Physics Affects Home Theater, No Matter What You Read on the Internet – Room Acoustics

If you read stuff on the Internet about home theater, the amount of misinformation about how your room affects the sound suggests that people have no idea how physics works. It’s depressing really. Your room makes a huge difference in how your system sounds, and yet people seem to think it makes no difference at all or that it can be fixed with magical thinking.

Room Correction Programs

Question: Which room correction program will fix my sound?

Answer: None.

Room correction programs are horribly named. They don’t do anything to your room. They only affect the sound that is coming from your speakers in order to try and counteract how your room is affecting the sound. The more your room affects the sound, the less your room correction can do. The only way to “correct” your room isn’t with electronics (no matter what you read on the Internet). It is to physically change your room.

That, of course, is not what people want to hear.

They want to be able to buy a device that fixes their problems rather than move a couch or add some acoustic panels. The reality is that no device, no piece of electronics, can EQ your sound so that it sounds good at every seat on your couch (or even more than one seat). That’s not how physics works.

Acoustic Materials

Question: What can I use to make my room sound better other than acoustic panels?

Answer: Say the question again, but slowly.

I don’t know why people have such a strong, negative reaction to acoustic panels. They aren’t that expensive, they can look like pictures, paintings, or movie posters, and they can come in many different shapes and sizes. Most importantly, they work. They make your room sound better an (by extension) your system sound much better.

And yet, whenever I talk to someone about room acoustics, they bring up curtains.

What is so magical about a curtain that people think it can block sound? Have you ever stood behind a curtain and found yourself completely isolated from any sounds around you? No! Curtains have to have special backing just to block light. I’ve got walls in my house that aren’t good at blocking sound, and yet people think that there are some magical curtains hidden in the bowels of Amazon that will absorb all sound?

Acoustic panels are made of fiberglass because it works and it is cheap. Not foam, not egg cartons. You may read on the internet that some product made a massive difference in someone’s room, but if that product wasn’t made of fiberglass, it probably didn’t work as well as they thought.

Sound Control

Question: How can I keep sound in my home theater?

Answer: You can’t. Well, you can, but you won’t.

There is a big difference between acoustic treatments and soundproofing. They are not the same and their goals are not the same. Soundproofing is keeping the sound in a room, acoustically treating that room makes the sound in the room better. Most people want a little of both but they certainly don’t want to pay for it.

Soundproofing is expensive. It requires an enclosed space (a room with a door) and extensive modifications. You will be taking that room down to the studs and spending thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars. No, you can’t just hang a curtain around one corner of your great room and call it a day. No, you can’t get a smaller subwoofer just because you are only using part of a massive basement for your home theater. Regardless of what you read on the Internet, that’s not how physics works period much less how it affects the sound in your home theater.

Our Other Articles in This Series:

Physics Affects Home Theater, No Matter What You Read on the Internet – TVs and Screens

Physics Affects Home Theater, No Matter What You Read on the Internet – Speakers