Sound is reflected many times before arriving at the listener from all directions. There are so many possible reflection paths, each individual reflection is very close in time to its neighbours, thus there is a dense set of reflections arriving at the listener. This part of the sound in the cinema room is called reverberation and is desirable as it adds richness to, and supports, musical sounds.
Reverberation in home cinema rooms also helps integrate all the sounds from an instrument so that a listener hears a sound which incorporates all the instruments’ sounds, including the directional parts. In fact we find home cinema installations in spaces which have very little reverberation, uncomfortable and generally unsuitable for listening to music in.
The time taken for reverberation to occur is a function of the size of the home cinema room and will be shorter for smaller spaces, due to the shorter time between reflections and the losses incurred on each impact with a surface. In fact the time gap between the direct sound and the reverberation in dedicated home cinemas is an important cue to the size of the room that the soundtrack is being played in. Because some of the sound is absorbed at each reflection on the cinema’s acoustic panels, it dies away eventually. The time that it takes for the sound to die away is called the reverberation time and is dependent on both the size of the home cinema room, and the amount of sound absorbed at each reflection.