Acoustics and room acoustics are the science of sound relating to waves, most commonly audible frequencies travelling in air. In this day and age much of acoustics focuses on interior electro-acoustics and how to design rooms for the “best” sound.
Traditionally acoustical design begins with all the issues of room acoustics such as Standing Waves, Resonance Frequencies, Comb Filtering, Reverb Times, Echoes, Long Decay Times and Bass Buildup in Corners. It focuses on all the problems which exist as if there is no choice, as if all rooms have inherent, unchangeable issues, and the only course of action is to mitigate the issues with absorption, diffusion and scattering, rather than solving the issues at the base level.
DHDI looks at acoustics as a force of nature, like a cold. Instead of assuming everyone has a cold to start with, we assume everyone is healthy until they get a cold. Quantum Acoustics is a method to keep interior spaces “healthy” and prevent acoustic issues from happening in the first place. It’s a completely different paradigm, starting at the postulate level. If the root of all acoustical issues lies in reflections off hard surfaces and boundaries, then if you control the air at the boundary and prevent sound from existing at the boundary, no issues.
Initially ZR was conceived to be adjustable and tune-able to the subjective preferences of the end user, client, mixer, engineer, producer, etc. However, once the first room was built for Mike Shipley, the overwhelming response was “don’t change it! It’s fantastic. Leave it as a neutral sounding room.” The original concept to take a traditional studio with 8 – 12 Non-Parallel Surfaces in a Trapezoidally Shaped Room into a Rectangular Room with hundreds of Non-Parallel Surfaces worked so well, that every generation of design was logarithmically higher performance than the last. Like snowflakes, no two designs were the same, yet this applied chaos theory acoustics resulted in a completely neutral interior space in every space.
At this early stage ZR didn’t even have a name. Mike Shipley was a huge fan and his studio developed a cult-like following. Several more studios and a few years later, Ian Dittbrenner and Hanson Hsu were talking about cars and the new ZR-1 Corvette, commenting on how the automotive industry knows how to create excellent names for cars. Running through combinations of acronyms they quickly realized ZR could stand for Zero Reflections: the basic concept behind the ZR Acoustics Design Paradigm. And in an instant ZR Acoustics was born.