Expressing legal demands in acoustical quantities; is the reverberation time a good predictor for the speech intelligibility in a sports hall?

摘要

The reverberation time is used in legal demands to provide for good acoustical quality in a sports hall. However, the reverberation time depends too much on the hall's volume, so the volume should be taken into account as well. There is a second drawback to the reverberation time: calculated and measured decay curves may be rather concave, especially in shoe box shapes and it is very hard to estimate the noise levels in a sports hall from the reverberation time. An alternative is possible by simple measurement of the strength of the diffuse sound field, but this method requires an extra indication about the characteristics of the loudspeaker used for the measurements.