Omnidirectional 360° sound in a private cinema room

A dedicated room is a bare volume

Unlike a living room, a private screening room has no rugs, no curtains and no bookcase. It combines hard surfaces, a screen and seats, which makes it a naturally reverberant space before anything at all is installed in it.

The first item is absorption

Treating the ceiling reduces reverberation over the largest surface available, without taking floor space and without touching the screen or the seats. It is the item that improves the listening most for the least intrusion.

The problem of the single listening point

An installation optimised for one armchair degrades the others. In a room with several seats, the question is not to perfect one point but to avoid the others being markedly worse.

What a three hundred and sixty degree source brings

An ambience that fills the room with no identifiable direction. Every seat receives a comparable field, which answers exactly the problem of the side seats in a private room.

What stays directional

The front channels. Localising the voices and the sound image calls for a source whose position can be placed, and that role stays with speakers aimed at the seats.

The order of works

Absorption, then sources, then settings. Reversing that order leads to correcting a room problem electronically, which works badly and costs more than treating the cause. A digital corrector compensates a response curve, it does not shorten the reverberation time of a room.

The home cinema case is developed on the dedicated page, and absorption on the R'Acoustic 20 page.

Three things omnidirectional sound actually changes

Beyond the sense of being inside the film, 360° diffusion has effects you can measure:the level stays the same across the room, speech stays intelligible and feedback disappears on its own.