In ancient cities, the theatre played a central role in civilized lifestyles.
Without a means of recording or capturing music and performance, it thus fell to performers to maximize their live sets. A system needed to be devised whereby a large group of people could experience the sights and sounds of a performance in a way that matched the artiste’s original intention. The ancient Greek theatre, the forerunner of Rome’s coliseum, was created to serve this need.
The theatre at this time – in the 5th century BCE – emerged as a venue for thousands of people to experience the plays and music of the period. These semi-circular affairs were built with an ear for acoustic properties that is strikingly contemporary. Ancient Greek theatre-goers had the pleasure of being able to experience performances as they were meant to be experienced, and this design was eventually replicated across the ancient world, with the Roman amphitheatre as its most famous architectural descendant. The chief triumph here was that of sound because even those seated on the highest level heard the action just as if they were directly in front of it.
To state the obvious, our enjoyment of music today has evolved greatly from the days of the ancient theatre performances.
In the modern context, the supply chain of our music can be summarized as follows:
However, even as technology behind the ways and means of capturing, rendering and delivering audio has developed at an astonishing pace, the science behind the acoustic properties of spaces remain unchanged.
Since it became possible for people to experience music in their own homes, the room has become the wild card in the delivery of excellence in aural experiences. Once the audio system has transformed electrical signal into audible sound waves, the music we hear will become subject to the strict laws of acoustics, and this makes the room the weakest link in the sound supply chain.
Optimizing the acoustical environment is the exclusive domain of highly skilled and specialized professionals who track all the relevant factors, including reverberation, absorption, reflection, diffusion, vibration etc. To give you an idea of what this involves, simply take reflection as an example. To get a realistic simulation of how a given sound will play out in a given room, you need to simulate a minimum of 100,000 reflections.
Even with the most advanced sound system in a controlled room, peaks and dips between +20 to -20 dB in the sound frequency response are to be expected. There is no way that simply tweaking cables, power stabilizers or the interconnects can ever adequately compensate for this big difference. (As an illustration + - 20 dB can be the difference between the sound levels in an average living room and an underground train!)
When this large difference in frequency response can be expected in a controlled room, one can imagine the difficulty in optimizing sound in a room with furniture, carpets and other accoutrements of a livable home.