Today’s update to SubZone brings some much-requested new features and a major improvement in performance.

To accurately simulate your room, we need to understand how the sound waves reflect and absorb when they encounter each surface. We have made this as simple as possible by creating a list of common materials that are used when constructing walls, ceilings, and floors. Up until now, we have only had the option to select a single material to represent each wall. This is quick and easy, but not as accurate as it could be.

Version 1.3 allows you to select different materials for each wall in your room. This should provide an improvement in accuracy, allowing you to get a clearer picture of where the best location for your subwoofer is. To be able to do this, we need to know which wall is which by capturing the orientation of the space. When creating a new room, you can now specify where the front of your room is. The front is represented in the heatmap by a blue line along one side.

Room acoustic simulation is an intensive task to run on a phone. As such, for some large and reverberant spaces it can take a long time for the processing to complete. To help with this, we have re-engineered the simulation engine to maximise the use of the phone’s processor. This means that simulations can now run up to 10 times faster. This will make a huge difference, particularly for the more challenging rooms that are made from hard materials.

Unfortunately this performance improvement is currently only available on iOS due to a bug with the software framework we use to make SubZone. We’re keeping a close eye on that and will update our Android release as soon as that is resolved. Thank you all for your patience and support!