Get Better Acoustics In Awkwardly Shaped Rooms

As an audiophile, the quality of your favourite music – be it Led Zeppelin or Mozart – is paramount. With a little care, you can turn the living room in your semi-detached house into an acoustical paradise that makes every note and every beat sound as though you were listening live.It all comes down to good speaker placement. Hide expensive speakers behind furniture and they’ll sound muffled; put a set of budget speakers in just the right place and they’ll sound like they are worth twice the price. The average home though, is not a concert hall, so how do you overcome odd-shaped walls and furniture to guarantee yourself the best sound?

Cutting Corners: 

So you had to be awkward and choose an abode where the rooms are odd shapes. All those little nooks and crannies suddenly become unappealing when you’re after the best sound. Avoid corners by arranging your audio/visual equipment and your seating in a rectangle. Although this will obviously mean that you have to arrange the rest of your furniture around them in the space left. But the sound is worth it!

Sound in an L-shaped room: 

The trick here is first to not think about the room as one L-shaped room, but as two rectangular rooms. Ensure your sofa is positioned close to the TV/speakers and not on the other side of the room from them. Inevitably part of the room is going to suffer from poor sound, so make sure it is not the part you predominantly listen to music in. Position your sofa against one long wall and the TV and main speakers opposite it. One surround speaker will be set off from one side wall, but the other will be in the middle of the room. You may have to move it back against the wall to avoid kicking it every time you walk past, although putting it against the wall will minimise its sound quality.

The surprisingly awkward square-shaped room:

Square rooms are bad for getting great sound from your speakers. The walls are all equidistant, so waves of sound reflect from the walls and end up favouring one frequency over others, affecting the tonal quality of the sound. If you put your TV/stereo speakers into a corner at a 45-degree angle, away from reflective walls with the speakers at least 30-inches in front of the TV, that can help. Speakers are best placed in an equilateral triangle arrangement with the listener at the tip of the triangle.

Why reflective surfaces are bad:

All rooms are reflective, with sound waves reverberating from flat surfaces such as walls, tables and counters. These reflections work against the sound quality of your music or the television to varying degrees, depending upon the shape of the room and the presence of other factors, such as furniture and carpets, which can absorb sound (known as damping). While damping can nullify standing waves, which cancel certain frequencies when they reflect off a wall, damping can also significantly lower the volume of your music. Although this may be to the delight of your neighbours, it isn’t ideal for music lovers who enjoy listening to their tracks with audio clarity.

MediaTek Doubles Down on Android at CES

MediaTek on Tuesday introduced several new hardware platforms supporting Google-developed software for wearables and smart TV applications.

The Taiwan-based semiconductor firm, known primarily for its chipsets powering smartphones and other mobile devices, kicked off 2015 with an Android-heavy lineup of new processor platforms at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.

Leading off, MediaTek's new MT2601 System-on-a-Chip (SoC) for wearables is optimized for devices running Android Wear software. It sports a dual-core, 1.2GHz ARM Cortex-A7 application processor with ARM Mali-400 MP-based graphics and supports qHD display resolution for wearables in a compact package measuring 480 mm2. A "whole host" external sensors are supported by the SoC, which interfaces with MediaTek's MT6630 for Bluetooth connectivity.

The MT2601, now in production and sampling to MediaTek partners, has "41.5 percent fewer components" and a lower power draw relative to similar SoCs for wearables on the market, according to the company.

"The MT2601 has an incredibly small die size and is highly optimized for cost and power performance. The platform solution, comprised of MT2601 integrated with Android Wear software, will fuel the maker revolution and empower the application developer community worldwide to create a broad range of innovative applications and services," J.C. Hsu, MediaTek's general manager of new business development, said in a statement.

MediaTek also unveiled a pair of SoCs designed in collaboration with Google for Android TV.

The MT5595 is a quad-core SoC incorporating ARM's big.LITTLE chip design architecture with two ARM Cortex-A17 processor cores matched with a pair of ARM Cortex-A7 cores. The MT5595 delivers current HDTV-quality visual computing and supports 4k/Ultra HD video playback at 60 frames-per-second via the Google VP9 and HEVC codecs.

"MediaTek has a strong heritage and a leading position in the TV SoC business. By introducing the world's first Android TV devices, we are demonstrating a fast pace of innovation and strong commitment to the home entertainment business," said Mohit Bhushan, MediaTek's head of U.S. business development. "MediaTek is proud to integrate Android 5.0 Lollipop software in its chipset portfolio and significantly improve the consumers' engagement model with their TVs."

Meanwhile, MediaTek also has audio covered in its burgeoning Google partnership with its new MT8507 audio SoC. The chip is designed for the Internet giant's new Google Cast for audio software and "will power a delightful home audio experience that allows consumers to easily connect with Google Cast Ready speakers and sound bars from their personal devices, such as iPhone, iPad, Android smartphones and tablets, Macbooks and Windows PCs, using Google Cast ready applications," MediaTek said.

MediaTek's MT5595 and MT8507 SoCs are also currently in production and should start appearing in consumer devices in early 2015.