It is commonplace today for new or remodeled residences to contain a family "media room," or even a dedicated home "theater" or "concert hall" for devoted movie-goers and music lovers. Audio/video equipment designed for the home is widely available, much of it precision engineered and very expensive. And the demand for high-fidelity, if not high-quality, entertainment is rising exponentially. Clearly it is our voracious appetite for new and more entertainment that is driving today's demand for consumer electronics.

"We're a very information-centric society," explains Sekhar Kondepudi of Diablo Research, a high-tech engineering design and product development company in Sunnyvale, California, "and a lot of the information is entertainment related." In fact, just "being some way connected to entertainment" may be crucial to the success of new home network products and devices.

Catering to this entertainment bonanza is a new breed of technicians calling themselves custom electronics designer/installers, who sell and install typically high-end A/V equipment. Many are also qualified to integrate audio/video into a whole-house network of lighting, communications, security, and environmental devices and controls.

"With customers willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars, or even hundreds of thousands of dollars for a media room or home theater," notes Keith Yates, "the question then becomes 'How do we make sure they get their money's worth by providing an infrastructure where everything is right?'" Yates, a world-class designer of fashionable spaces for demanding clients, believes the answer is to seek architectural acoustics and engineering services from consultants such as himself.

For new construction, he says, "we can guide the proper dimensioning and layout of the space in what is necessarily the most technical room in the home. Basically, we harmonize the A/V hardware and the person—where they're going to sit, the prime listening/viewing areas—and the acoustical environment for any particular use." Not an A/V dealer or installer, his firm's core product is a set of detailed, color CAD drawings specifying the geometrical relationships between the listener, the room, the acoustic treatment, and the speakers and sub woofers. Cutaway views, section details, mounting instructions, and installation notes are included. Architecture, Yates believes, is crucial to the success of any A/V environment.

He says a room—whether a media room, home theater, or precision listening environment (PLE)—must have "good bones." By this he means its geometry, dimensions, and construction, all of which shape the room's fundamental sonic character. Only then is it possible to create the special effects that engender what he terms an "immersion experience." In the first of many educational articles he has written for Audio/Video Interiors magazine, Yates notes that "the laws of physical acoustics are swayed by neither the cost nor cachet of cables, amplifiers, loudspeakers, and the rest. The plain fact is this: The speakers and the room in which they sit form a system, and the latter contributes the lion's share of what you hear."

The listening room, he argues, is far more critical to sound reproduction than the speakers—"after all, it's larger and our ears are located in it"—yet the room's "acoustical behavior is unknown, uncontrolled, and highly likely to sabotage the goal of replicating the sonic richness—the colors, textures, shadows and shapes—that the recording engineers, producers, and artists sweated over in the studio."

Not surprisingly, one of his basic services is to provide exact room dimensions for optimal support of low-frequency playback. This is important because realistic performance of movie soundtracks requires that the room itself not foster an uneven distribution of bass "eigenfrequencies," Yates explains. This distribution depends on room geometry and dimensioning, which can be analyzed using state-of-the-art acoustic software modeling tools. Similarly, the construction of the room is critical in isolating it from distracting, outside noise. "We propose how a room is to be framed, sheathed and insulated, and we typically provide technical power system design (for low-noise electrical service to power-sensitive components) and also supply a low-noise HVAC design."

Most acoustical and A/V designers wish they could be engaged by architects in the planning process at an earlier stage than they generally are in the design of a new or remodeled residence. They feel this would avoid problems they often encounter such as the wiring being troublesome (and costly) to install, the A/V equipment difficult to locate, lighting that detracts or interferes with the A/V presentation, traffic patterns being disruptive, etc. Yates maintains that early consultation would actually improve the sound quality of the room by affecting its basic shape and how it is constructed. "One of the most challenging and frankly exasperating facts of acoustic engineering," he writes in "The Well-Tuned Room" series, "is that the residential environment offers such a rich array of opportunities for things to go wrong that the acoustical engineer's charter is not so much to install 'good sound' measures as to ferret out and eliminate the sources of bad sounds. Acousticians must be physicists before they can be artists."

Removing all the serious defects in an existing room is "really job number one," he says, adding that "solving these problems in room acoustics has bedeviled this whole industry." But, Yates cautions, "even with advanced computer modeling programs and a staff of world-renowned acoustical designers, you cannot achieve the 'acoustically perfect' environment. There is no magical combination of size, geometry, and acoustical treatment, because what constitutes 'perfection' varies according to the program material, A/V gear, and where you sit, among other factors. "So the question is not so much what can be done, but what should be done. And that depends on how you plan to use the room—as a dedicated home theater, home concert hall, audiophile listening room, home music studio, or as a general-purpose media/entertainment room."

Media rooms, which typically include a large-screen television combined with "surround sound" capability, constitute the majority of demand today for specialized A/V services. While less rigorous in acoustical terms, "you also see all the worst mistakes being made," says Yates. "You see media rooms which are equipped as media rooms, but which are a cacophony, a jumble of loud, obnoxious noises, not only from the TV or big screen, which echo around the room, but infiltration of noise through the walls, windows, and down the corridors. So it's difficult to participate in even an 'Internet experience.'

"Part of my job is to call out how quiet is quiet enough for this customer using this room for these purposes. We've completed projects that are quieter than any recording studio on the planet. But the level of noise that I permit depends on the character of the noise (noise isn't just noise; it has a tonal quality) so that what does get through is subjectively innocuous or not even noticed." Yates loves media rooms because "people are going to live in them." Such rooms, he says, should be "comfortable and inviting for family and friends" and yet capable of transporting them into a world of movies. "I want a very good experience with movies. I want not just to watch a good movie, I want to feel like I am actually there.

"I tend to design spaces which require some unusual layout for acoustical effects in order to make them pleasant rooms to be in. The sonic character is comfortable and familiar, yet the room doesn't have any of the problems of a normal, untreated room. In fact, to achieve this effect most of my rooms are very aggressively treated, but they are not necessarily 'absorptive,'" which Yates says often leads to home theaters, for example, that feel acoustically dead. "It's rather eerie to be in those rooms. You walk in and there's a hush in the room that seems to suck the life out of you. It's not a comfortable room even to chit-chat in before the movie starts, or after the movie is over. So now you have this room that's supposed to be where the family gets together, but nobody can talk? "Most of my rooms are more relaxed architecturally and stylistically. They blend more with the rest of the house, the architecture, and they tend to be a logical extension of it. The theatrical nature of the playback environment isn't thrown in one's face. But when the lights go off and the movie comes up, it is overwhelmingly the acoustical presentation of whatever is on that screen."

The challenge for Yates is "how to portray what's on the screen without contaminating it with a boxy, small room personality." The answer is not by killing all the sound in the room. "Most people think this is paradoxical, but there are good technical answers." Part of his firm's basic scope of services is a detailed "acoustical treatment plan" that includes the number, make, model and location of all acoustic devices, such as diffusors, absorbers, reflectors, bass traps, and compound devices. This is a detailed scheme that involves "actually sculpting the sound and forming a zone out there in the middle of the audience area which is pleasant to be in, with a natural sound feeling. "Yet when the movie starts and you hear the sound from those speakers, you're bathed in that sound field, not the room's sound field."

Yates' manner of "sculpting sound" is a creative as well as a scientific exercise. It involves devising practical and even innovative techniques to create nuance as well as to provide a distraction-free entertainment. He is the inventor of an "e-Quake" floor motion system for realistic "vibrotactile" events such as explosions and dinosaur clomps. And he has pioneered the use of custom-designed sound diffusors as a richer and more preferable alternative to heavy absorptive damping. Yates has coined the phrase "Deep Entertainment" to connote his various immersion-related technical endeavors. Like Coleridge's "willing suspension of disbelief," he says, "Deep Entertainment™ is what you get when you present the brain with a rich set of well-correlated cues across multiple sensory modalities—in the conventional case, auditory and visual or, in the case of e-Quake-enhanced systems, the auditory, visual, and haptic (tactile). "I'm planning to launch a website on it.

It should be of interest to those who want to probe beyond conventional A/V products and technologies. Lots of goodies on the perceptual mechanisms behind 'DE' await the curious!"

Keith Yates is affiliated with the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE), the Audio Engineering Society (AES), the Acoustical Society of America (ASA), and the Custom Electronic Design and Installation Association (CEDIA). He is Lucasfilm certified for THX system design and Imaging Science Foundation certified for video calibration. Keith Yates Design Group can be reached at P.O. Box 526, Penryn, CA 95663, phone (916) 663-3400, fax (916) 663-3499, www.keithyates.com