Wisdom Sage C150i, Owner'S Manual

13

Room Acoustics & Placement

Wisdom Audio believes in equalization. Assume for a moment that you had a 
“perfect” loudspeaker: as soon as you place it in your room, its perfection is 
gone. In fact, even good rooms often introduce deviations of 20 dB to the re-
sponse of the system, particularly at low frequencies.

It seems strange to us to worry about tenths-of-a-decibel differences between 
one component and another when there are 10-20 dB problems right there in 
the room with you.

At the same time, room equalization is not a panacea. It does not solve all prob-
lems. In fact, and somewhat paradoxically, EQ works best when it has the least 
to do. It is best used as the “finishing touch” on an otherwise good system. Un-
fortunately, most people do not understand that the most important component 
in their system is their listening room. 

This manual does not have the space for a full description of everything that 
goes into creating excellent room acoustics; doing so would require a textbook 
of several hundred pages. Instead, we will give you some ideas, and some refer-
ences to pursue should you want to learn more.

Start With the Room

There are many myths floating around pertaining to what a “good room” should 
be like. One of the most common is that it should have non-parallel walls. With-
out going into the details, we recommend staying with rectangular rooms whose 
dimensions do 

not

 share common divisors. 

Thus a room with dimensions of 8’ by 16’ by 20’ would be quite poor (since 
the dimensions are all divisible by a length of 4’, and 16 is also multiple of 8). 
This commonality of dimensions results in large standing wave problems at low 
frequencies. By contrast, a room whose dimensions are 9’ by 16’ by 29’ would 
be much better, since none of the dimensions are mathematically related to one 
another.

There are infinite variations on this idea. If you have the flexibility to choose (or 
modify) your room dimensions to avoid such problems, do so. Either way, our 
room correction will be a big help.

Rigid Walls

Another myth that should be dispelled is the notion that the walls (and ceiling 
and floor) of the room should be extremely rigid in order to reproduce good 
bass. Rigid, inflexible walls reflect energy extremely well; thus you will keep 
more of the bass energy in the room. This much is true. However, those rigid 
walls will only increase the amplitude of the standing waves that your room 
naturally supports. In simple terms, you will have more bass, but it will also be 
more irregular, with larger peaks and valleys in the response.

Walls that flex a bit (but do not rattle) are much better. Coincidentally, tradition-
al American residential construction standards (sheet rock on wooden studs) are 
not a bad place to start. You can do better still with professional help, but studs 
and sheet rock are better than poured concrete. (If your listening room is in the 
basement, a false wall can easily be built in front of the concrete. You probably 
need something like this for insulation and aesthetics anyway.)