Given the fact that I’m building a new home from scratch, I’d be crazy not to take the opportunity to include a kick-ass media room. Budget constraints prevent me from going completely over the top—there won’t be stadium-style seating, for instance—but I do want to render the room as acoustically neutral as possible.
I’m doing this for both selfish and professional reasons: I’ve always dreamt of having a great media room, and this is the perfect opportunity to create an excellent environment for real-world testing of many of the products that I cover here at Maximum PC—especially speakers, video projectors, A/V streaming gear, and wireless network products. I also want to prevent sound from leaking out of the room into other parts of the house—especially since my master bedroom is on the other side of the wall. What I’m doing is made much easier by the fact that I’m dealing with new construction, but it’s not something that would be impossible as part of a remodel.
A good media room should be rectangular, not square, with a uniform ceiling (cathedral ceilings look impressive, but they're acoustically terrible).
The room in which you listen to music, watch movies, or play games can have as much of an impact on your sonic experience as the speakers and amplifier you deploy in it. The room’s walls, floor, and ceiling reflect sound so that you hear it emanating not only from your speakers, but also from other parts of the room. These reflections can enrich the sound and make it fuller and more natural, but they can also distort sound by amplifying some frequencies while canceling others out altogether. This can lead to boomy-sounding bass and harsh mid-range and high frequencies.
Dead air is effective sound proofing, but fiberglass insulation is even better. This room consists of a 2x4 frame within a 2x6 frame stuffed with two layers of R19 insulation.
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