Home Theater Room Acoustics Design Management System

Abstract

The process of creating an acoustically efficient enclosed area is not a new concept and there are systems that already provide the functionalities to design an acoustic room in one way or another. This project's benefeciary has existing tools that are either difficult to maintain and too granular to use in one place. Even extensive software solutions that offer some of the same functionalities are not suitable for the business because of cost limitations and the absence of some necessary functionalities. Due to this, current processes involves calculations using spreadsheets and manual drafting of room drawings to visualize a room’s acoustical properties such as placement of speakers, acoustic panels, and view-optimized listening positions. This project is a web information system for managing Home Theater Room Acoustics Design projects and allow the functionalities to quickly design the acoustical properties of a room in one place. An important feature of this project is the simulation of a room’s acoustic impulse response to generate an audio representation of the room. This provides an approximate estimation of how the room will sound based on the specifications of the room. Furthermore, the system shows a visualization of the sound reflections that help locate acoustic panel placement and the visual mapping of room mode lines that are necessary to locate the low frequency resonance pressure locations, used to treat room modes that degrade a room’s listening experience. This project incorporates the latest cloud technologies in AWS, a reliable software stack of Django, Django REST Framework, MariaDB and Vue.js. It was found that the tool developed in this project significantly reduced the time it takes to conceptualize and draft a home theater’s room acoustic design. The functionality that allows to locate the reflection points helps to easily locate the acoustic panels placement locations. Also, the room modes mapping allows the designers to make sure that bass traps and other room modes treatments are correctly placed. Furthermore, the room audio simulation feature of the developed tool allows a convenient overview of the room’s acoustic impulse response.