Room acoustics criteria are essential guidelines for designing rooms with excellent acoustics. They describe the parameters to be controlled and the targets set for each one.
Small and medium-sized rooms are relatively easy to design, using simple criteria, like reverberation time, to control the sound energy needed for adequate speech intelligibility. In large rooms, besides reverberation time, more complex sound energy criteria are used, addressing issues like early energy or lateral reflexions.
For smaller rooms, MMT follows the recommendations set by DIN 18041, “Acoustic Quality of small to medium-sized Rooms.”
A suitable reverberation time between 0,8 and 1,0 sec for smaller rooms can be easily achieved without compromising the sound energy in the room needed for speech intelligibility. Of course, a low noise level is essential as human speech has limited power.
For larger rooms, an extended set of criteria is used, including Reverberation Time in sec, Early Decay Time EDT in sec, Definition in %, Strength Index in dB, Clarity in dB, and Noise Level in dB(A).
Although predictions in room acoustics for larger rooms are not an easy task, digital modeling is a good starting point to control the parameters involved and get the results needed. It is to be noted that a different set of criteria is used in rooms with loudspeaker systems.
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Theater design plan - Criteria Filetype: png83.26 KB |
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Theater design plan - Reverberation time Filetype: png130.50 KB |
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