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🪵 The Threshold

Fan-shaped halls discourage early side reflections and tend to fail acoustically

Properties2
tagsja-picks, causal_relationships, singleton, xref, factual_claims, category/causal-relationships
aliases@heller_why_2013, loc. 1931

2 min read

Fan-shaped halls discourage early side reflections and tend to fail acoustically

Evidence

Another popular structure, which has a different behavior as regards to lateral reflections, is the fan-shaped hall shown in Figure 6.26. This structure has the advantage of being able to seat more people with good sightlines but unfortunately it directs the lateral reflections away from the audience and those few that do arrive are very weak at the wider part of the fan. — David Howard, Jamie Angus, coustics and Psychoacoustics, 1970 (#qualifies, via linked claim)

However, it is not just the provision of diffusion on the side walls that must be considered. The traditional concert hall is called a shoebox hall, because of its shape, as shown in Figure 6.25, and this naturally provides a large number of lateral reflections to the audience. This shape, combined with the Victorian penchant for florid plaster decoration, resulted in some excellent sounding spaces. Unfortunately shoebox halls are harder to make a profit with because they cannot seat as many people as some other structures. — David Howard, Jamie Angus, coustics and Psychoacoustics, 1969 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

  • XREF: connects to: Fan-shaped halls sacrifice lateral reflections for seating capacity — David Howard, Jamie Angus, coustics and Psychoacoustics, 1970; Fan-shaped halls trade good sightlines for weak lateral reflections; Early side-wall reflections range neutral to beneficial with well-designed loudspeakers — Toole, Floyd E, Sound reproduction- the acoustics and…, 845 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

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