Retooling results of a massive database of home theater measurements

Abstract

In 2010 the first results of a large-scale measurement program on home theaters was reported in an AES presentation. More than 1,000 rooms were measured for impulse response from each of a minimum of six loudspeakers to at least four (usually more) listening locations. However, computer processing capacity limited the initial report to 275 rooms. Room acoustics and sound system information was reported: RT and its std. dev. with frequency, room volume statistics for those rooms, and transient and steady-state frequency response for some example rooms were shown. From these few rooms an important item of interest emerged: the Schroeder frequency did not show as a boundary of response deviations between lower and higher frequencies—the average deviation from the average response was more constant with frequency than expected. This work will be briefly reviewd. Now in 2022 a new look at this data plus that which was gathered in the intervening years may be studied with much more advanced math tools such as machine learning so much more can be understood. This presentation is interim describing work to be done and soliciting comments from practitioners.