- YouTuber PlasmatronX creates a test rig to visually map how spatial sound waves travel
- It requires a lot of custom design, including building your own multi-channel amplifier
- You can download the 3D print files and code to make your own test rig
Have you ever wished you could see the sound waves in your room? It turns out that all you need is a guinea pig and a CAT: Computer Acoustic Tomography.
In a fascinating and funny video that thrilled the entire TechRadar AV team and is well worth 11 minutes of your time, YouTuber PlasmatronX creates a test rig that enables him to visualize how sound waves travel around space.
That visualization can then be used to compare how different audio setups perform, such as the difference between a soundbar and a full surround speaker setup.
Look at
Put a guinea pig in a test rig
PlasmatronX clearly doesn’t take things too seriously. His experiment makes use of several soft toys, including a toy guinea pig to sit within the sound because it is close enough to be a 4:1 scale of his own head, and at one point he suggests that his beam steering experiments – using imperceptible delays to make the sound appear to come from somewhere else – would have been more successful if he had fired his own end.
The guinea pig is centered in a multi-speaker setup that can replicate a perfectly placed 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 bottom line here is that your room is one of the most important factors in the sound you hear: the combination of sound reflections from walls and ceilings, and sound wave absorption from soft furnishings such as your sofa or curtains, will have a significant effect on what you hear.
This is especially important if you have a soundbar that uses acoustic tricks to create virtual speakers that send out sound that is meant to bounce off the walls and ceiling of your room. The cozier your front room is, the more sound it is likely to absorb.
This is by no means a huge secret – it’s why many of the best soundbars have room calibration – but it’s still fascinating and the video is often a lot of fun, especially when PlasmatronX experiments with building his own amp and building soundbar waveguides with varying degrees of success.
If you want to repeat the experiment with your own guinea pig, PlasmatronX has provided all the necessary code, 3D print files and schematics, which you can download right here.
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