• Acoustic Panels
• Bass Traps
• Acoustic Foam Panels
• DIY Acoustic Panels
• Church Acoustics
• Studio Acoustics
• Home Theater Acoustics
• Restaurant Acoustics
• Acoustic Insulation
• Room Acoustic Treatments

Building a home theater room involves more than just wiring up some fancy equipment and placing some comfortable seating right in front of the big screen TV. It involves tuning not just the equipment but also the room itself.

One of the best rooms for a home theater can be the basement. The lack of windows helps the video screen to appear brighter and clearer. If there are windows in the room, then the screen can often appear washed out by the ambient light that comes in during the day. The basement also helps to prevent the sound of the home theater system from leaking out and bothering the neighbors. Often the basement is available for home theater conversion because it was previously unfinished. By finishing the basement, a home theater room can be created without sacrificing any of the existing living space upstairs.

From and acoustic perspective, though, basements are less than ideal environments for accurate sound reproduction. The walls are generally solid cement. Even if they are covered by paneling or light upholstery, the sound waves will reflect from the solid walls beneath. Bass tones in particular will reverberate around this type of room and produce unnaturally boosted bass in some areas and nulls or regions of suppressed bass in other areas. When this happens it is impossible to correct the acoustic balance with an equalizer because the listener’s perception changes depending upon where they are sitting win the room. If there are more than one person watching and listening to a move, then they are getting different experiences. One may think the sound is perfect, another may experience almost no bass, while a third person may experience so much bass that they can’t wait to leave the room.

To correct basement bass problems, acoustic treatments can be applied, but first make sure you’re not making the problem worse with the placement of the subwoofer. If your subwoofer is in a corner, then its output will be reinforced by corner loading as the long bass waves interact with the nearby wall surfaces. You can use the subwoofer’s proximity to a corner to raise or lower bass output throughout the room in general. If you have too much in most of the room then move it farther away from the corner. If you have too little in the majority of the room, then move it closer to the corner.

Once that is done, consider applying bass traps to the corners themselves. This will help knock down standing waves that result in peaks and valleys throughout the different parts of the room. Bass traps can be applied in the two front corners of the room or in all four corners. In some cases, placing them the back corners may alone may help depending upon where the seating is placed in the room.

Broad spectrum acoustic treatment panels along the side and back walls of the basement home theater room can also help temper the effects of the cements walls, not just for bass, but for higher frequency issues as well.