Case Study: Theatre Seating In many auditoria, the seating and
audience form the main absorption in the room, and consequently
being able to correctly measure and predict the absorption
coefficient of these surfaces is very important. The wrong
estimation of seating absorption has been blamed for acoustic
problems in many halls. Salford University developed a method
for testing theatre seating which is now used commercial. The
aim of measuring the random incidence absorption of a small
sample of seats in a reverberation chamber is to predict the
absorption that a large area of the same seats will exhibit when
installed in an auditorium. There are problems, however, in that
the small sample of chairs in the reverberation chamber (say 24)
is unrepresentative of a large block of seating because the edge
effect is overemphasised in the reverberation chamber
measurements. The Kath and Kuhl method involves placing the
seating in the corner of the reverberation chamber in rows with
their intended row spacing, and th