We all like to take care in choosing the best sounding speakers and electronics we can afford for our systems. Often taking several visits to dealers listening to various styles of music or film at varying volume levels. Listening to equipment before choosing is a very wise thing to do. However, most folk and many dealers, just take it home and stick it down randomly and presume it will work at its best, after all it's the equipment that's important right? Well not really, it's the system that's important and the room is part of the system.

The idea of audio in a home theatre/cinema should be to re-create the dubbing theatre where the film was mixed. Luckily for us there are standards set down for this and the bulk of the worlds films are mixed in just a handful of studio's that are all constructed to these standards. This is great as it means if we follow the rules we can get closer to what they wanted us to hear. Of course, if you don't have a dedicated room it's going to be hard to get it all perfect, but that doesn't mean you can't get some of the way there, improving the audio playback in the process. If you have a dual purpose room then things get more tricky as multi-speaker audio systems do not have any standards set and there are conflicting ideas as to how such a room should be designed.

Convergent's basic audio calibration involves carrying out basic health check of the installed audio system. This involves putting speakers in correct place, making them solid and level, checking phase, delay times, audio levels, making sure the sources and amplification speakers are set up correctly and optimized for the room. These are the simple things that usually make big differences. This audio check over is usually carried out as an additional option during ISF video calibration.

In our experience, there is not much more that can be achieved in a domestic situation. Acoustic treatments, moving seating or speakers or adding/repositioning furniture is usually not possible in a home environment. If it is though then further room analysis and a calibration plan could be considered. If you want to go the whole hog and have an acoustically optimized room designed and built then we also have the ability to bring in the world leaders in this field. It might even be more affordable than it sounds.