If you need your speakers close to your screen and to have the material make the least acoustic impact, the SoundMax 8K is your pick. It somehow beat one layer of spandex at 12″. The SoundMax 8K is at the top of the list for both 4″ and 12″ speaker to material distances.

Here are the materials that really stood out after my battery of tests: On the other hand, micro-perforated screens can offer very high gain or ambient light rejection characteristics that woven screens just can’t. The micro-perforated screens all suffer in dB attenuation and need a greater seating distance to not show texture. All types of woven screens can have good acoustic properties. Bonded woven screens are very smooth, have good to great acoustics but struggle with sharpness. Coated woven screens will typically have a higher gain and will be more sharp compared to the uncoated, but they have a tendency to show more texture. Uncoated woven screens typically have less texture but are less sharp. coated woven screen material, like the strong outdoor fabric stretched across lounge chairs.bonded woven is a material that has the black backing attached to the front material.uncoated woven screen material with a t-shirt kind of feel.standard screen material with micro-perforations to allow sound to pass through.Stewart Filmscreen StudioTek 130 G4 Perforatedįour types of acoustically transparent materials were tested: Stewart Filmscreen StudioTek 100 Perforated Stewart Filmscreen FireHawk G5 Perforated Stewart Filmscreen GreyMatte 70 Perforated Spandex – light silver over black – from Spandex World Spandex – white over black – from Fabric Wholesale Direct Seymour-Screen Excellence Enlightor Bright I’d encourage anyone reading this to select a few that check the right boxes and order some samples. What this report can do is help you narrow down the list. It is up to you to select the screen that fits your needs and desires. All of these screens have some tradeoffs. There is still some subjectivity involved when picking a screen. Removing as much subjectivity as possible, I’ve tested 31 acoustically transparent screen materials for dB loss, estimated screen gain, visible texture from eight, ten, and 13.5 feet, contrast, and sharpness. The goal of this project was to do that comparison and report the findings, in detail, at one time and in one place. That’s time-consuming, though, and it can be hard to know what to look for. It’s commonly recommended to get as many samples as possible and compare. Plus, acoustically transparent screens on average (at least woven ones) have a lower rated gain than your traditional screen material! Challenging, indeed. If you pick an acoustically transparent screen, things get more complicated: 1) there aren’t as many options, and 2) there are more variables to consider, which impact both picture and sound. Screen size, screen gain, room environment, ambient light, projector light output, screen type, cost, and more can make anyone’s head spin. įinding the right screen and screen material for your home theater can be quite challenging. If you would like to read its designed for format, click here. A lot of formatting, the table of contents and all of the images of acoustic measurements have been dropped from this version. This is a copy and paste from my website. If you would like to jump to the comments for after this was updated, click here. I believe many will find these results much more thorough. More materials were added and a couple were removed. Below is my updated and much improved results. Thank you to those that have followed along and have given such incredible feedback.

Thanks for listening pixel transparent