5.1 design help

Hi, im designing a 5.1 acoustically treated HOME THEATRE room for my father as a b-day present. although i already have some knowledge of acoustic treatment, i need to make it look very smart and not too obvious(not studio style). my ideas were to use helmoltzt resonators, but instead of having standard rectangle shapes, having a "puzzle" style rectangle.(different shapes, fitting together as a standard rectangle) i also would like to make these DIY bass traps: http://www.teresaudio.com/haven/traps/traps.html for a floor, we would put things like persian carpets and so on, which would help acoustically for the floor. i calcualted the RT60 and it is 0.83 seconds(untreated) and the modal frequency's are 34/37 HZ between the 4 walls and 73HZ from ceiling to floor. ceiling-wise, we are fitting small spot lights(many nice homes and studios have these, unfortunately i dont have a name for them). but i had an idea of building a eg. 10/15cm deep(depth) wooden box, which would cover most of the ceiling, where we could use the box to fit the lights in, and i could also fill it with 703, to acoustically absorb ceiling-wise... Question:is all this so necessary for such a small room?(i personally hope so;) ->ive seen pics of studios that have these ceiling acoustics that have up-side-down, irregular half triangle shapes...i really like that but cant seem to find specs on how to make em.... ->any better ideas on other acoustics? ->is my placing correct? ->the direction of where the couches/tv will be, cant be moved(orders from dad;) p.s. on the drawing: there will be a 5.1 system installed, which i havent drawn in yet, hope this is of no great importance. your help would be grrrreatly appreciated. Greg

Greg, probably the reason you've not gotten an answer on this is that you are asking more about a home theater system and not a recording studio - in a studio, we tend to set up things very precisely and concentrate on a single seat being accurately configured - in a home theater, you are more interested in SEVERAL people having "good seats" and so there are different ways of setting things up for that. Your comment about the 5.1 system not being important is about as far from reality as you can get - if you read some of the posts in the acoustics forum on speaker/listener placement for studios, you'll see what I mean. Here is a recent paper written by several professionals in the music industry on surround to illustrate what I'm talking about - note that even the "pioneers" can't agree on much... http://www.grammy.com/pe_wing/5_1_Rec.pdf I hope you find some of that helpful... Steve

Steve gave a good summary. Try http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/forumdisplay.php?s=baec04f9afef8cb35668d53c9e62e38f&forumid=19 That forum is devoted to HT building and design. You will note many people who are regulars here are on there also. The acoustics doesn't really change that much, just the application.