Party People!
The art of acoustic treatment is a vital part of the world of luxury AV and home cinema. All rooms have physical characteristics that adversely affect the quality of sound that will be experienced inside the space, no matter how good the AV equipment is. This is because any enclosed space will reflect the audio around inside a room and create extra ‘sounds’ that will impact on what the listener hears, muddying the quality of the playback.
As AV installers we want to cut down on the amount of reflections often called ‘standing waves’, control the bass response ensuring it is not overpowering and ensure higher frequencies are pin sharp.
The way this has been done for many years is to use ‘treatments’, physical products (panels, traps and diffusers) to control the sound and make the space suitable for a high-quality audio system. However, it is true to say that in the past these products were not always the best looking. They were designed for best performance rather than aesthetics. Because of this they often had to be concealed and home cinema rooms were finished with a cloth wrap that hid the treatments, looked neater, but the remedy was not the most inspiring look for a room.
Thankfully these days technology has moved on considerably and today’s products give AV installers all the power they need to get a space sounding correctly. They also provide the design community with exciting new opportunities to create inspiring and impactful concepts for all types of spaces.
Rather than being a point of contention between interior designers and AV installers, acoustic treatments are now a point of enjoyable collaboration where each discipline gets to stretch themselves and provide the customer something they will not have experienced before. Treatments can offer dramatic and inspiring shapes closer to sculpture than acoustic treatment, they can also be much more subtle and provide a canvas on which the design community can add beautiful surfaces, images and designs.
Great Sound and Beautiful Rooms, through Creative design
Also worth nothing here is that today’s acoustic treatment techniques and products are great at providing control for many types of spaces in the residential and hospitality worlds. It is not just world class home cinemas that can benefit, an echoey dining room, a flat feeling living space or an abrasive sounding hospitality venue can all gain from well executed acoustic treatments.
Attractive and human centric sounding spaces benefit everyone, and today’s technologies are delivering both. For centuries humans have known how to create amazing sounding, beautiful spaces, often on a grand scale. The Musikverein concert hall in Vienna, Austria, is often celebrated as the best sounding concert hall in the world, but it is a stunningly beautiful building in its own right.
Thankfully the modern world of aesthetically conscious acoustic treatments are allowing creatives to move away from the issues of the past and move to a place where form and function meet in concert to deliver beauty for the ears and the eyes.