How important are room treatments??

[Alamar]

I'm glad to hear that it's not likely that I'll have huge / abnormal problems. I do strongly suspect that I'm going to have problems with bass vibrations but I'll have to run some tests and see when & where the vibrations occur and resolve them as best I can.

I am certain that acoustically this house is superior to all of the other houses that we were looking at. ... Heck when I speak I don't hear an echo [literally] so this house is already leaps & bounds better than the others I was looking at.

 

[Savant]

Heck when I speak I don't hear an echo

It's a rare residential room that's large enough to provide a clear echo! You might get echoes in a completely unfinished basement with poured concrete walls and floor. Typically, surfaces need to be more than 20-30 feet away for humans to start perceiving actual echoes, in the true sense. I imagine what you meant was that you don't hear much in the way of reverberation when you speak. But I'm splitting hairs.

 

[Alamar]

It's a rare residential room that's large enough to provide a clear echo! You might get echoes in a completely unfinished basement with poured concrete walls and floor. Typically, surfaces need to be more than 20-30 feet away for humans to start perceiving actual echoes, in the true sense. I imagine what you meant was that you don't hear much in the way of reverberation when you speak. But I'm splitting hairs.

Actually what I'm talking about is similar enough in effect to an echo that the difference doesn't matter. While I was speaking I could hear a relatively clear time delayed repition of the sounds that I had just made. Whether that counts as an echo or a reverb doesn't matter much to me because "it's close enough to government work" ....

FYI: The dimensions of the area we're looking at is 12x25 with an opening in the back of roughly another 4x25. There were openings into other rooms with similar dimensions and the like. While I'm not sure I think that houses on a slab tended to be worse than those with crawlspaces although I wasn't looking at that directly.

...

 

[Savant]

Actually what I'm talking about is similar enough in effect to an echo that the difference doesn't matter. While I was speaking I could hear a relatively clear time delayed repition of the sounds that I had just made. Whether that counts as an echo or a reverb doesn't matter much to me because "it's close enough to government work" ....

No worries. Like I said, I was splitting hairs. Over here in my pocket-protector-wearing-noise-geek world, we like to define such things. Most people perceive "echoes" when the reflection arrives > about 20-30 ms relative to the arrival of the direct sound, which corresponds to talking in a room with walls roughly 20-35 feet away. But the phenomenon is subjective; each person's ear-brain mechanism works differently. You may be hearing bonafide echoes while many others may only perceive coloration of the sound. It's also possible that the rooms you experienced just happen to have multi-order reflections (bouncing off more than one surface) that are distinct enough to be perceived as echoes. Nonetheless...

FYI: The dimensions of the area we're looking at is 12x25 with an opening in the back of roughly another 4x25. There were openings into other rooms with similar dimensions and the like. While I'm not sure I think that houses on a slab tended to be worse than those with crawlspaces although I wasn't looking at that directly.

Sounds a lot like a family room / HT I had once. The space was roughly 12x18x8 with an entrance to a 4x25 hallway at the back, all sitting over a crawl space. The room had decent-to-high quality sound with minimal acoustical treatments. There were various qualities to the room that gave it good natural bass control. Among them were 1/4" wood paneling walls (as opposed to drywall), 1/4" ceiling tiles over a massive insulated airspace (A-frame attic above), two monstrous couches with cloth (as opposed to leather) material, and the hall at the back (no door) allowed the bass to "breathe." The floor was Berber over a 1" thick pad. All these factors combined to control the sound quite well, which was good news since there were three large windows and an 8'-wide sliding glass door were largely untreatable. Could it have been better? Absolutely. But it was a family room first and an HT a distant second. Had it been a dedicated HT, I would have worked to improve it.

 

[Alamar]

Your house sounds a LOT like mine.

Crawlspace: Check.
A frame Attic with insulation: Check
Door at the back [that is often left open] ... Check
Carpeting with a thick pad ... Check
Cloth couches ... check

I should have mentioned that I do have wood paneling about 3-4ft up the wall. Above that level is drywall though. ... half a check

**************************************************

While the room is theoretically dedicated to "media" [It's not good enough to claim that it is a "home theatre"] I don't think that I'm going to go to drastic measures unless my ears and instrumentation say that something is too far off for me to ignore it.

 

[Savant]

Your house sounds a LOT like mine.

Check! (But you should know that I don't live there anymore.)

While the room is theoretically dedicated to "media" [It's not good enough to claim that it is a "home theatre"] I don't think that I'm going to go to drastic measures unless my ears and instrumentation say that something is too far off for me to ignore it.

And Check! again.