Why you should be considering acoustic treatment products for your home theatre?

Would a recording studio mix your precious music in a space that hadn’t been acoustically treated? Of course not. People spend thousands of dollars on amazing speaker systems, award winning amplifiers, high definition DVD / SACD players, expensive speaker cables and spend nothing on the treating the acoustic space of the room in which all of this high-end equipment is installed. With quality audio equipment and carefully designed acoustic solutions, your system can have a controlled and rich bottom end (bass), warm midrange and a silky smooth top end (treble). Acoustic treatment is one of the most powerful ways of ensuring the quality of your sound system is maximised. Many of our clients now have sound systems that deliver a more superior listening experience than most commercial movie theatres.

What is Acoustic Treatment?

A lot of people think that acoustic treatment is “sound proofing” a room so you can’t hear what’s going on outside. This is just one aspect of acoustic treatment. The other is providing balance to the frequency spectrum of the room to ensure the sound is being reproduced exactly as it was intended to be heard.

By placing custom built acoustic baffles, diffusers and bass traps into a room, a $5000 sound system can sound like a million dollars. Most people are stunned by the difference that the acoustic treatment has on their media room or listening space and agree that spending as little as $3000 on the room was a fantastic investment.

How does acoustic treatment work?

Sound emanates from your speakers and strikes your ears, but also continues past your ears and bounces off the surfaces of your walls, floor and ceiling. This reflected sound distorts and exaggerates the soundscape. This can make a room sound boomy or muddy and difficult to clearly hear the dialogue in a movie or vocals in a musical performance. With the addition of our custom made acoustic baffles on your walls and ceiling, these adverse affects can be virtually eliminated. The dialogue will be crisp and clear which will sound balanced with the music and sound effects in the feature film or high definition sound source.

With our custom built Bass Traps added to the room, the bass response of your system will tighten and seem much more powerful and focused. This doesn't mean that your system is louder, it's now more even and pleasing to your ears. Your front and rear speakers will also express positional detail like you’ve never heard before. When watching a helicopter fly over your head within the film, you can now feel it move through the room, the way that the sound designer of the film intended it to be heard.

Want to reduce noise in a room?

Connect Multimedia design and install custom solutions for "bad" listening environments. Home theatres, Office, bars and resturants can all suffer from excess noise reflecting off hard surfaces like, concrete, glass, timber flooring and plasterboard walls / ceilings. By installing absorbant batts or foam in this environment, the sound can often be absorbed and the problem is solved.

Klipex® is a fabric stretching system we use to disguise or hide "ugly" foam or batts on a wall or ceiling surface. Pictured on the left is the rear wall of a home cinema. The cinema was suffering from excessive sound reflection from the wall and ceiling. The white Kliptex® frame around these batts was used to stretch fabric the same colour as the wall. The client was rapped with the results and he was surprised how well the acoustic treatment blended in in the decor. Click here to read his testimonial.

How do we calculate what is required for treating a room?

Every listening room can need vastly differing treatment solutions, so we analyse the room in question using computer modeling technology and sound sampling devices to determine which custom built acoustic solutions are required to rectify the problem frequencies.

By playing a series of sounds through your speakers into the room, we record the "response time" of the room across the frequency spectrum with reference to both time and amplitude. Based on these results, we calculate what needs to be removed or added to the room. We custom build devices to absorb frequencies (absorbers), scatter the sound (diffusers) and pull low frequencies out of the room (bass traps).