Who's had a listening room built - what would you do differently?

[Sean K]

I'm about to get a dedicated room built, a single-storey extension with stud walls and a concrete floor. It will be joined to the main house only by a short (60cm) passageway, which make things a whole lot easier from a noise insulation point of view.
Considering dimensions, I initially thought of going down the sloped roof and non-parallel walls option (golden trapagon, etc.) but decided against it, put off by the talk of unpredictable and more difficult to rectify nodes, etc.
I looked at the 'golden' and Louden ratios. Fortuitously, the space I have available allows me to have internal dimensions of 2.9 x 4.3 x 6.3m – very close to Louden proportions, I think, with the intention of putting the speakers on the long wall, to give them plenty of distance from the side walls. There'll be plenty of books, LPs CDs, furnishings and other diffracting/absorbing stuff - I ain't going for the minimalist look!
Excepting a lottery win, and considering my age, this is probably the only chance I’ll get to do this while I can still hear anything above 10 kHz .
To anyone who's designed a dedicated room, with hindsight, is there anything you wished you'd thought of at the design stage?

Forgot to add, I'll be going for double-layer gib-board (plasterboard) and whatever variation of pink bats or fiberglass gives the best results for the stud walls and ceilings - advice on the latter?

 

[AndyU]

Here's an interesting video of the internals of an absorbent wall designed by Northward Acoustics. Their facebook page may have some useful ideas - many posts show construction details of studios - or their website. I know you're not designing a studio, but if I were you I'd revisit your decision to have parallel walls - seriously non parallel ones give you the opportunity to avoid early reflections completely and should have much less intrusive modes.

 

[Werner]

I have a dedicated room, though not custom built. You can learn from its faults:

1) it is 7.3 x 4.1 x 2.4 m. Speakers on the short wall. Listening seat roughly half-way down the room.
-the room should be wider
-the ceiling should be higher

2) the left speaker sees a curtained window to its side, the right speaker sees a blank wall
-this should be utterly symmetrical, so either both windows or both blank walls
(in my case the problem is that the left channel has less bass: yes, it disappears through the window; new glass may help)

Whatever you do, allow to have the speakers on the long wall AND on the short wall, providing both positions with symmetry and with sufficient mains outlets. You will have to try and listen to find the best sounding setup. And it may change when you get other speakers.




Oh, and did I mention ethernet everywhere?

 

[Sean K]

Here's if I were you I'd revisit your decision to have parallel walls - seriously non parallel ones give you the opportunity to avoid early reflections completely and should have much less intrusive modes.

Many thanks. It's hard to know what's the best route to follow, the advantage of non-parallel walls seems intuitively right, but based on what I've read (not experienced or tested, mind), there seem to be strong arguments against as well as for this, which I don't know how to resolve!

If it helps, I have pretty much free reign to use any absorbent or diffracting surfaces or structures to treat the room.

 

[Sean K]

Whatever you do, allow to have the speakers on the long wall AND on the short wall, providing both positions with symmetry and with sufficient mains outlets. You will have to try and listen to find the best sounding setup. And it may change when you get other speakers.

This seems like great advice, to allow the flexibility of at least two configurations, even without any tweaking of position. I know what you mean about asymmetry causing imbalance of response; I have been living with an L-shaped room for the last 10 years, very frustrating.

 

[Rodney gold]

I have a dedicated room , 6m x 8m x 2.3 m , I could go no higher on the ceiling as there is a slab.. I wished I had a higher ceiling
My internal walls are not solid plasterboard but are slotted and pierced acoustic panel on battens with acoustic rockwool behind .. makes for a very quiet room, looks a $million as well
http://www.acousticsolutions.co.za

Plenty corner bass traps and DSP sort out low end

Biggest mistake was the ceiling , albeit its plasterboard and does have rockwool in the void , it rattles and the 24 downlighters do not help . it is also too low to use effective diffusion panels on it

I should have used a more absorbent type of ceiling , the absorption makes it act like a higher ceiling ..

a big mistake with many other dedicated rooms i have heard is that the RT60 times are way too low as too much absorption is used, deadening the room , the panels I use do not do so

I built for symetry .. one side wall was originally 3 huge sliding glass doors , I blocked them off with glass brick instead .. light still comes in , but the glass bricks sort of emulate a bare wall .. I use heavy duty wooden venetian type blinds in front of them and can angle slats to my liking
I have one window behind me for ventilation etc , also with a slatted blind


At any rate , make sure you have a zillion plug points and some sort of hidden conduit from your listening position to the hifi .. I have a lot of cables running under my carpets.
Make sure EVERYTHING is screwed in and fastened securely .. you do not want any wall panel to rattle

Here are some pics

 

[zippy]

Seems to me the biggest advantage of a dedicated hifi room is not the construction but the opportunity to lay out the room internals to the best advantage, e.g. putting the speakers where they sound best rather than having to squeeze them between the wall and the TV as I do.

 

[Shuggie]

I have a dedicated room, though not custom built. You can learn from its faults:

1) it is 7.3 x 4.1 x 2.4 m. Speakers on the short wall. Listening seat roughly half-way down the room.
-the room should be wider
-the ceiling should be higher

2) the left speaker sees a curtained window to its side, the right speaker sees a blank wall
-this should be utterly symmetrical, so either both windows or both blank walls
(in my case the problem is that the left channel has less bass: yes, it disappears through the window; new glass may help)

Whatever you do, allow to have the speakers on the long wall AND on the short wall, providing both positions with symmetry and with sufficient mains outlets. You will have to try and listen to find the best sounding setup. And it may change when you get other speakers.




Oh, and did I mention ethernet everywhere?

Good advice. Apart from the general acoustician's rule that a critical listening room should be as large as you can make it (within reason), certainly with a taller than average ceiling height, it should also be a room that's a nice place to be, to encourage a positive and relaxed frame of mind for listening to music. So, plenty of natural light, natural ventilation, and preferably a nice view from the listening position.

 

[James]

I'm about to get a dedicated room built, a single-storey extension with stud walls and a concrete floor. It will be joined to the main house only by a short (60cm) passageway, which make things a whole lot easier from a noise insulation point of view.
Considering dimensions, I initially thought of going down the sloped roof and non-parallel walls option (golden trapagon, etc.) but decided against it, put off by the talk of unpredictable and more difficult to rectify nodes, etc.
I looked at the 'golden' and Louden ratios. Fortuitously, the space I have available allows me to have internal dimensions of 2.9 x 4.3 x 6.3m – very close to Louden proportions, I think, with the intention of putting the speakers on the long wall, to give them plenty of distance from the side walls. There'll be plenty of books, LPs CDs, furnishings and other diffracting/absorbing stuff - I ain't going for the minimalist look!
Excepting a lottery win, and considering my age, this is probably the only chance I’ll get to do this while I can still hear anything above 10 kHz .
To anyone who's designed a dedicated room, with hindsight, is there anything you wished you'd thought of at the design stage?

Forgot to add, I'll be going for double-layer gib-board (plasterboard) and whatever variation of pink bats or fiberglass gives the best results for the stud walls and ceilings - advice on the latter?

G'day John

I built my dedicated room in a new house four years ago. The dimensions are to Louden ratios of 1.5:1:2.15. With a 2.7m ceiling height, the length is 5.8m and depth is 4.05m. It has a concrete floor and double gib walls stuffed with Silencer Batts. From my perspective, I could not wish for better, except maybe stumping up the $10K needed for in-built joinery to accommodate CDs, vinyl records and my growing collection of Lego Technic sets. Thankfully, I can still fit the latter in when funds permit, or I feel sufficiently inclined to DIY.

The picture looks trapezoid, but it's perfectly rectangular. The windows are behind the photographic plane.

 

[demotivated]

It depends on your choice of listening near or far. I prefer distant listening. This means a rectangular room such as golden ratios does not work in a normal uk scaled house. You are either close to the speakers+ front/back with large gaps to side walls [this is how people listen when they have problem rooms] or you are firing down a tunnel. I don't know all the preferred ratios but choose the 'squarest' that is recommended. Even a large room like Rodney's is nearer square than a golden ratio. The best listening room I had was a 1 st floor bedroom with carpeted wood floor/stud plaster walls/ceiling - almost a lossy cube. Around 3 sides was a corridor with masonry walls. This gave a room within a room for better bass [outer solid walls] and reverb loss [inner walls]. As other have said, place lots of pipes in floors and wall so you can rearrange things neatly [put centred string at 3 times pipe length inside to pull wires through].

As James posted, 1.5,1,2.15 sounds practical for UK scaled rooms

 

[GT]

I would recommend not to use panelled wood floors. Carpet the entire floor area and use a good quality carpet with a thick underlay, hessian based if you can get it. I had to use special thick industrial grade underlay that would take the weight of my 950kg speakers without compressing too much. This works really well.

If you are going to have a concrete floor which is good if you can, I would shutter off the whole area where the equipment is going to reside and make this a separate area from the main floor so there is break in the concrete mass from where the speaker and the equipment is placed.

Depending on your speakers I would fire the speakers down the room. Try to treat the room acoustically and avoid the use of any DSP.

 

[Purité Audio]

There doesn't appear to be a 'perfect' room in terms of size or ratio, but as has been mentioned if you can give yourself at least two possible options for siting the loudspeakers .
Once the room is complete you can measure and experiment with positioning ,and any acoustic treatment if required.
Keith.

 

[Tony L]

Building a listening room is something that has always really appealed but I'll never be able to afford to do. I imagine it is a scary prospect as you can't hear it first. Over the years I feel I've pretty much gained the ability to tell if I'll like the sound of a room on an estate agent visit and have rejected many potential homes as I was certain I'd never get a sound I wanted in that space. I only ever seem to like systems firing across a room and always hate uneven or worse L-shaped rooms. If building myself I'd go for golden ratio with the ability to house free-space speakers firing across the room, and ideally a large enough space to be able to tune the distance of the seat from the rear wall as that is a massive factor IME (something I am currently rather too cramped to do). Just a couple of feet here can make a huge difference. Get the room right and there is no need to fart about with room-correction processing etc IMO, i.e. you can keep a clean analogue signal path.

 

[JTC]

This may sound disingenuous, but it's because of room issues (acoustic, aesthetic and domestic) that I scaled back my loudspeaker ambitions and decided to concentrate on headphone listening. Much cheaper (especially if the alternative requires dedicated rooms to be built) and no room issues. Different, not necessarily better, but certainly easier to justify.

If I were building a dedicated room, I'd design in adequate bass trapping from the off, probably with the 'live/dead' end approach. However, I wont be able to try this for some time as it's not possible for me at present...

 

[GavinB]

No-one's mentioned their arrangements for electricity. Perfect opportunity for a separate spur.

 

[Sean K]

Seems to me the biggest advantage of a dedicated hifi room is not the construction but the opportunity to lay out the room internals to the best advantage, e.g. putting the speakers where they sound best rather than having to squeeze them between the wall and the TV as I do.

TBH, just this would be a fantastic advantage on what I have now; having the freedom to experiment with position and keep varying it

 

[Sean K]

G'day John

I built my dedicated room in a new house four years ago. The dimensions are to Louden ratios of 1.5:1:2.15. With a 2.7m ceiling height, the length is 5.8m and depth is 4.05m. It has a concrete floor and double gib walls stuffed with Silencer Batts. From my perspective, I could not wish for better, except maybe stumping up the $10K needed for in-built joinery to accommodate CDs, vinyl records and my growing collection of Lego Technic sets. Thankfully, I can still fit the latter in when funds permit, or I feel sufficiently inclined to DIY.

The picture looks trapezoid, but it's perfectly rectangular. The windows are behind the photographic plane.

Kia Ora James

That's very similar dimensions to what I'm planning, so that's very reassuring to hear that it's working very well. How do silence bats differ from standard? Are they just denser and thus more mass?

PS Nice speakers, Harvey Norman?

 

[Tony L]

If I were building a dedicated room, I'd design in adequate bass trapping from the off, probably with the 'live/dead' end approach. However, I wont be able to try this for some time as it's not possible for me at present...

I'm pretty much convinced that a good 'golden ratio' room will need no more than a light 'live-end/dead-end' treatment on all surfaces, e.g. a large record/book collection, curtains, good carpets etc. Certainly no bass trapping or EQ unless really hopeless ported speakers where the port frequency hits a room node are a factor. Back wall bounce is a big issue in smallish UK rooms IME, e.g. my system sounds a bit over-ripe from the listening seat on some stuff, but move your head forwards a foot and the slight bass prominence vanishes completely hence my suggestion above to consider this a huge factor. I've noticed this in so many systems, in fact all where the seat is against the rear wall.

I'd also caution paying too much attention to measurements, they are certainly useful in a broad-brush sense, but just moving the mic an inch or two in pretty much any direction can give a radically different result, e.g. +/-5db or more at some frequencies. It is fascinating to see, but I'd always trust my ears more as you are always working with an average perception there.

 

[Sean K]

Rodney, what a stunning room and I can only see the speakers.

I'm going for 2.9m height, which is as high as I can go without altering the ratio to the width. I'd love to go bigger overall but am limited by a steep bank at the back of the section (plot). I can go longer and higher but I think that would make for an unusual feel.

You've gone for absorbancy (damping?) rather than mass with the wall materials, is that because isolation was not such a concern?

 

[Sean K]

I had to use special thick industrial grade underlay that would take the weight of my 950kg speakers

I thought this was a typo until i clicked on the link to your website