Home Theater Room Dimensions Calculator
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Good room dimensions help your home theater achieve its best sound. Dimensions are important for the acoustics of small to medium-sized rooms, such as home theaters. Here, room resonant modes can be widely and unevenly spaced in audible low frequencies, right within range of your subwoofer. This can create strong peaks, which cause your sound to "boom" at certain frequencies.
If you are building a new home theater, this Excel spreadsheet calculator will help you calculate good dimensions. It uses the formulas below to tell you if your room dimensions are within the recommended range. You must have Microsoft Excel installed on your computer to use this calculator.
To download this free calculator click here.
This calculator implements the newest and most commonly excepted formula for room dimensions, proposed in 1996 by Robert Walker of the BBC. It's been adopted as a standard by both the European Broadcasting Union and the International Electrotechnical Commission. It is simply this:
1.1w/h <= l/h <= 4.5w/h - 4
where l, w, and h are the room's length, width, and height, respectively. The other rule is that no room dimension should be within 5% of any multiple of another room dimension.
