[djeickme]

I thought I would share my experience with getting a professional acoustician to design my home theatre room.

I am renovating a 115 year old church into a house. On the lower level I have put in a purpose built home theatre room. Nothing huge (about 12X14'6" with sloped 10'6 to 10' ceilings) but still a pretty big endeavour in my book, so I decided to get professional help. I have been dealing with the people at Acoustic Sciences. I looked into a variety of services before choosing Acoustic Sciences. I liked them because they were an all in one outfit. They could do the acoustic design and provide all the products required. While I realize that this limits you to there product, they are well respected products and I did not want to have to run around looking for acoustic treatments on my own after getting the plan.

Unfortunately, the room dimensions were already set by the time they became involved but they were able to help guide me on construction techniques. There was no space for staggered studs so we went with resiliant channels. These made my contractor crazy. It is not that they are particularly challenging but they are very time consuming. Combine that with the necessity of two layers of sheet rock with dampening between them resulted in a half day job growing into a day and a half job. I thought about DIY but it probably would have taken me a month given the amount of time it took him. I must say that there has been a change in the acoustic since the sheet rock is finished. I expected a "deader" sound but in fact the sound is more lively, if you have ever been to a purpose built opera house you will know what I mean. There is no way to be quiet as every sound is clearly projected. It is not really reverberant, just every sound is clearly there.

The biggest challenge was communicating with the acoustician. We had already had a parting of the ways with out architect on the project (as well as an interior designer and a general contractor) , so we didn't have professionally done measured drawings. While I did up some quick CAD drawings it was still very hard to communicate the construction details to the acoustician (now that is at least in part due to some of the unusual construction methods due to the historic nature of the property). I would advise trying to get the acoustician to do a site visit. What took months of email and phone conversations, could have been done in two hours if we had done it in person. The other is start early. We ended up with a significant construction delay because of the time it took to finalize the acoustics which just led to frustration for all concerned.

The next odyssey is the in room acoustic treatments. I will keep the forum posted and perhaps post some pictures of the room once I find my digital camera again. After that I get to think about how to treat the "listening room" which is also the kitchen, living room, dinning room, den and office as it is part of a 35 000 cubic foot room that used to be the church sanctuary. That should be an interesting challenge.

Dan