Acoustical Treatment
Did you know that the #2 complaint (after bad service) in restaurants is noise? Noise can affect the perceived quality of food, as well as the enjoyment of a space. This principle also applies in the home, and how music or film is enjoyed. The Room in which your audio system is set up is just as important as anything else. Correctly tuning the room using acoustical treatment solidifies audio clarity, dialog intelligibility, and reduces the ambient noise pollution (such as traffic noise or conversations in another room). It can make your music clear and clean, even at lower volumes. This principle can be applied to residential, performance venue, or commercial environments.
There are different aspects to room acoustics:
Sound Isolation
Sound Isolation is making sure noise doesn’t travel in or out of the room. This ensures noise from subwoofers or other resonant frequencies will not disturb adjacent spaces, or it will eliminate disturbing sounds of footsteps overhead if your environment is in a multi-level structure. Anywhere light & air can travel, sound can travel, that means air vents, unsealed electrical boxes, gaps in the sheetrock, all these and more can be a conduit for unwanted audio leakage. Audio Artisans can seal up these gaps and deaden the resonance that comes with standard construction. This aspect of acoustic control is best done on a construction level, although there are products that we carry that can be applied after trim.
Sound Tuning
This area is typically what you think of when you think acoustics. It’s the controlling of frequencies within a room by use of absorption and diffusion. Sound waves from a single point will typically bounce around a room and ultimately hit the ear at slightly different times creating what we interpret as a smearing or a muddying of sound. This is bad with speakers, but when you have a large amount of people all talking in a big room, it becomes unbearable, as in a noisy restaurant. That’s what we remedy in this stage of acoustics. Audio Artisans can tune a room to eliminate a lot of those wandering reflections and focus those sound-waves down to gentle, direct, accurate sound. If it’s in a home theater, or in a small office, Audio Artisans can help.
Proper Setup of Electronics
The last part of acoustical tuning is the proper placement and set-up of your system. A speaker standing in the middle of a room sounds dramatically different than a speaker pushed into a corner. Having an EQ incorrectly set in a pre-amp may make a product sound harsh. Audio Artisans makes sure you have the right product that matches your environment as well as your aesthetic desires, and then we make sure they also sound right in those environments by properly placing, tuning, and calibrating those electronics. The difference of where a speaker is placed can make all the difference in the world.