Acoustics + architecture
the room is the system.

/ Engineering body

What this integration is and where it lives

Acoustic treatment is an architectural specification, not a finishing item. The reverberation time (RT60) of a finished room is set by the surface materials, the room volume and the seat density — before a single speaker is mounted. Adding more speakers to a reverberant room does not improve intelligibility; it makes it worse. The right intervention is at the design stage: absorption on the rear wall, diffusion on the side walls, low-frequency traps in the corners, ceiling cloud absorption matched to the speech-frequency range. The integration with the AV system is iterative. EASE or REW modelling predicts RT60 and STI before construction. Treatment is sized to meet target RT60 (0.4-0.8 s for boardrooms, 1.0-1.6 s for concert halls). Speaker placement is then designed to match the treated room. After commissioning, a measurement pass verifies the prediction. The seam is between the architect's finishes spec and the acoustic consultant's treatment spec — when they don't reconcile, the room is either too dead (overtreated) or too live (untreated), and no amount of AV intervention will fix it.