[Wayne A. Pflughaupt]

Duty2 wrote:

Can anybody point me to some test case(s) where someone has documented this process ?

There must be a set a measurement that needs to be done before starting on the treatment of the room. Freq response, waterfall, etc...

Not sure what you’re after exactly, but there are plenty of threads on both this and our BFD Forum of people’s before and after equalization results.

It shouldn’t be hard to get the sound similar to all seating in the room, as long as your speakers have adequate dispersion.

Bass response uniform to each location – that’s another story. That will largely depend on your room, where the seating is in the room, etc. For instance my room is a large, open family room with the seating some distance from any boundaries. It’s been my experience in a room like this that it’s not hard to get the bass to sound uniform, even if it doesn’t measure quite the same at all seated locations.

At the other end of the spectrum, if you have an enclosed room with shoebox dimensions, it can be very problematic getting the bass to sound the same at all locations, especially if there are seats near boundaries. Even if you equalize for average response, the situation often is one of different levels of bass at the dead center of the room vs. closer to boundaries. Still, some people have overcome this with the use of multiple subwoofers in the room (our “head honcho” Sonnie is one such case, I believe).

The news isn’t all bad, though. Fortunately, bass in movies mostly is nothing but “boom,” so even if you do set things up to sound best at a single sweet spot, the bass often will nonetheless be perfectly acceptable at the other locations.

As far as treating the room, treatment for the upper frequencies is different than that for the lower frequencies. The means of measuring improvements is different, too. As I understand it, improvements in upper frequency treatments are measured with RT-60, and waterfalls are most useful for lower frequencies. (You might check in at our Acoustics Forum for clarification and qualification on this – I know just enough about acoustics to be dangerous. ) If you’re going to apply treatments, some “before” measurements would be helpful, not only to see if you actually do need treatments, but also to register the improvements when you do. REW can generate low-frequency waterfalls from a frequency response measurement, and I think I’ve heard that the latest version can also do RT-60 as well.

Good luck, and keep us posted.

Regards,
Wayne