Acoustic Decoupling of a Home Theater

The main topic of interest in this project is to show how to improve room acoustics inside the room. Nevertheless, the influence of wall construction and how to achieve acoustic decoupling of the interior can be seen in the following figures.

How to achieve:

Figure 1: Wall construction.

Figure 1 (a-c), obtained through measuring data from Bradley show the influence of several wall constructions by the use of gypsum board on lightweight steel studs on the random-incidence absorption coefficients.

It can be observed that in case of two gypsum boards, decreasing the distance between them results in a lower absorption coefficient between 100 and 200 Hz.

Figure 1 (d) demonstrates that a decrease of absorption at in this frequency range will also be caused by omitting one layer of gypsum board at one side of the stud. (e) depicts less efficiency in absorbing this frequencies by filling the cavity between the gypsum boards with absorbent material as well as adding more layers of gypsum board on both sides.

In conclusion one can observe that wall constructions can have significant influence on the sound inside rooms. Furthermore, making room boundaries too rigid fails in diminishing particularly the low-frequencies, which are mostly of interest if room modes should be diminished.

The distance between the boundaries of the room

If acoustic decoupling is of significant interest because of noise penetrating from outside or in case one desires to not “share” the listening experience of a home cinema, importance should be given to the distance between room boundaries in a multiple-wall structure.

Figure 2: Concept of a room within a room.

Figure 2 depicts how to achieve acoustic decoupling of the interior from the exterior. The instruments used to obtain such a room within a room principle are hangers that provide isolation from low and high frequency vibrations through the combination of a spring with a fiberglass element, a specific non-hardening sealant, as well as isolated sway braces and floating floors.

In this post, we explained Acoustic Decoupling of a Home Theater; Other types of these methods that need to be mentioned to improve the sound will be published in future posts. These will pave the way for creating a home theater of the highest quality

Although, we explored two types of sound absorbers that are effective in controlling sound reflections; Other types of these absorbers and the things that need to be mentioned to improve the sound will be published in future posts. These will pave the way for creating a home theater of the highest quality.

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