Two Words
Often, after doing a job for a lot of years, you realize the choices involved in doing that work have become simpler. You’ve gotten much better at intuitively making the right choice for the work at hand. The reason for this can be simplified into two words: it works.
When you’ve made choices over hundreds and thousands of instances, you distill the results into two broad categories – “that didn’t work” and “that worked”. You pull the right answer from memory when it matches the choice in front of you. Highly-experienced professionals do that routinely, and make the work look simple.
I’m reminded of this whenever I’m asked what will make a room sound better. I’ve made sound-based decisions over the span of three decades, and a lot of different experience in a lot of different rooms makes my answer intuitively simple: more diffusion.
A long time ago, a friend in the high-end studio design business told me the best way to build very effective diffusors myself, for a wide variety of rooms. I’ve applied that advice in dozens of situations, and recommended it to hundreds of people who have asked me how to do the same. Now I’ve developed an improved version of that diffusor design as a commercial product line, and the simple marketplace response is this: they work.
Anyone in the acoustics business – if they are being honest – will tell you the test procedures devised so far, especially for diffusion, have little relevance to what and how we hear. We’re certainly in the infancy of diffusion testing, and the best advice I can give you – admittedly biased toward my own product line – is this: diffusion works.
John Calder
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