04-Jun-2020, 10:37
Rectangular rooms are the easiest to deal with but I've got my system in an L shaped room which I have acoustically treated and I get very good results. You can usually get good results in any room but you have to work a lot harder in some rooms than in others. The worst shapes would probably be square and round, and I think round would be worse than square. You would potentially have a really bad room mode resonance at the frequency with a wavelength equal to the diameter of the room with a round room and at wavelength equal to the width or the room with a square room.
With a mini house of 30-35 square metres you have some challenges ahead of your. My L shaped room, which is a dedicated listening room, is 29 square metres so it's almost the size of your house. When it comes to room acoustics bigger rooms are better and rooms in nearly every house count as small rooms for acoustic purposes. That doesn't mean you can't get good results but a lot is going to depend on setup.
What I think is the most important thing for you is to have a room where you can place the speakers symmetrically in relation to the corners behind them. That helps get the left/right stereo balance and the imaging right. If you're going to have bends in the room like in an L-shaped room, try to have the bend behind you. The asymmetric shape is going to affect the sound but having symmetry at the speaker end helps a lot.
Consider things like doors and windows. You don't want to have people walking between the speakers to get to a door because that makes cables connecting the speakers a problem. That's not an issue if you can do things with a wireless connection but it is if you have wired connections. You can have a power point for power on either side of the door so powering the speakers isn't a problem. Try and plan things so that you have as much symmetry as possible but that's going to be difficult. I'd definitely prioritise symmetry behind the speakers if at all possible.
You can do a lot with things like carpets, soft furnishings, and furniture placement and I'd try to deal with any acoustic issues that way rather than with physical acoustic treatments because acoustic treatments take up space and some need to be permanently fixed to walls in particular locations which means that you have to map everything out from the start before you start building so that you know where to put things like windows.
With a mini house of 30-35 square metres you have some challenges ahead of your. My L shaped room, which is a dedicated listening room, is 29 square metres so it's almost the size of your house. When it comes to room acoustics bigger rooms are better and rooms in nearly every house count as small rooms for acoustic purposes. That doesn't mean you can't get good results but a lot is going to depend on setup.
What I think is the most important thing for you is to have a room where you can place the speakers symmetrically in relation to the corners behind them. That helps get the left/right stereo balance and the imaging right. If you're going to have bends in the room like in an L-shaped room, try to have the bend behind you. The asymmetric shape is going to affect the sound but having symmetry at the speaker end helps a lot.
Consider things like doors and windows. You don't want to have people walking between the speakers to get to a door because that makes cables connecting the speakers a problem. That's not an issue if you can do things with a wireless connection but it is if you have wired connections. You can have a power point for power on either side of the door so powering the speakers isn't a problem. Try and plan things so that you have as much symmetry as possible but that's going to be difficult. I'd definitely prioritise symmetry behind the speakers if at all possible.
You can do a lot with things like carpets, soft furnishings, and furniture placement and I'd try to deal with any acoustic issues that way rather than with physical acoustic treatments because acoustic treatments take up space and some need to be permanently fixed to walls in particular locations which means that you have to map everything out from the start before you start building so that you know where to put things like windows.
Roon Nucleus+, Devilalet Expert 140 Pro CI, Focal Sopra 2, PS Audio P12, Keces P8 LPS, Uptone Audio EtherREGEN with optical fibre link to my router, Shunyata Alpha NR and Sigma NR power cables, Shunyata Sigma ethernet cables, Shunyata Alpha V2 speaker cables, Grand Prix Audio Monaco rack, RealTRAPS acoustic treatment.
Brisbane, Qld, Australia
