What's the best location for a skylight?

If your ceiling has a pitch to it already..the sonic impact would be limited to the added bounce from the glass. If you have a flat ceiling, the hole down from the skylight would create a waveguide with a reflective surface at the top....and the impact on sonics would be more of an unknown.

From a light/heat gain standpoint, the morning Sun is friendly and the afternoon Sun is less so. ie: solar gain to warm up a room in the A.M. is usually a good thing...esp. if you live in the upper part of the U.S.,..however, P.M. Sun and the solar gain from (ie: South and West facing windows/skylights) are usually a problem in this hemisphere and are a common building error by both builders and Architects.

A friend of mine recently went with skylights. Very nice to listen to music in natural light.

How big is the room and how large the opening? Perfect rectangle?

His game plan was very simple and we talked about it prior to his doing it. 1) we avoided placing the skylights on angles of direct reflection. You can use a mirror for this. 2) We put a cloth like material on the trim of the skylight light to avoid as many angular hard surfaces as possible to soften the reflected sound on the theory that small omissions (absorbed sound) will be more difficult to hear that some added reflections. 3) The ace in the hole was we added a retractable "shade" over the skylight. It's a light cloth that resembles the old shades you would pull down over a window. If placement and trim measures failed the idea was to simply cover it for "serious listening." (Was there a post some time ago for most anal audio thing you've done/ maybe this is mine, eh?). A short pole pulls the cover over easily. We begged out on making it electric.

Anyway, we cannot hear the difference (as best we can remember) w/ the skylights installed and he almost never uses the shades.

It might be different with other rooms of course and other speakers with different dispersion patterns.

Couple great online sources www.linkwitzlab.com/rooms

www.silcom.com/~aludwig. This has it all and if he doesn't cover it he refers you to who will. He also sites several great online room calculators to use for acoustic treatments.

I remain,

I agree with PBB about not placing the skylight near the first reflection points of the speakers on the ceiling. If building codes require placement of a skylight, then you can use diffusion materials rather than absorption. RPG and Echo buster sell these products. ASC and Echo Buster will provide a free evaluation. I received an ASC tubetrap package containing interesting articles on placement of their products. Art Noxon President of ASC sent me the package containing some old stereophile reviews regarding the use of both diffusion and reflection. Another article of interest was on stereophile’s review of Thiel 7.2’s regarding ASC MATT test (you can download this review from Thiel’s website). Jon Risch’s website has a lot of info on DIY acoustic products that really work. He can be found at Audio Asylum – Tweekers Asylum

Best of Luck

Definitely in the ceiling! On a more serious note, I would avoid one in a listening room. If you insist on one, I would keep it away from the speaker end of the room and probably not over the listening position. I am certain you will get all kinds of answers on this, most, like mine, based un some educated (or maybe uneducated) guess. Why bother if it means you may have to add all kinds of acoustic treatment to cure the problems this will no doubt create.

In an other room. Especially if you consider problems of UV fading of veneers and fabrics. For openning units add all the delights of water infiltration. Can't imagine any sonic advantage to having them in the ceiling.

Seriously consider paying for a professional (audio) evaluation/simulation before pursuing the addition of skylights.

There's not much that i can add to that other than the irregularities in the ceiling should provide "some" form of natural diffraction even with the skylight(s) closed.

Depending on how far you could open them, this could also be used as somewhat of a bass trap. The more that you opened it, the greater the amount of low frequency leakage and the less "bloat" that you might experience. You might even be able to fine tune both the frequency range and amplitude that would be most affected using your "heavenly bass trap". You could actually chart your results by taking frequency response measurements with the skylight in various positions.

Obviously, this would also play with ultimate spl levels as you would be altering the amount of air volume that your speaker were trying to load into and pressurize.

Sounds like something to check into with a LOT of potential for variables. Sorry i can't help you any more than this. Like i said previously, i was "wingin' it" for this one. Albert might know a little more since it appears that he has skylights AND has had a professional acoustician survey his room. Sean
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I have some placed at those points in my room and it sounds great. Give it a try!

Sean, I AM LISTENING, so far it's making sense. Opening them up when I'm listening sounds like a good tweek, heavenly? I searched the threads and could not find anything. Right now, you are the leading authority...go along some more! Bgrds.

From a non-audiophile perspective, i think that they have to be installed in the ceiling to be called a skylight. If they are in a wall, they are typically referred to as windows. Sorry, but i just hadta do it : )

While i really don't know if this would work or not, how about placing two of them right where your primary points of "ceiling bounce" would be ? You could then open them up when listening and take advantage of their natural ability to diffract the signal. Keep in mind that i'm making this up as i go along : ) Sean
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