Home Theater and Audio Listening Room Diagnosis (Local)

Overview

Acoustical Diagnosis is the process of understanding the acoustical issues of your listening room or home theater. We synthesize acoustical measurements, critical listening and a review of your system against acoustic design best practices to develop a set of improvement recommendations. It will help you answer questions like:

• How is my room degrading sound quality?
• How does my room measure up to industry best practices?
• What acoustic treatment does my room need?

This page details our onsite process that we offer within the Greater SF Bay Area (map). We also have a remote acoustical diagnosis service for our national and international clients.

Deliverable

25-30 page Acoustical Diagnosis Report containing:

• Scoring of your system against the Acoustic Frontiers set of 'Acoustic Design Principles', an extensive list compiled from personal experience and industry best practices.
• Analysis and scoring of your room's acoustic measurements against the Acoustic Frontiers set of 'Acoustical Measurement Standards'.
• Scoring of your system's sound quality from a critical listening perspective.
• Acoustic treatment recommendations that synthesize the design principle review, acoustic measurements and critical listening findings.
• Recommendations on use of EQ, seating and listening positions, etc.

Process

1. Acoustic Design Review

We review your system's design against our set of Acoustic Design Principles. These principles represent industry accepted best practices synthesized from standards developed by the HAA, Dolby, THX and CEDIA.

2. Critical Listening

Using our set of reference recordings with which we are intimately familiar we score your system against our sound quality framework.

3. Acoustical Measurements

One of the differentiators in our approach is the use of acoustic measurements to analyze your room's acoustical distortions. We believe measurements are absolutely critical to understand the type of issues that your room has and how much of a detriment to sound reproduction they are. We believe that an acoustic treatment scheme cannot be engineered without measurements, no matter what our competitors say.

We analyze:

• Frequency response, from 20Hz-250Hz and 250Hz-4kHz
• Energy decay using spectrograms and energy time curves, from 20Hz-250Hz and 250Hz-4kHz
• Energy decay from 250Hz-4kHz using T20 and T30.

Onsite vs Remote service

• Onsite visit enables combining with other services such as speaker placement or subwoofer integration
• We take the acoustic measurements - no need for you to buy or loan equipment from us
• Incorporates results of critical listening - we can't do this with our remote service

Pricing

This phase is charged at a fixed cost of $875 - see our pricing policies for more information.