Page 233 - Master Handbook of Acoustics
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identify the size of the room.
Listening Room Reverberation Time
The reverberation characteristic of a typical home listening room is of interest to the audiophile, the
broadcaster, and the recording engineer. The monitoring room of the broadcast or recording studio
should have a reverberation time similar to that of the listening room in which the final product will
be heard. Generally, such rooms should be deader than the listening room, which will add its own
reverberation to that of recording or broadcast studio.
Figure 11-18 shows the average reverberation time of 50 British living rooms measured by
Jackson and Leventhall using octave bands of noise. The average reverberation time decreases from
0.69 second at 125 Hz to 0.4 second at 8 kHz. This is considerably higher than earlier measurements
of 16 living rooms made by BBC engineers in which average reverberation times ranged from 0.35 to
0.45 second. Apparently, the living rooms measured by the BBC engineers were better furnished than
those measured by Jackson and Leventhall.
FIGURE 11-18 Average reverberation time for 50 British living rooms. (Jackson and Leventhall.)
