Listeners prefer reverberation times of 1-1.1 s for piano in living-room-sized spaces

Evidence

In his pioneering investigations of reverberation over 100 years ago, Sabine experimented with differing amounts of absorption in rooms of different sizes, asking listeners for opinions about how a live piano sounded. In rooms of typical living-room, home-theater sizes (2600 to 7400 ft3/74 to 210 m3) the most favored conditions were rooms having reverberation times in the range 1 to 1.1 s (reported in Cremer and Müller, 1982, p. 528). These had to be sparsely furnished rooms to achieve such high RTs, meaning that reproducing a close-miked recording of a piano in a normally furnished domestic room (RT 0.3 to 0.5 s) would be less than fully rewarding without added reverberation in the recording. — Toole, Floyd E, Sound reproduction- the acoustics and…, 691

Categorization

• DEFINE: Gives concrete RT ranges (1-1.1 s preferred, 0.3-0.5 s typical furnished domestic) that anchor later psychoacoustic discussion.
• XREF: Connects to Sabine’s foundational work on reverberation, standard material in Helmut Haas, Wallace Sabine literature.