Echo Sound In Home Theatre Rooms

By Author: Henry Janice
Total Articles: 119
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Sound is reflected multiple times before arriving to the listener from all the directions. There are numerous possible reflection paths; every individual reflection is quite close to its neighbors.

Therefore, there is a dense set of reflections reaching at the listener. This part of the sound in the home theatre room is known as echo and is desirable as it adds richness to, and supports musical sounds.

Echo in home theatre rooms also assist to incorporate all the sounds from an instrument so that a listener hears a sound which integrates all the instrument sounds, including the directional parts. As a matter of fact, we find home theatre installations in spaces which have very little echoed, inconvenient and usually unsuitable for listening to music in.

The time taken for echo to happen is a function of the size of the home theatre room and will be short for smaller spaces, due to shorter time between reflections and the losses incurred on every impact with a surface. As a matter of fact, the time gap between the direct sound and the echo in dedicated home theatres is a vital cue to the room size that the ...
... soundtrack is played in. As some of the sound is absorbed at every reflection on the home theatre’s acoustic wall panels , it dies away ultimately. The time that it takes for the sound to die away is known as the echo time and is dependent on both the size of the home theatre room, and the amount of sound absorbed at every reflection.

As a matter of fact, there are three aspects of the echo field that the home theatre reflects.

1. The surge of the home theatre’s echo field level

This is the initial part of the echo field and is impacted by the room size of the home theatre, which impacts the time between reflections and hence the time it takes the echo field to build up. The amount of absorption in the home theatre room also impacts the time that it takes the sound to get at its steady state level. If we put it differently, the rate at which sound accumulates in a dedicated home theatre depends on the time between absorption and reflection. That just implies that echo sound level will take more time to reach a louder level than a smaller home theatre room.

2. The decay of the home theatre’s echo level

When the tone in the home theatre stops, the echo sound level won’t lessen instantly but will rather decay at a rate decided by the amount of sound energy that is absorbed at every reflection with the sound panels and other surfaces.

This implies that the steady state level will be higher in an anechoic chamber that has a small amount of acoustic panels, in respect to home theatre rooms that have a lot of absorptive treatments.