ClassicA Acoustical Panels

ClassicA architectural hardwood-framed acoustical panels represent the optimal combination of beauty and function in a home theater or listening room.  Custom-milled hardwood profiles are joined to create a grand frame via a proprietary miter-spline machine developed specifically for this purpose. Acoustical panel material up to 2” thick is wrapped with our Cinergy acoustically transparent decorative fabric and the resulting finished panel is inset into the frames once they have been hand-rubbed with stain and then sealed and top coated for a permanent finish.   The result?   A luxurious acoustical panel product that adds to the décor of any room in an upscale home vs. making the room look like a commercial sound studio like most acoustical panels.

ClassicA architectural wall panels are the best choice if you want to control excessive sound reflections and you are looking for a much more elegant, refined solution than simple acoustical panels covered in burlap-style panel cloth.

Why Use Acoustical Panels?

Most of what you actually hear in a home theater is the actors and actresses speaking, or “dialogue”, which comes from the center channel speaker.  Ideally, the “clearest” dialogue would be realized if 100% of the sound energy from the center channel speaker was completely captured by the listener.

There are two fundamental problems with this ideal scenario – in any room there are normally multiple listeners, and the center channel speaker will disperse sound that will reflect off the side and rear walls that the listener will eventually hear.  When sound travels different distances to reach the same point it takes different times to get there, and the listener ends up with a noticeable blurring or distortion of the sound, the severity depending on the room geometry and the specific location of the listener in question.

Preventing this unwanted reflected sound energy from reflecting off the side and rear walls is best accomplished by absorbing it with acoustical panels placed along these walls.  This way, any sound energy that is not captured directly by the listener is absorbed by the acoustical panels.

The other approach to controlling undesirable sound from reaching the listener’s ears is to diffuse or “scatter” the sound enough so that it decays or reduces in intensity enough so that it is no longer a significant factor by the time it reaches the listener.  The advantage of diffusion over absorption is that you can start out with less sound energy (less powerful speakers and amplifier) because the undesirable component still remains sound energy (vs. absorbed).  However, you must be careful to make sure that you don’t have too much diffusion either because otherwise, the room will be too live and you will end up with the same blurring effect if you don’t have any acoustical panels in the first place.

Our ClassicA panels contain both absorption and diffusion components.  The main area of each panel is either a 1” or 2” acoustical sound absorbing panel wrapped with our proprietary Cinergy acoustically transparent fabric, which handles the absorption portion of sound control.  These panels are in turn surrounded with a customized 3” wood frame with an undulating profile designed to act as a diffuser.  In a typical panel approximately 15% of the total panel surface ends up being diffusive.

Even if your system allocation does not allow you to purchase our ClassicA acoustical panels, we would strongly recommend that you purchase some sort of acoustical panels if you are spending at least $5K on your audio system. Spending more than $5K your audio gear (receiver, speakers, etc.) without the addition of a room acoustics package is like putting a Ferrari engine in a Chevy Nova – assuming it would fit the car would go faster, but nothing like you would expect (and have paid for)!

Below are the styles of corner embellishments that can be added in pairs or all four corners of any ClassicA Panel.

Locations & Quantities

To come up with how many and where the ClassicA panels should be located, there are three issues to consider: the percentage of wall surface area that needs to be covered in order to make a noticeable positive difference in the sound quality, where the panels need to go in order to be effective, and what sizes and locations are required in order to look good.  ClassicA panels are manufactured in widths from 16” to 46” wide and heights from 16” to 94” high to accommodate nearly every placement situation that could arise.  The percent rule of thumb of wall coverage varies depending on which "expert" you happen to interview.  Our experience has been that you need to cover at least 35%% of the side and rear wall area to make a discernable difference.  More surface area coverage is better; however, you will always need some hard reflective surfaces exposed (such as painted drywall) lest the room turn into an anechoic chamber or “dead” room.  We also suggest placing ClassicA panels to either side of the front screen or TV – not only will it look great, but these panels will absorb any excess sound energy missed by the rear panels before the sound is re-reflected off the front wall again.

What about the ceiling? We have found that it is not necessary to cover the ceilings because a typical center channel speaker does not have a strong vertical dispersion range, which in English means not much sound energy will bounce off the ceiling nor bounce off the floor and then back up to the ceiling. If you place panels on the ceiling, they will be there more as a decorative element than as a functional requirement.

With respect to wall placement, since as a general rule center channel speakers can effectively project sound forward over a 135-140º distribution field; for most rooms 12’-18’ wide the ClassicA panels need to start no more than 2’ from the front corner and then as much as possible continue down the sides of the room.

What about if there is a riser for a second or even third row of theater seating? ClassicA panels are manufactured in heights that feature both 12” and 8” height offsets to accommodate the two most popular riser sizes. This means that the tops of your ClassicA panels placed above the riser can be made to line up horizontally with each other and panels located above the floor where there is no riser and still maintain the same spacing (or reveal) between the floor and the bottom of the panels, which ultimately looks the nicest.

At any time, feel free to email or fax us a drawing of your room and we’ll do the work for you and work with your local custom install expert to get you the best performance possible out of your equipment investment.

Many people wish to hide their speakers behind the acoustical panels (or inside columns).  Done correctly, it creates a very clean uncluttered look to a room, a look that everyone seems to appreciate and is more popular than ever.

Unfortunately, most of the time it results in speakers sounding poorly OR the end result looking worse than if the speakers had initially remained mounted on the walls or standing on the floor.  There is a huge difference between acoustical panel fabrics and acoustically transparent fabrics.

For example, many manufacturers offer “acoustical panel fabrics” wrapped around sound-absorbing panels that are used to absorb the normally reflected sound energy off the walls of a home theater.  Typical panel fabrics are used in a wide variety of non-theater, non-critical listening applications including industrial & manufacturing environments, office partitions, churches, and generally anywhere where it is desirable to absorb extraneous sound energy.

Acoustical panel fabrics may also be used in home theaters when the speakers are floor-standing or wall-mounted, though many homeowners may object to the bland or “commercial” look which is very typical.   However, if the homeowner desires to “hide” their speakers behind the acoustical panels in their home theater, then an acoustically transparent fabric MUST be used.  We found during testing that the typical acoustical panel fabrics and high-end decorative upholstery fabrics used by many other panel and theater manufacturers sheared off significant and audible levels of sound above 5,000Hz (often six to twelve decibels or more). In other words, not acceptable for use in front of speakers, and certainly not acceptable for @Home Theater Rooms to use in our ClassicA™ architectural millwork wood-framed panels and our @HomEscape Theaters.

Working with textile consultants for almost a year, @Home Theater Rooms has developed Cinergy - what we believe is the world’s first acoustically transparent fabric with a pleasing pattern that compliments the décor in a high-end luxury home. While in actuality anything placed in front of a speaker will change the speaker response to some extent, Cinergy provides a high-end look in a wide range of colors without compromising the integrity of the mid and high frequency response any more so than a “typical” standard coarse-woven, industrial look, acoustical panel fabric.

Testing June ’06 with Audio Control SA-3050a, calibrated microphone, pink noise referenced to zero baseline through Sony ES electronics & M3 studio monitor speaker.  Testing at 70db @ 1M and 80db @ 2M on axis yielded consistent results with Cinergy vastly outperforming a well-known competitor's plain, solid color fabric with limited color choices.  Synergy also exceeded the performance of FR701 at most of the measured frequencies.

If you are planning on hiding your speakers behind acoustical panels in a home theater and are NOT using panels finished with Synergy fabric, we would STRONGLY suggest that you ask the fabric manufacturer for a graph showing the sound attenuation from 6000Hz to 20,000Hz.

Acoustical Panel Thickness

As a general rule of thumb, the thicker the acoustical panel, the better the job it will do absorbing excessive unwanted sound energy at lower frequencies, particularly between 125Hz to 1000Hz.  You can get acoustical panels in thickness ranging from 4” down to ½” inch. Practically speaking, 4” thick material is simply too thick to be applied to a wall and still end up looking attractive, at least we think so, and ½” panel thickness doesn’t do a very effective job.  @Home Theater Rooms uses either 2” or 1” acoustical panel material in our ClassicA wall panels.  Both panel thicknesses absorb nearly all the sound energy from 20,000Hz down to 1000Hz that physically strikes a panel hanging on a wall.  Below 1000Hz is where the sound absorption values diverge.  Here is the actual raw acoustical panel manufacturer’s data to review:

Values above 1.00 occur when the surface areas of the edges and corner effects are taken into account.  Since ClassicA panels use a wood frame to hide the panel edges, the maximum value that will be attained is approximately 1.00.

As you can see, there is a substantial difference between the performance of 2” acoustical panels vs. 1” acoustical panels below 1000 Hz which is the deep bass range.  Where possible, use 2” panels everywhere, or if budget constraints prevent you from doing so, use 2” panels for the middle side wall panels and center rear wall panel(s) and 1” panels elsewhere.  Remember that unlike other acoustical panels, with the ClassicA design you won’t be able to tell visually the difference between the two thicknesses because the wood frames hide the actual panel thickness.