Wayne Parham Messages: 18789 Registered: January 2001
Illuminati (33rd Degree)
Most times, you can work with what you've got and expect at least reasonably good performance. There are some very difficult rooms though. Examples are basements (or any room with hard walls), very long narrow rooms, very small rooms and rooms with highly irregular shapes.
Basements are difficult because of the solid concrete on all six boundaries. This make reflections and room modes very strong.
Long narrow rooms are hard to setup because there can be either little separation between lateral sound sources or too much. Room modes can also be a problem.
Small rooms have a problem with room modes. They can also be too small to setup all the speakers and screen, so sometimes you have to choose a smaller screen and forego surround speakers.
Highly irregular shapes sometimes just don't allow any sort of reasonable placement. The irregular shape isn't usually bad for acoustics and is often actually beneficial. But a weird room can make it hard to position screen and speakers where they would make the most natural illusion of reality.