Up to now, if you wanted to place speakers behind acoustical wall panels or hide them in columns you had two choices:

1. Pick a solid color fabric that was acoustically transparent but often with the consistency of “burlap” – functional, but not particularly pleasing to the eye, OR
2. Pick a very decorative, designer-oriented fabric from one of the many acoustical panel suppliers or even fabric stores that works well as the decorative face of absorptive panels but seriously distorts the mid and high frequencies when placed in front of the of a speaker

If 2) seems to make no sense, think of this – the specific geometry of the fabric weave determines how much distortion occurs when sound passes through the fabric.  If an acoustical panel needs to simply absorb excess sound energy, it doesn’t matter very much whether the sound energy that passes through the fabric and strikes the acoustical panel material is distorted or not, so basically any fabric that you can breathe through slightly can be used in front of an absorptive acoustical panel.  However, if you are hiding speakers behind the panels like many people wish to do these days, you need to select either one of the acoustically transparent fabrics available (typically solid color that look somewhat like burlap) or select Cinergy fabrics.

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 acoustical panel fabric such as FR701.

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.  Cinergy 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 Cinergy fabric, we would STRONGLY suggest that you ask the fabric manufacturer for a graph showing the sound attenuation from 6000Hz to 20,000Hz.