Whether you’re recording pro audio or simply want a high-quality home theatre space to watch TV or movies, the size and shape of your room matters. If your room is small, paying attention to the way sound travels can vastly improve your listening experience. If you’re having trouble taming acoustics in a room, the solution might be simpler than you think. Today, we’ll take a look at how room size and surface materials can impact audio quality, as well as steps you can take to maximise your listening experience. 

How Does Sound Travel?

It’s important to understand how sound travels in space before attempting to control it in a studio or home theatre environment. Sound is created by the energy that comes from vibrating objects, such as speakers. Often, sound waves will travel through space and bounce off of materials or surfaces before arriving at our eardrums, altering how we hear the sound. When sound travels and hits a surface or a new medium, there are a few things that can happen that affect how we perceive the sound:

1. Reflection: When audio waves leave a source and hit a flat, hard surface like metal or empty wall space, the sound can bounce right back into the room and create reverberations or echoes. This can create an inaccurate sound quality that can impact your perception of music or audio.

2. Diffusion: This occurs when audio waves hit surfaces with multiple uneven surfaces, such as a diffuser. This doesn’t completely absorb the sound but causes it to be broken up and distributed more evenly.

3. Absorption: When sound hits soft, porous materials like foam or wood, the sound can be dampened and trapped within the material. This prevents additional reverberations and prevents echoes.

How to Dampen Hard Reflections

Now that we know how materials and surfaces can impact sound, there are steps you can take to reduce reflections and improve the accuracy of the sound coming out of your audio source. Small rooms offer a particular advantage in this case due to the fact that a smaller surface area means you don’t have to spend as much to cover your walls with sound absorption. There are several key ways to reduce reflections:

Acoustic Panels

Acoustic panels are boards made of materials like foam or wood that hang on walls or down from ceilings. These panels are highly effective at reducing overtones and reverberations and come in many shapes, sizes, and styles. Perhaps the most popular form of acoustic panels is fibreglass panels that can effortlessly trap rogue frequencies. They contain sound-absorbing materials like rock wool and have a wooden frame wrapped in fabric. Premium wooden panels can combine absorption and diffusion by allowing sound to enter the panel’s “box” through slits, allowing the sound to reflect until it’s completely diffused.

Bass Traps

While also considered acoustic panels, bass traps deserve their own mention. Sound can get caught in the corners of rooms of any size and create additional reflections, and low-end bass gets sent all throughout the room. Bass traps are larger L-shaped panels that sit in corners and sponge up low frequencies. Their installation is fairly simple; lightweight foam panels can be attached to walls with adhesives or tape. Floor-sitting wood or foam bass traps don’t need to be attached to walls, and a small space between the wall and the trap can even provide additional absorption. 

Furniture

This might be surprising to some, but your furniture can make a huge difference when it comes to audio quality management. If you’re trying to improve audio in a bedroom, what’s the largest piece of furniture in the room? For most, that would be a bed! You might not realise it, but your bed could be your greatest asset for sound absorption. Beds can be extremely effective for reducing room noise, particularly memory foam or non-spring beds. The positioning of your bed and other dense pieces of furniture, such as couches or chairs, can dramatically improve your listening experience. 

Why Your Speakers Matter

Another critical way to improve your audio quality in a small space is to evaluate your speaker setup. You’ll want to invest in high-quality speakers that present accurate frequency responses, but it’s important not to over-do it. If you use speakers that are too large for the room, you could easily find yourself overwhelmed by bass frequencies. For smaller rooms, we recommend speakers with no more than a 5” cone woofer, such as the Yamaha HS4 monitors. If more low-end is needed, small subwoofers can go a long way to round out the sonic frequencies that you might be looking for.

The placement of your speakers is also crucial. If you’re trying to improve sound quality for a home recording setup, place your monitors at an angle so that your seating position is triangulated by the speakers. If you’re looking to improve your home theatre setup, be conscious of your seating position and make sure that the speakers are converging properly on that spot in the room. You can also use room calibration software, such as Sonarworks, that can listen to the frequency response in your room via echolocation and tame harsh frequencies that get trapped, offering a significantly cleaner sound. 

Conclusion

It can be uniquely challenging to optimise audio in a small room, but with a proper understanding of room acoustics and quality equipment, you can get the accuracy that you desire. Between the inclusion of acoustic panels and picking out the right speakers, you can quickly hear a sizeable difference in clarity. At Selby.com.au, we have everything you need to improve your sound quality and provide you with a richer, more accurate listening experience.