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ABSTRACT
This paper describes the features, scientific rationale and acoustical performance of a new reference listening room
designed for the purpose of conducting controlled listening tests and psychoacoustic research for consumer,
professional and automotive audio products. The main features of the room include quiet and adjustable room
acoustics, a high quality calibrated playback system, an in-wall speaker mover, and complete automated control of
listening tests performed in the room.
1. INTRODUCTION
reproduced sounds, and even affect listeners’
Listening tests play an important role in the research,
loudspeaker preferences [3]. Finally, the listening room
development and testing of consumer, professional and
should be designed to prevent noise from entering or
automotive audio products at Harman International. The
exiting the room so that listeners can reliably judge both
listening room in which these tests are performed is a low and high level sounds without disturbing their
significant nuisance variable, which left uncontrolled, neighbors.
can bias the results. Below 300 Hz, the modal behavior
of the room can affect the quality and quantity of low
With these challenges in mind, a new prototype
frequency sounds heard by the listener that vary
reference listening room was recently designed and built
according to the room’s dimensions, its absorption, and
at Harman International in Northridge, California for the
the locations of the loudspeakers and listeners [1]-[2].
purpose of conducting listening tests and
Above 300 Hz, the reflectivity of the room can
psychoacoustic research related to consumer,
influence the timbral and spatial attributes of
professional and automotive audio products. The room
Olive A New Reference Listening Room
is one of four being replicated at other Harman locations dimensions provide a high-quality 7.1 multichannel
across the world, so that listener training, product playback experience for four to six listeners arranged in
evaluations and psychoacoustic research can be two rows of three seats.
conducted at different locations under similar well-
defined acoustical conditions. This paper describes the A diagram of the room in Fig. 1 shows the standard
features, scientific rationale and acoustical performance setup of the front, side and rear loudspeakers, as well as
of the prototype room built in Northridge, California. the four subwoofers located in the corners of the room.
The room is sufficiently large to allow the loudspeakers
to be arranged in an ITU-R [6] circle such that all main
2. A MULTI-PURPOSE LISTENING ROOM
channels are equidistant (2.9 m) to the primary listening
seat. The symmetrical placement of the left and right
The room has been designed for several different pair of loudspeakers ensures that properties of the
purposes. Firstly, the room must provide a standardized, reflections produced by these pairs will be similar for a
high-quality listening environment for the reproduction listener sitting along the centerline of the room. Of
and critical evaluation of multichannel (7.1) recordings course that is only true if the acoustical treatment of the
and/or audio technologies including loudspeakers, room is also symmetrical, which is the case here (see
amplifiers, and audio algorithms. section 3.5).
Secondly, the room must provide a means for proper .
comparative evaluation of loudspeakers intended for
installation in, on, or near a wall. This includes in-wall
speakers, automotive transducers, and home and
multimedia systems intended to be mounted on or near a
wall where a substantial low frequency boundary effect
occurs below 500 Hz [1], [4], [5].
3. DESCRIPTION
The following section describes the dimensions, Figure 1 A simple diagram of the prototype reference
construction, acoustical treatment, equipment, and other listening room showing dimensions, speaker setup and
main features of the Harman reference listening room. in-wall mover.
3.1. Dimensions
3.2. Listening Room Construction The wall cavity is filled fiberglass. The gypsum board is
attached to the metal stud with a sparse amount of
The following section describes the construction details screws to allow the wall to flex and absorb energy. A
of the reference listening room. bead of acoustical caulking adhesive is applied to each
stud to minimize rattling between the studs and gypsum
3.2.1. Double Shell Construction board. This particular wall construction was chosen
based on the research of Bradley who found that there is
The construction of the reference listening room is less low frequency absorption below 200 Hz as the
designed to provide good noise isolation from sounds depth of the stud decreases, and as the thickness or
entering the room from an adjacent office areas, yet layers of gypsum board increases [8]. Also, a single
provide dampening of room modes generated inside the layer of gypsum board on one side of the stud is less
room. A Balanced Noise Criterion (NCB) [7] of 10 or effective as a low-frequency absorber than a single layer
better was the desired target for background noise. In on each side. Toole provides a good summary of the
order to achieve this, a double-shell room design was absorption coefficients of different gypsum wall
employed as illustrated in Fig. 2. constructions (see Fig. 21.6 in [1]).
3.2.2. Ceiling
with weather stripping. The bottom of the door Finally, great care was taken in the design of the HVAC
automatically seals itself with a mechanical door sealer system to minimize the noise from air turbulence and
that drops into place when the door is closed. whistling noise. An independent HVAC system was
chosen for the room in order to greatest amount of
3.3. Services control, flexibility and performance in terms of noise
control. The HVAC compressor and fan are suspended
The services include lighting, electrical (audio, phone above the room with the supply and return ducts
and data network, and AC power), water sprinklers, and mechanically decoupled from the inner shell. Each duct
heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC). is acoustically lined, oversized and equipped with a 5-
Services are often the weakest link in an otherwise section silencer that virtually eliminate any audible
acoustically well-designed listening room. Lights, noise or turbulence in the room. In cases where absolute
HVAC, water pipes and electrical wiring can produce silence is required the HVAC system can be turned off.
significant noise, hum, rattle, and buzz. Bringing these
services into a listening room can result in perforations 3.4. In-wall Speaker Mover
in the outer and inner shells of the room and
compromise the noise isolation of the room. Consumer demand for low profile loudspeakers that
mount in, on or near a wall has increased since the
With this in mind, careful attention was paid to the availability of flat-panel wall-mounted video displays.
selection and installation of the services provided for the In a similar vein, the ubiquitous Apple’s IPod has led to
reference room to ensure that they did not compromise the proliferation multimedia speakers and IPod music
the desired low background noise performance. docking play stations that often find themselves on a
desktop or near a wall.
Room lighting in the reference listening room is
provided by 12 V ceiling lights mounted on four tracks The acoustical effects of mounting a loudspeaker near
that can be individually controlled and dimmed. The adjacent boundaries have been well documented by
electrical transformers are moved outside the room to Allison and Berkovitz [4], Allison [5], and more
eliminate a potential source of noise. Rattles from the recently Toole (see chapter 12 of [1]). Mounting a
tracks themselves are suppressed by applying acoustical loudspeaker in, on or near a wall or boundary, such as a
silicon caulking between the track and the ceiling. shelf or desktop, can have a significant effect on its
Rattles from the electrical wiring inside the ceiling and frequency response below 500 Hz due to solid angle
walls are eliminated by decoupling the wires from the boundary gain, and acoustic interference. If listening
metal studs via rubber grommets and where possible tests performed on these products are to be valid and
suspending the wiring from the studs. The results are meaningful, they must include these interaction effects
very effective: even the most tooth-rattling subwoofer between the loudspeaker, boundary and/or the desktop.
passages from the latest Hollywood blockbuster movie
produce no audible rattles from the services installed in The reference listening room has been designed with
the room. this in mind. A custom, motorized 3-sided in-wall
speaker mover has been developed that permits rapid
To minimize the number (i.e. 2) of wall perforations and three-way (A/B/C) comparisons among loudspeakers
provide maximum flexibility all audio, network and intended to be used in/on/near a wall including a
electrical connections are accessible via a dual-track desktop. The speaker mover can accommodate proper
conduit that runs along the inside perimeter of the room. testing of four different categories of loudspeakers: (1)
The conduit is decoupled from the walls and floor to in-wall loudspeakers, (2) on-wall loudspeakers, (3)
minimize another potential source of rattle. Outlets for floor-standing loudspeakers designed to be near a wall,
AC power and audio (both line and speaker level) are and (4) loudspeakers designed to be on a desktop or
available every 1.8 m along the wall. shelf near a wall (e.g. multimedia speakers and IPod
music stations).
The water sprinkler system is also designed to limit the
outer ceiling perforations to just a single hole through Removal wall baffles are used for mounting the in-wall
which the main supply pipe runs the length of the room loudspeakers into the speaker mover’s internal wall
between the inner and outer ceilings from which the enclosure. On-wall speakers are mounted onto the wall
individual sprinkler heads are fed. baffle itself. Slim floor-standing speakers with a depth
of less than 30.5 cm can be mounted to the base of the administer listening tests. Positional changes between
speaker mover. Three detachable semi-circular shelves loudspeakers can be performed in about 2 s.
can be mounted to the in-wall mover for testing
bookshelf, multimedia or IPod music stations. The shelf 3.5. Acoustical Treatment
can be extended into a full sized desk by moving in
place a stationary desk that has a cutout for where the An important feature of the listening room is the ability
rotating shelf fits in. A visually opaque, acoustically to manipulate its reflectivity through removable
transparent screen is placed between the mover and absorptive and diffusive panels. This is desirable for
listener so that the test is double blind. studying the perceptual effects of loudspeaker-room
interactions on reproduced sound. The acoustical
A photograph of the in-wall mover is shown in Fig. 3 changes are made by adding or removing the thick area
configured for testing of three loudspeakers intended for rug and the absorptive and diffusive acoustical baffles
on-wall mounting. that attach to the two wooden rails on the walls. Each
rail has a 45 °groove cut out of its top into which fits a
cleat attached to the back of the acoustic panel. The rails
are situated at different heights to allow the bottom and
top halves of the wall to be treated the same or
differently.
(a)
(b)
Figure 4 A view of the acoustical treatment in the Northridge reference listening room from (a) the perspective of
the top front left corner of the room and (b) from the right rear corner of the room.
Most of the absorptive panels are placed along the front 3.6. Furniture
and rear walls at locations where the room reflections
The furniture in the reference listening room consists of
arriving at the listener will have little spatial benefit.
six comfortable leather hotel chairs. The chairs were
The diffusers and RPG Skylines and are placed near the
selected for their relatively small profile: 79 cm (w) x
side and rear channels to provide additional sources of
84 cm (d) x 74 cm (h). Their compact size allows the
reflections and scattering of sound. A symmetrical
chairs to be tightly arranged in two rows of three
pattern of acoustical treatment was generally observed
without being too far from the primary listening zone.
for the front, side and rear walls. In this way, the
The backs of the chairs do not interfere with the direct
reflections produced by each pair of left/right
sound produced by the side and rear loudspeakers.
front/side/rear loudspeakers should be mirror images of
The only other furniture in the room is a low storage
each other.
cabinet located at the rear of the room where the
program source machines are located (Mac Mini, DVD, 3.8. Audio Playback System
Blu-ray player).
A block diagram of the audio playback system is shown
in Fig. 5. The upper half of the diagram shows the
3.7. Video Playback equipment located inside the room and the lower half
contains the equipment located in an equipment rack
A high quality video projection system is required for outside the room near the entrance to the speaker mover.
presentations, listener training, and playback of DVD Inside the room are located the media source players
and Blu-ray discs. A JVC DLA-RS1 1080p HD (Lexicon DVD, Toshiba HD DVD players) located on
projector displays the picture onto a motorized the AV cabinet at the back of the room to facilitate
retractable 305 cm diagonal screen made by Stewart control and access to media content during
Filmscreen. demonstrations.
Figure 5 A block diagram of the audio equipment setup in the Harman Reference Listening Room.
Figure 6 The average in-room frequency response of each loudspeaker channel averaged across the six seats. The
top curve represents that average response across all 7 channels.
Figure 7 The in-room frequency response taken at each of the six seating locations for the left channel. The dark
solid curve is the average response for all six seats.
The roll-off above 10 kHz is not a concern since the in- diffuse, isotropic sound fields. Nonetheless, an attempt
room response represents a combination of both direct was made to minimize the resultant measurement errors
and reflected sounds produced by the loudspeaker. In by energizing the room with a large number of
particular, the reflected sound should naturally contain loudspeakers, and averaging the measurements over
less high frequency due to the that the directivity of the several different microphone locations.
loudspeaker, and the high frequency absorption from air
and the room’s furnishings. The room was measured under five different conditions:
1) bare room (seats, carpet, diffusers and absorbers
Fig. 7 shows the seat-to-seat variation in the in-room removed), 2) absorbers only, 3) seats/carpet only, 4)
frequency response for the left channel only. The seat- reference setup with no diffusers, and 5) reference setup
seat variations are approximately ± 2.5 dB above 1.5 with diffusers. The results plotted in Figure 8 reveal that
kHz, and ± 5 dB below 1 kHz. The variations in the bare room produces a maximum RT60 value of 1.7 s
response are primarily due to acoustical interactions at 500 Hz and even larger values at higher frequencies.
between the loudspeaker and the listening room. These Simply adding an area carpet and six leather chairs to
include room mode effects below 300 Hz, and the room brings the room RT60 down to 1.1 s at 500 Hz.
acoustical interference effects from reflections above However, the wall absorbers are clearly doing the brunt
300 Hz. of the work as they alone bring the RT60 down to 0.7 s at
500 Hz. The reference setup produced the lowest
average RT60 value of 0.4 s. It is interesting to note that
4.2. Room Measurements the diffusers actually reduced the reverberation time,
probably by their scattering of sound towards absorptive
Acoustical measurements were also conducted in the surfaces. For the reference setup, the 0.4 s value puts the
reference listening room to determine how various reference room’s reverberation time among the typical
acoustic treatments of the room affect the measured values Bradley measured in 600 domestic rooms [10].
reverberation time (RT60). Toole has argued that
reverberation measurements of domestic sized rooms
are rather pointless, since such rooms do not produce
Figure 8 The RT60 for the Harman Reference Listening Room for different acoustical conditions.