Become a TechRadar Insider
- YouTuber PlasmatronX creates a testing rig to visually map how spatial audio waves travel
- It requires a lot of custom design, including building his own multi-channel amp
- You can download the 3D printing files and code to make your own testing rig
Have you ever wished you could see the sound waves in your room? It turns out all you need is a guinea pig and a CAT: Computer Acoustic Tomography.
In a fascinating and fun video that enraptured the whole TechRadar AV team and is well worth 11 minutes of your time, YouTuber PlasmatronX creates a testing rig that enables him to visualize how the sound waves move around the room.
That visualization can then be used to compare how different sonic setups perform, such as the difference between a soundbar and a full surround speaker setup.
Put a guinea pig in a testing rig
PlasmatronX clearly doesn't take things too seriously. His experiment makes use of multiple soft toys, including a toy guinea pig to sit within the sound saves because its close enough to being a 4:1 scale of his own head, and at one point he suggests that his experiments with beam steering – using imperceptible delays to make sound appear as if it's coming from somewhere else – would have been more successful if he'd been firing beams out of his own rear end.
The guinea pig is centered in a multi-speaker setup that can replicate a perfectly positioned pair of stereo speakers, a soundbar, and a full 7.1 surround sound setup. You can easily see where the "sweet spot" appears in each setup, and how soundbars can make sound appear to be coming from speakers that aren't there.
The key takeaway here is that your room is one of the most important factors in the sound you hear: the combination of audio reflections from walls and ceilings, and sound wave absorption by soft furnishings such as your couch or curtains, will have a significant effect on what you hear.
That's particularly important if you've got a soundbar that uses acoustic trickery to create virtual speakers, beaming audio that's intended to bounce off the walls and ceiling of your room. The cosier your front room the more audio, it's likely to absorb.
This isn't revealing a big secret by any means — it's why many of the best soundbars have room calibration — but it's still fascinating, and the video's often very funny, especially when PlasmatronX is experimenting with building his own amp, and building soundbar waveguides with varying degrees of success.
If you fancy repeating the experiment with a guinea pig of your own, PlasmatronX has provided all the necessary code, 3D printing files and schematics for you to download right here.
Thinking of buying a new TV?
Try our TV size and model finder! You tell it how far you sit from your TV, we'll tell you what size to buy based on viewing angle advice from image quality experts, and we'll recommend our three top TVs at that size for different prices.
Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds.
