MusicReasonRooms, Monitoring, and Acoustic Calculations
What reverberation time does this room predict?
Enter room volume and total equivalent absorption. This tool estimates an idealized RT60 using the Sabine equation, as a starting estimate, not a measurement of a real room's actual decay.
Answer
Want to learn more? Decay, Absorption, and the Limits of RT60 Estimates
Understand
The Sabine equation assumes a diffuse sound field and does not account for how absorption is distributed around the room, or how it varies by frequency: a room with the same total absorption concentrated on one wall behaves differently from the same total spread evenly. This tool never claims to measure a real room or substitute for band-specific acoustic testing.
Worked example
A 100 cubic meter room with 20 square meters of total equivalent absorption estimates an RT60 of about 0.805 seconds. Doubling the absorption to 40 square meters halves that estimate to about 0.4 seconds, since RT60 is inversely proportional to absorption in this equation.
Method and limitations
The metric Sabine equation is RT60 = 0.161 × V / A, where V is room volume in cubic meters and A is total equivalent absorption in metric sabins. This is a diffuse-field idealization, not a frequency-dependent model; real low-frequency decay in particular often departs meaningfully from this single-number estimate.
Why RT60 alone does not describe a room fully
Two rooms can share the exact same single-number RT60 and still sound noticeably different, since real decay varies by frequency: a room can ring longer at low frequencies while decaying quickly at high frequencies, a pattern this single-number estimate cannot show. Treat this result as a starting orientation before a fuller, frequency-resolved measurement, not as the complete acoustic picture of a space.