For the newbie, getting great home theater acoustics might just seem as simple as popping up some big speakers and pointing them towards your chairs. This system works for some, but if you have spent time and money investing in a great HD flat panel television, a Blu-ray DVD player and furnishings for a home theater, it might be time to take acoustics into account.
The rooms with the best home theater acoustics are ones that avoid hard, flat surfaces and don’t utilize any parallel flat surfaces. This, unfortunately, is the situation many homeowners have in any room in their house. Avoiding hard, flat surfaces is impossible in a home, but the right furnishings and accessories can help minimize the acoustics issues.
In a home, find a rectangular room for maximizing your home theater acoustics. These rooms help avoid the problem of noise being reflected back and forth between two parallel walls. Carpeting is a great way to create an acoustic deadener to any room, along with any fluff – pillows, wall treatments and window drapes. These create soft surfaces that kill some of the sound reflection that happens on hard flat surfaces. If you can afford it or don’t mind the look, there are great acoustic panels available for purchase that helps soften the reverberations that can occur in rooms with plaster walls.
Take a look at your ceiling and decide if it is going to hurt or help your acoustics. Flat ceilings help bounce noise, but even a bit of texture in your plaster will help break up the noise and minimize acoustic problems. If you don’t have carpet, get large area rugs to soften the room and add some acoustic barriers.
But you do need some noise in there. A room that is too soft and too absorbent of noise will sound strange, as we are all used to hearing some reverberation in everyday life. Try to find a middle ground to allow the right amount of reverberation in your home theater.
Speaker placement is also key. Many home speaker setups have multiple speakers and a subwoofer. Common speakers include a center channel, right and left channel, rear surround channel and subwoofer. Placing these discreetly but still allowing the sounds to come through naturally can be a challenge.
If it all seems like too much, talk to an expert. They can help arrange all of these elements in order to make your house sound like a multiplex. Acoustics is a complicated field, and an expert can work through the kinks with ease.