"Dave Plowman (News)" wrote in message
...

ISTR 1.2s being the figure chosen by the BBC to represent an average
domestic living room. And that was many years ago when furnishings were
rather less sparse than is common these days. Of course average living
room size may have gone down too.

Sorry, I think your recall is imperfect. I work with someone who does a lot
of measurements of newly finished rooms, with no carpet curtains or
furniture. Even in these rooms, one second would be a high figure, and 0.8 s
is more typical. It would go up if you cleaned and polished the surfaces,
but we are talking about a room that is totally empty apart from the person
doing the measurement.

I do remember that some living room measurements were made, though not by
the BBC, and the figure came out somewhere near 0.5 s. Domestic sound
insulation measurements have been standardised to that figure for many
years. Going from the 1950s to the end of the last century, living room
RTs fell because of the general adoption of fitted carpets, and I would
guess that 0.35 to 0.4 s was typical. Now with the change to hard floor
with rugs, 0.5 s is probably more like it, perhaps even 0.6 s but that would
definitely sound echoey unless the room was very large.

This is the mid-band figure. Low frequency RT will very a lot depending on
the structure.

--
Tony W
My e-mail address has no hyphen
- but please don't use it, reply to the group.