Learning your room Laminar Flow and Pressure Zones

Hi Tuneland

The biggest part of this hobby full of equipment is not the equipment at all but what the room does with the sound the equipment is making.

If your new to this hobby your going to want to take a look at this long before you start shelling out the bucks. If you don't have a clear understanding of this part of the hobby of listening you could spend years and a fortune on thinking that the components you are buying are suppose to give you what you are hearing. The fact is the equipment part of this hobby does not control the major part of what makes sound. I always recommend buying a system that is very simple and put your time into learning what your room is able to produce. It might surprise you how good you can make the sound just by knowing the ins and outs of your biggest component "your acoustical environment".

Learning how your room works is the first step to getting great sound. There are three main components to acoustical waves in your room.

1) the individual sound wave
2) the laminar effect that the surfaces of your room creates along with any furniture
3) the pressure zones that build up in your room

the following is to help you see the room in action and how to bring the best out if it

first lets take a look at the laminar flow and pressure zone



All audio companies have a story to tell, but sometimes these stories are based on theory instead of practice. RoomTune is based on "live sound" research instead of "sound theory". The difference between these two approaches is one is looking at sound from what it might be and the other from what it is.

Why is this important? Because every room in the world sounds unique unto itself. No two rooms in the world have ever tested exactly the same, and in our research this is very key, because we design products that give acoustical solutions around the globe, and to all acoustical environments.

It's a must for us as an industry to apply true physics instead of bad engineering.



How did the audio engineering world get mixed up and start thinking that soundwaves are straight lines? What's worse is building a false science around something that should be pretty common sense. With RoomTuning we're going to get started on the right foot.

sound waves are spherical



Here is what a stereo sound source looks like in a room.



If my room is done properly, using the attributes of the pressure zones I should be able to stand almost anywhere in the room and get close to the same volume level, plus or minus the natural rise and fall of each pressure zone and along the laminar parimeters.

There is nothing in science that tells us that the following happens.



If a sound wave was 2 dimensional it would respond at the wall more like this.



What we have found in our testing is that there is an acoustical plane that developes on any surface where the on coming wave meets with the reflective wave. We call this the laminar line or laminar flow.



The next part we need to know about what affects the pressure zone is room loading.

Room loading happens when the sound waves meet at intersections such as the corners and midseams and the mid wall ceiling or floor.



Here's a 2D look at the loading and laminar flow together. Keep in mind the floor and ceiling are doing the same thing as the walls.



All rooms because they are enclosed build sound pressure. Here's a look if the speakers and chair were gone.



Your probably starting to get the picture of how powerful the room is and how big of a role it must play in the stereo's sound. It is without a doubt the biggest component.

A misconception is that the speakers play independent of the room, but lets think about this. How can a speaker play without the room? Air pressure is a function of the room not the speaker. The speaker is a vibrating source that sends the music signal into the air in the room but it's the room that amplifies this signal. A loudspeaker can not play louder or over power what the room is doing. You may think your listening directly to a loudspeaker but if this were the case the music would sound like it was coming directly from the speaker and there would be no stereo image to speak of. The sound would be very sterile as if someone cut away the music.

Take a look at the misguided view of the speaker minus the room if it were possible. Notice how much of the sound waves are cut out.



The only way to remove the room would be to hook a tube from the speaker to your ear cutting out the room altogether. Nope, far better to use the room, and why not? The room can be a wonderful tool that allows you to recover much of the content rather than trying to cut the acoustic information out.

This is why I named the product RoomTune and started the phrase "Roomtuning". We don't want to get rid of the biggest component but use it as the most important and final part of the audio chain. Once you accept this as the "music producer" you can view the hobby with more accuracy.

Want to hear the laminar effect in your room?

Walk into one of your rooms where you have open wall space without a lot hangings on the wall or breaking up of the surface. Stand in the middle of this room and begin talking. As you are talking start walking toward the wall, walk slowly and listen. When you get a couple of feet from the wall surface pay close attention and as you slowly move about 8" from the wall your going to hear a splash of sound running along the surface of the wall. This is the laminar flow. The on coming pressure is pushing against the reflected pressure causing the sound to spread, much like if you poured paint on your floor and watched it make it's way to the seams.

It is hard to beat the sound of wood for reproducing musical note structures. Not just any wood is special though. We spend much time listening to different types and recently have settled on the fast growing younger trees. These trees when cured in our process of nature curing in Nevada are producing fantastic tonality that is among the best we have heard. No need to ever have a system that sounds cold, hard or brittle when nature has provided the perfect tonal material.



When we listen to sound in our rooms we are listening to air pressure. Sound waves are not traveling in a straight line to our ears. There are 2 main parts to what the sound pressure (build up) is doing. One, pressure zones, the other, laminar flow.



This constant build up of energy is in every room and is what you hear. As the pressure forms it makes pressure zones that you can easily listen to as you walk around the room talking or making sound. Some areas are at a plus signal and some at a minus.



Pressure Zone Controlling is what we have named taking control of a zone in the room and telling it what to sound like with the use of our acoustical/mechanical tuning tools.