• If you're about to build a new control room, whatever the scale of your project, you can benefit from the design principles of the Early Sound Scattering room.
• Instead of relying on creating a reflection free zone, in this new configuration of room the unwanted reflections are masked by many randomized low level reflections from the front of the room, allowing consistently accurate response and imaging throughout the room regardless of equipment layout.
• This means that very different rooms can be made subjectively identical, providing the closest thing yet to absolute reference monitoring.
How It Works
• The design features a highly diffusive front end, including the walls into which the monitors are built, and an absorbent body of the room. The room is neutral and comfortably live, with a flat frequency response and good stereo imaging, both of which remain stable throughout the room.
· A common assumption about diffusion is that, by smearing the signal in time, the stereo image is bound to be severely degraded. This, however, has transpired not to be the case. The fact is that stereo image is a psychoacoustic illusion: a trick played on the mind and ears. The ears gather what information they can, and the brain makes what sense it can of that information. The most important clue for image formation is the level difference between left and right ears, but timing information is also significant. If the two conflict, the brain fails to make sense of it, and the image is lost. Reflections have been shown to assist in the localization of a sound source, but in forming a stereo image this is not the aim, as the perceived source should lie between the speakers. Masking the timing information with many randomized low level reflections makes it difficult to localize the loudspeaker itself, and allows the level information, uncontradicted, to provide the image. The resulting image, while not quite as dramatic as that found in a well set up reflection free room, is reliable regardless of changes to equipment layout in the rear of the room, and extends the full width of the desk and to the rear wall.
· Another important advantage of this configuration of room is its uniformity of response. It is a well established property of waves that two point sources in phase produce interference effects, which cause points of maximum and minimum intensity, or fringes. This causes most rooms to have a different frequency response at every point in space. For the first time, this problem has been surmounted, with the diffusers effectively converting the speakers to large plane sources which do not interact in the same way.
· Furthermore, because the early reflections are well masked, the room imposes very little character of its own on the signal: a truly neutral room.
Interested? Why not get in touch with me at ESS?