The system
Rooms are not improved by adding absorption until everything sounds dead. They are improved by controlling three distinct problems and balancing them across the whole space.
The three Rs of acoustics
Resonance
At low frequencies a room resonates. Bass is strong at some seats and absent at others, and no amount of loudspeaker choice fixes it. The Resonance Control Panel is corner loaded, including ceiling corners, because that is where modal pressure is highest. Consistent low frequency response is the foundation the rest sits on.
Reverberation
Reverberation is how long sound lingers. The goal is not simply less of it. It is the right decay time, and the same decay on every axis: length, width and height. The Reverberation Control Panel brings RT60 into the target window evenly, spread across wall and ceiling and weighted toward the rear of the room.
Reflection
Early reflections arrive at the listener just after the direct sound. They smear stereo imaging and cost clarity. The Reflection Control Panel is placed where reflections actually land, in a deliberately irregular layout: a regular grid concentrates its scattering at one scale, and the irregular arrangement is what reaches lower. That is why the layout is designed rather than estimated.
Each of the three raises its own questions, and they are answered at length in the knowledge base: what reverberation actually is, why a room can measure well and still sound wrong, and why the bass is right in one seat and wrong in the next.
Acoustic treatment normally costs a room 100 mm to 200 mm or more on every treated wall. In a cinema or a listening room that floor area is worth more than the treatment. No panel in the C-ATS system is deeper than 50 mm, and the Resonance Control Panel is 43 mm, which is what makes the system usable in rooms that cannot spare the space.
Corner loading is how a shallow panel does low frequency work: placed where modal pressure is highest, it does what would otherwise need far greater depth. That is the depth argument made concrete rather than asserted.
How a project runs
The room is modelled across all three problems together, because treating one moves the others. Reflections are calculated for every loudspeaker and the combined resonance response for every listening position. Which of the three the room actually has, and in what proportion, comes out of the model rather than being settled before it.
Start a projectThe layout is built to. The panels are designed to go in with ordinary site skills and nobody from us in the room, and because the arrangement is aperiodic it is the relative positions that perform: set out from the drawing, and move a run as a whole rather than panel by panel.
Once the room is built, its performance is measured on site, so the targets the design set can be shown to have been met. Acoustic verification is a distinct task from speaker calibration, and it belongs before it.
Isolation stops sound crossing the boundary between a room and the building around it. Treatment controls resonance, reverberation and reflection inside the room. The two are often confused and they are not interchangeable: isolation does not determine treatment performance, it provides the conditions in which treatment behaves predictably. Where a room needs both, they are specified separately.