Q: How can I optimize my room's acoustics ?

Acoustical considerations can have a great impact on a media room, especially in a dedicated home theater where you will also want to ensure that the rest of the house isn't hearing The Matrix or Spider-man while it blares.

Theater design firm Acoustic Innovations lists three basic acoustic concerns: sound passing through walls and doors, sound ricocheting off walls and distorting the audio, and thick, boomy bass. Depending on the room you wish to tweak acoustically, solutions can range from affordable to costly. Acoustic Innovations president Jay Miller noted that one of the company's recent installations for a theater room measuring 30 by 22 feet required a combination of plywood, flakeboard, neoprene barrier under the walls, multiple layers of drywall, and the company's own sound barrier material called SoundCor. No sound is seeping through those walls and floors.

Acoustical panels can be a practical and decorative solution for walls of theater and multipurpose media rooms. These are generally large wooden squares or rectangles covered with fabric of varying styles, placed along the room's walls for sound absorption and diffusion control. Incorporating common living room items like plush carpeting, sofas and pillows can also help absorb and diffuse sound. Experimenting with your seating arrangement may increase the airflow of sound, especially with the lower frequencies. Audio should properly envelop you, not get trapped in the corners of your room.

With flat-panel TVs allowing just about any size room to serve as a media room, often homeowners or condo owners must seek other ways to save space in smaller areas. You may already be researching in-wall and in-ceiling speakers as a way to do this, but if you don't want to cut into the walls, you can look for cabinets that include storage for left-, center- and right-front speakers or even subwoofers. These cabinets may feature cloth grilles that look like door panels so the sound travels virtually unimpeded into the room.