Better sound without additional black boxes.
Have you considered room acoustics? That’s my first question when people ask me for home theater advice. Your theater’s acoustic environment is as important to your system’s sound quality as any single component. Sure, you can improve the sound with a new amplifier, new speakers, or the latest and greatest EX/ES processor; however, if your room isn’t acoustically optimized, you still won’t get maximum performance from your system, no matter how much it costs. Adding acoustic treatment is probably the easiest and most effective thing you can do to improve your sonic environment. Granted, it can be daunting to calculate reverberation times so that you add the right amount of acoustic treatment. Fortunately, Performance Media Industries (PMI) has done the work for you with their CinePanel acoustic-treatment kits.
We added a CinePanel kit to our newly built listening room (see the October and November 2002 issues) after our original attempt to use home-built acoustic treatments failed. Fiberboard covered with 6 inches of R-19 Fiberglas and poorly wrapped with black fabric proved to be ugly and relatively ineffective. PMI’s kits are designed around your room’s size in square feet and make basic assumptions about the room’s construction and design. You can go to www.cinepanel.com to see how many panels you might need for a particular room. Our room, for example, is 18 feet by 14 feet, or about 252 square feet. According to PMI, we’d need either a 12- or 14-panel kit. Given the fact that our room has nothing but flat surfaces and contains little furniture, we opted for the 16-panel kit. Most living-room theaters require fewer panels because they already have some diffusive and absorptive material like bookshelves and sofas.
