How echoey is your room?
Clap once. Your phone tells you in 30 seconds.
- 1Stand in the middle of the room, phone in hand.
- 2Tap the button and wait for the countdown.
- 3Clap once, hard, and stay quiet for 3 seconds.
Questions
What does the number mean?
It's the reverberation time: how many seconds a sound takes to fade by 60 dB after it stops. A treated studio is around 0.2 s; a furnished living room around 0.4 s; an empty office or a big kitchen can pass 0.8 s. Above about 0.6 s, speech gets tiring and music turns muddy.
How accurate is a phone?
Good enough to tell whether you have a problem and how big it is, which is what this is for. Phone microphones and their processing are not reliable below roughly 200 Hz, so a clap can't show bass problems, which is where small rooms usually suffer most. For that you need the full diagnosis, which calculates from your room's dimensions and surfaces.
My result changes between claps. Why?
A clap is not a perfect impulse, and background noise eats the tail of the decay. Measure two or three times in a quiet room and take the middle value. If the readings vary by more than 0.15 s, there's too much noise.
Will foam panels fix a high number?
Thin foam only absorbs high frequencies, so it can lower this number while leaving the room boomy. What you need depends on the surfaces you already have and what the room is for. The free diagnosis tells you how much absorption is missing and where; the treatment plan tells you exactly what to buy.
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