WaveForming Study - L and T shape Room Recommendations

A converted living room or a dedicated room built into an irregular footprint often has a side space attached to it: an alcove, a bar area, a stair landing. Integrators have asked us the same question ever since: what happens to WaveForming performance when the room is not rectangular?

Our research team ran a new set of wave-based acoustic simulations to find out.

We modeled L-shaped rooms (a side space in one corner) and T-shaped rooms (a side space in the middle of a long wall), varying the size of the side space from a small alcove to nearly the size of the main room.

For each geometry, we tested several subwoofer layouts and measured Mean Spatial Deviation (MSD, our proxy for seat-to-seat consistency) and decay time (DT60), before and after WaveForming optimization.

One factor mattered far more than any other: where the emitter subwoofers sit relative to the room's cross-section.

When the front array is placed at the standard WaveForming reference points, using the narrower part of the room, WaveForming produces a clean, controlled wavefront regardless of the side space. MSD after optimization stayed below 1 dB in most L-shaped configurations, close to an ideal shoebox room.

The rear absorber layout proved far more forgiving, holding up well whether it referenced the narrow or the full room width.

Decay time told a simpler story: WaveForming brought DT60 down from 0.35 to 0.6 seconds to roughly 0.1 to 0.2 seconds across every layout and every room shape tested.

The practical takeaway

A non-rectangular room does not disqualify a project from strong WaveForming performance.

Place the front subwoofers at the regular positions, referenced to the narrower section of the room, and the side space becomes a secondary concern.

Avoid placing extra subwoofers as emitters inside an alcove or side room.

The full simulation methodology and layout-by-layout results are available in the complete study.