I think that would be a fantastic listening room... most hi-fi acoustic problems are down to 'small room' modal responses. High ceilings are good so use all the space you can. The only thing to bear in mind is that you'll need efficient speakers, high power amps or both as you won't get the 'room gain' effect from the near field reflections of the walls & ceiling.
Sport Court as Listening Room?
Probably a dumb question but who knows, maybe someone else has done this before...
My wife and I are currently shopping for a new home. Here in Minnesota one of the popular features in high end homes is to have a sport court inside. In the house we looked at yesterday this consisted of a room approximately 18 feet wide by 30 feet long and 18 foot ceiling. There is currently a basketball hoop hanging on one end but this room can be used for other sports activities, and these are especially popular with couples who have smaller kids as a means of burning energy on winter days.
Our kids are mostly grown up now so this space would not get the use it deserves, but the room size is good for setting up a listening room. The problem would be the ceiling height I imagine. It would not be hard to acoustically treat the walls and floor to prevent reflections, but would the ceiling height create an insurmountable problem to make this a viable option? I imagine so.
Anyway, we probably won't buy this house, but if we have this builder design us a house we could have the sport court included per spec, so that when we sell the house down the road it would have this attractive feature for the future owners. Or, we could convert the design to have these same footprint but with lower ceiling.
Just curious what you would do if you were in my shoes.
Thanks for any ideas you might share.
Peter
My wife and I are currently shopping for a new home. Here in Minnesota one of the popular features in high end homes is to have a sport court inside. In the house we looked at yesterday this consisted of a room approximately 18 feet wide by 30 feet long and 18 foot ceiling. There is currently a basketball hoop hanging on one end but this room can be used for other sports activities, and these are especially popular with couples who have smaller kids as a means of burning energy on winter days.
Our kids are mostly grown up now so this space would not get the use it deserves, but the room size is good for setting up a listening room. The problem would be the ceiling height I imagine. It would not be hard to acoustically treat the walls and floor to prevent reflections, but would the ceiling height create an insurmountable problem to make this a viable option? I imagine so.
Anyway, we probably won't buy this house, but if we have this builder design us a house we could have the sport court included per spec, so that when we sell the house down the road it would have this attractive feature for the future owners. Or, we could convert the design to have these same footprint but with lower ceiling.
Just curious what you would do if you were in my shoes.
Thanks for any ideas you might share.
Peter
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Tall ceilings are wonderful for listening IME. It’s not ideal to have the same dimension for height and width, but it’s probably manageable. Since sport courts usually are fully enclosed, the room may accentuate bass peaks and nodes, though the large size will help. My guess is, you will need extensive acoustic treatment to control reverb time and other consequences of echoes. It’s doable but will be an added expense. Unless you’re quite experienced with acoustic treatment, I’d suggest getting professional help in that. The biggest issue with that is finding qualified people in most places. You might even consider a consultation with Jim Smith, author of Get Better Sound. He sells nothing but his expertise. The project probably won’t be cheap, but it could be a lot of fun. |
Seems to me that space has great potential as a listening room. Higher sensitivity speakers are always a good thing. If you use line source speakers, ceiling interaction will be minimal. You could use an acoustic cloud if you have ceiling interaction issues which could be easily removed at a later date if you sell the house. |
You guys might be right. Our current house has a living room ceiling that's tall (about 13 feet). I've set my system up in this room before and loved the sound. Always assumed I wasn't doing it right but figured that if it sounded good, why not? Thanks for the input. Not sure it makes sense but fun to hypothesize. Cheers |
Ultimately my listening room goal for our next house is NOT to make it look like a listening room. I want to have a sofa and some comfy chairs in a space that sounds really good but isn't a "chamber" for listening. I have several friends who are all avid music fans, but not audiophiles. I've hosted some listening parties at my current home in the past, and everyone enjoyed it so much that in the future I want to have a space dedicated to social listening and hanging out. The image of a listening room with a single chair triangulated between the speakers is not what I'm going for. I'm willing to sacrifice some acoustical perfection to satisfy this goal. I do, however, want to optimize the space to sound the best that it can, within reason. Most likely we will not buy a house with a sport court at all, and if we do, I doubt that my wife will want to convert it to a listening room. Reason being that if we have a sport court there will be people wanting to use it as such (my kids and eventually their kids as an example), and it will look strange to use such a room as a listening room. I will be focusing on designing a home or finding an existing home that has a really good room to achieve my goal. Although I will not plan to create the acoustically perfect space, I will likely have them add a dedicated line to the room and an audiophile grade transformer outside of the house. I will also want the room insulated against sound bleeding into the other rooms of the house, within reason, so that I do not have to worry about disturbing my family while playing music loud, and also not hear noise from other rooms in the house while listening. I've read Bob Harley's article about the listening room he built in his latest home, and while I find that all pretty interesting, I do not plan to go that far with this project. |