Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Advice from Axiom Owners The HT Room Design

>>What is interesting is that the room dimensions coincidentally come close to fitting the golden ratio.

That was what got me thinking. Playing with Modecalc for a while seemed to indicate that the golden ratio was not actually best for distribution of room modes but it is pretty close. Playing with ceiling height is your only option to fine-tune the modes, I assume, but anywhere between 7' and 8' the results look pretty good.

Question for you -- on the drawing, it looks like the "D" area is the left hand side of the top part of the floor, with the right hand side being "something else". Is that correct, ie will the room's long axis run "up and down" ? Are you going to drywall all around the room or will there be openings ?

Question for all -- in this case (walling off a portion of a larger area) there are two approaches. Making big solid walls gives you better sound absorbtion, gives you even reflections on both sides (imaging) and lets you control the room modes by positioning the walls, but having very thin walls allows you to take advantage of the possibly superior room modes of the larger surrounding area AND benefit from the fact that the room modes extend to lower frequencies because of the larger distance between walls.

In Chess's case the smaller room looks quite good from a room response point of view (decently spaced modes down to 31 hz) but the 20-30hz area is going to be weak. How heavy do the walls have to be before they dominate over the outside basement walls from a room resonance standpoint ?