Experimental and Numerical Comparison of Absorption Optimization in Small Rooms

A vast majority of modern music is recorded and produced in small control room environments of volumes of around 50 m3. Several problems occur when controlling the room acoustics of such small spaces. First, the room modes will produce strong peaks and dips particularly at lower frequencies, and even in the sweet spot posi-tion the listening experience can be easily deteriorated. Second, when designing or refurbishing small rooms, it is hard to adequately predict the reverberation time by using Sabine's formula due to highly non-diffuse conditions and using statistical ap-proach below the Schroeder frequency.This project experimentally investigates changes in the room acoustic parameters by altering the positioning and orientation of porous materials in a small room, which are compared with the finite element method (FEM). FEM is able to take into account the exact room geometry, boundary condition, and phase information and therefore is accurate at low frequencies. Good agreements are found between meas-urements and FE simulations, and therefore FEM can be used as a design tool for optimizing absorption and acoustic parameters in small rooms.