Design Challenges
Another challenge in this room was that the room dimensions are not naturally good for audio. In addition to having the big windows on the side, if you look at the dimensions, which are 18 feet deep, 16 feet wide and 9 feet high, the depth is exactly double the ceiling height and the width is almost equal to the depth. If you were designing a perfect room, you would avoid dimensions that are multiples of each other or that have the same length and width because of the way that sounds bounce around the room and certain frequencies are cancelled or multiplied. If you are designing a room from scratch and want to learn more about this, check out our article on Home Theater Design Best Practices, which covers room dimensions and all of the major topics for designing a theater.
Many of you will find yourself in a situation like this where the room is not optimal. Yes, we could have created a fake wall and shortened the room, but then it would have tightened the space and made the length and width even closer. To avoid this, we employed a host of techniques that collectively led to a great outcome. The first thing we did was to use the JBL Synthesis SCL speakers that give us great dispersion control. The second thing we did was to use two subwoofers versus one subwoofer. The more subs you add into a room, the more you can evenly control the bass across multiple listening seats. In this particular room, it made most sense to position the subs towards the front left and right. We then set them up perfectly in phase with each other and despite the challenging dimensions of the room, ended up with a good bass curve. If you want to learn more about where to place your subwoofers or how to calibrate them to get everything in phase and evenly distributed, check out our article on subwoofer placement and setup.