Owner's manual

oration. Custom designed bass traps, such as perforated Helmholtz resonators, provide the
greatest degree of low frequency control.
Section 3.4—Your Room
Room Shapes
Standing waves are pressure waves propagated by the interaction of sound and op-
posing parallel walls. This interaction creates patterns of low and high acoustical pressure
zones that accentuate and attenuate particular frequencies. Those frequencies are depen-
dent on room size and dimension.
There are three basic shapes for most rooms: square, rectangular, and L-shaped (see
Figure 4).
A perfectly square room is the most difficult room in which to set up speakers. By vir-
tue of its shape, a square room is the perfect medium for building and sustaining standing
waves. These rooms heavily influence the music played by loudspeakers, greatly diminish-
ing the listening experience.
Long, narrow, rectangular rooms also pose their own special acoustical problems for
speaker setup. They have the ability to create several standing wave nodes, which will have
different standing wave frequency exaggerations depending on where you are sitting. Ad-
ditionally, these long rooms are often quite lean in the bass near the center of the room.
Rectangular rooms are still preferred to square rooms because, by having two sets of dis-
similar length walls, standing waves are not as strongly reinforced and will dissipate more
quickly than in a square room. In these rooms, the preferred speaker position for spatial
placement and midrange resolution would be on the longer walls. Bass response would be
reinforced by speaker placement on the short walls.
In many cases, L-shaped rooms (see Figure 4) offer the best environment for speaker
setup. Ideally, speakers should be set up along the primary (longest) leg of the room. They
S e C T i O n 3 . 4 — y O u r r O O M
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