A well-furnished domestic room can already provide acceptable reverberation times for listening.

Evidence

Figure 12.1(a) shows the progression in RT reduction as room treatments and furnishings are added in a typical domestic room, as exemplified by the original NRCC listening room. It is seen that adding an acoustically absorbent carpet has a major effect. Adding multidirectional reflections, redirection, and scattering from cabinets causes that absorbent to work harder. Finally, adding the absorption and dispersion of normal furnishings brings the RT into the desirable range. Low-frequency membrane absorbers were incorporated because the original room was a laboratory space with concrete floor and plaster on block walls (to contain any mad-scientist experiments that might go wrong). The resulting RT is consistent with data on typical domestic rooms. From this it is clear that, with a bit of luck, a well-furnished domestic room can be a good basis for a listening environment, without additional acoustical devices. — Toole, Floyd E, Sound reproduction- the acoustics and…, 1235

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to how the NRCC listening room figures throughout earlier chapters as the canonical domestic-model for loudspeaker evaluation.