Room Acoustics HiFi or HT

[Bam!]

Hey duders!

I'm doing some research on room acoustics and treating the room so it's not an added instrument or so they say....

I'm sort of confused right now with :

Can a room be treated for both 2 channel and 5-7 channel ?

Should the rears be treated to diffuse......and if so how does that react with 2 channel.....

technically speaking......2 speakers firing at eachother as is the case with a 5-7 channel setup....don' t they sort of cancel eachother out ?

Thanks for the help here!

[David Meek]

You are looking at two very different environments:

1) Two-channel, where you want the room optimized for sonic "honesty", ie. detail retrieval, spatial accuracy (soundstage and imaging), tonal accuracy and on and on.

2) Multi-channel where the surround speakers basically override any acoustic nuances (brute force approach, IMO).

I'm pretty sure that you cannot optimize a room for both at the same time, although compromising on both situations may give you a room you can live with for each - I dunno. If you could optimize for both, it would be some SERIOUS acoustic engineering. But hey, I've been wrong before (at least once I know of : ). It'll be interesting to see others' feelings on it.