Reverberation room


A reverberation chamber or room is a room designed to create a diffuse or random incidence sound field. Reverberation chambers tend to be large rooms and have very hard exposed surfaces. The change of impedance these surfaces present to incident sound is so large that virtually all of the acoustic energy that hits a surface is reflected back into the room. Arranging the room surfaces to be non-parallel helps inhibit the formation of standing waves - additional acoustic diffusers are often used to create more reflecting surfaces and further encourage even distribution of any particular sound field.
Reverberation chambers are used in acoustics as well as in electrodynamics, such as for measurement microphone calibration, measurement of the sound power of a source, and measurement of the absorption coefficient of a material. All these techniques assume the sound field in the chamber to be diffuse, and will normally use a broadband sound source so that the resulting sound field contains acoustic energy across the whole audible range.