Free tool · beta

Design your room acoustics

In 5 steps: tell us what it's for, enter its size and materials, and we'll show you how it sounds today plus a treatment plan with quantities and placement. No acoustics knowledge needed.

What is the room for?

The use sets how long the sound's tail should last: it's the single most important figure in the whole design.

Target reverberation time

0,45 s

It's how long the tail of a snare hit takes to die out. Shorter means more definition; longer means more "air".

DryBalancedLive

I'm worried about bothering the neighbors or about outside noise

Understand your room

Reverberation time

When you stop playing, the sound keeps bouncing off the walls until it fades. That time is the reverberation. If it's long, notes blur into each other and everything sounds muddy; if it's short, the room sounds dry and defined. It's the figure that changes the sound of a room the most.

More detail

It's measured as the time it takes the sound to drop 60 dB (T60). We calculate it with the Sabine and Eyring formulas, from the volume and how much each surface absorbs.

Why the target depends on use and size

A mixing room has to be dry so you hear the details; a live music room needs some tail to sound full. And the bigger the room, the more reverberation suits it. That's why the target changes with the use and the volume.

More detail

We use the DIN 18041 formulas (rooms for music, speech and communication) and the EBU Tech 3276 recommendation (control rooms). You can move the target toward dry or live to taste.

Size and proportions

Size sets how much air the sound has to develop, and proportions set which bass notes the room resonates at. Cube-like rooms, or rooms whose dimensions are multiples of each other (3 × 6 m, say), stack resonances on the same notes.

What each material absorbs

Brick, concrete and glass reflect almost everything. Porous materials (mineral wool, foam, thick carpet) absorb mids and highs. Absorbing bass takes thickness: panels 10 cm or more, or spaced off the wall.

Absorbing is not soundproofing

The most common mix-up. Absorber panels improve how the room sounds inside, but they barely stop the sound reaching the neighbors. Soundproofing takes mass and airtightness: heavy walls, solid doors with seals, no gaps.

Lows, mids and highs

A room doesn't sound the same at every frequency. The lows (kick, bass) usually last longer because hardly any material absorbs them; the highs (cymbals, voices) are easy to control. That's why we look at reverberation by range and not as a single number.

Room modes and standing waves

Some low notes "fit" exactly between two walls and form waves that stand still: in some spots they boom and in others they almost vanish. These are the room's modes. That's why the bass sounds different depending on where you stand.

More detail

In a rectangular room, f = c/2·√((l/L)² + (m/W)² + (n/H)²). For other shapes we compute them numerically. In the 3D map, the colors are high-pressure zones (in opposite phases) and the gaps are null zones.

The Bonello criterion

A quick way to tell whether a room's low end will sound even. Count the resonances in each third octave up to 200 Hz: if the count never drops as the band goes up and there are no repeated resonances in the bands with few of them, the room is well proportioned.

More detail

It depends only on the dimensions. If it isn't met, treatment doesn't "fix" it, but it does reduce the effect of those resonances: that's where bass traps come in.

Why the low end is treated differently

Below a certain frequency (the Schroeder frequency), what rules a small room isn't the sound's tail but its resonances. In the lows, the problem isn't reverberation: it's the modes. That's why they need bass traps and not just panels.

How the automatic design works

It's not a chatbot. It's an expert engine: it applies acoustic design rules and tries combinations of absorbers and quantities until it gets close to your target in all 6 bands, without over-damping the highs. Quantities come from the calculation; placements, from rules of thumb.

More detail

It optimizes by least squares within the available surface, with more weight on the mids and a penalty if a band ends up drier than the target. It uses generic materials with typical absorption values.

Bass traps

Thick absorbers placed in corners and along edges, right where the low resonances have the most pressure. There they work far better than in the middle of a wall.

First reflections and placement

The first bounce off the side walls and ceiling arrives almost together with the direct sound and smears it. Panels pay off most at those points: at ear height, to the sides and above where you play or listen.

Insulation: the weak spot

Sound escapes through the weakest element: a light door, a single-pane window or a gap can ruin a very good wall. That's why we calculate each wall's insulation together with its openings.

The limits of the calculation

These calculations assume sound spreads evenly through the room and use typical absorption values for each material. They're a very good starting point, but a real room is finished by measuring it.

Design your room acoustics

What is the room for?

Room size

What is it made of?

How your room sounds today

The low end: room resonances

The solution for your room

Your report

Want a custom design?