and it does more for what you hear than the next amplifier up.
The floor being treated is the unusual part. Most people carpet a theater and consider it done, which handles some of the high frequency slap but not much else. Doing the floor properly alongside the ceiling is what kills the vertical flutter between two hard parallel surfaces, and that is exactly the echo people try to fix afterwards by stuffing panels behind the seats where they do the least good.
The order matters too. Treat first, then set speaker positions, then run room correction. Doing it backwards means your correction is spending its budget fixing reflections you could have absorbed for less. Anyone here treated a finished room after the fact and found it worth the disruption, or is it a build-time-only job?
