Alpha Certification®


What is it?

Over several decades, talented acousticians have developed measurements to quantify room acoustics. These include reverberation time (RT60), early reflection level, Clarity, and Speech Transmission Index. Alpha Certification® uses a proprietary mixture of such metrics to determine if your room is of top quality for its intended audio purpose.

Your room is assessed using all of these metrics remotely, via your own laptop computer. We supply the software and hardware tools necessary for you to record the "impulse response," the acoustic signature of your room. You email the resulting files to our lab for detailed acoustical analysis using our own software tools and evaluation by a professional acoustician.

Types of Certification

We offer three types of certification, in order to accommodate the widest range of home and critical listening environments.

Alpha 2-Channel Certification

This certification is for high-quality stereo listening rooms. While we allow a range of reverberation (liveness) to accomodate individual musical tastes, we still require evenness of the reverberation times at different frequency bands. Reflections should not distort or smear the accuracy of the sound stage. The room frequency response must be free from significant problems over the frequencies from 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz.

Alpha Home Theater Certification

To achieve Alpha Home Theater Certification, you need a "medium dead" room, with low and even reverberation. This provides the highest fidelity for movie surround sound. We adhere to the same high standards as professional cinemas and dubbing stages. High dialog intelligibility is also required. A typical Alpha Certified home theater will have carefully balanced acoustical treatment applied to most of the wall surfaces.

Alpha Multimedia Certification

Designed for multi-purpose and media rooms, this is similar to Alpha Home Theater Certification. However longer reverberation times are permitted, which may be appropriate for a mixed-use room and for a combination of different media. Dialog must still be clearly understandable.

What if my room does not pass certification?

If your room doesn't achieve Alpha Certification®, we'll tell you why. As part of your testing, you receive a detailed 6-page acoustical analysis, with treatment recommendations.

We "Plug and Play"!

To record the data needed for Alpha Certification®, all you need is a laptop computer and relatively simple hardware and software.

Alpha Certification® can now be done from data collected using widely available acoustical measurement tools. We now support:




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