the listening room: "golden ratio"?


I too am about to build a listening room, actually, I'm building a garage and adding the room over the top. There seems to be a lot of advice to pay attention to the "golden ratio" which, essentially requires a room at least 25 feet long, by, roughly 17. this seems really "BIG". The rationale for the size is based on the theory that the lower hz frequency has a "wave length" of 25' or something to that affect. However, there are few speakers that reach down to that range. I have BW N804, whose freq. response is around 40hz. I was thinking of getting some N803's which add a bit, but still nothing close to 20hz. As nice as it might be to build a 25'X 17' room, I'd like to stick to somehthing around 15 X 12, roughly half the total size of the garage. How much would I "lose" in that size? The other consideration is the cost of heating this room, living in the north, my electronics would not like to spend the winter out there at -30 and electric base board heat would run up a hell of a bill.
thoughts?
joeb
joeb

Showing 1 response by redkiwi

Hi Joeb. I am a bit late on this one, but thought it worth adding that the Golden Ratio is a way of fixing the natural problem of parallel walls and ceilings parallel to floors. But if you are building a separate unit (ie. your garage with room over the top) then you can do better still by having the room boundaries curved or just not parallel. You still need to do some maths about nodes, but risks are reduced. The only issue of course is how a non-uniform structure adds to cost. But I would go that way if I were in your shoes.

The other piece of maths you need to do is about where you want your speakers to be. This will require some research about where others have positioned your chosen speakers, to get a rough guide - mainly to figure out how far from room boundaries you will have to have the speakers before they open up. But what I am getting at is that the distances from woofer to room boundaries are best to be in a golden ratio too. Again, non-parallel surfaces reduces the risk of encountering problems.