Why
I built the first version of this for my own studio. Planning a room means holding too many things in your head at once: what gear you own and what it can actually connect to, how the cabling runs, where the speakers sit, and what the room does to the sound once they’re there. Most of that ends up on paper, in a spreadsheet, or not written down at all.
Sonara puts it in one place, and does the acoustics maths for you.
What it does
- Gear library — add the equipment you own with its real specifications: I/O counts, connector types, power draw, physical dimensions.
- Routing and wiring — plan the signal paths for audio, MIDI, USB and power, with the app tracking what can legitimately connect to what.
- Room modelling — define the space, its contents and its acoustic treatment.
- Placement analysis — speaker and listening positions analysed in real time, with recommendations as you move things.
The acoustics
Two distinct things get analysed, because they behave differently and want different fixes.
Early reflections are geometric. Sound leaves the speaker, bounces off a wall, ceiling, desk or floor, and reaches you late — comb-filtering the response and smearing the stereo image. The fix is absorption or diffusion at the mirror points, or moving the speakers and the seat. Closely related is boundary interference, the cancellation notch caused by the wall behind and beneath each speaker, which lands in the low-mids and is driven purely by speaker-to-boundary distance.
Room modes are resonances. At wavelengths comparable to the room’s dimensions, reflections superimpose into standing waves and the room rings at particular frequencies — axial, tangential and oblique. They produce large, position-dependent peaks and nulls in the bass, and they ring on after the note has stopped. Trapping, placement and sometimes EQ; absorption panels alone won’t touch them.
The two split roughly at the Schroeder frequency, somewhere around 200–300 Hz in a domestic room. Below it you are thinking in resonances, above it in ray paths.