If you’re all in on your home theater or gaming section, you may be asking yourself what finishing touches you should put on. For some, acoustic panels are a way to give the experience an extra level of polish. Even if you’re not going for a full theater experience, any home theater will benefit from adding acoustic panels, and if you’re installing any sound system more sophisticated than a TV’s built-in speakers, acoustic panels will add more quality to the sound being produced. There’s no need to break the bank though. You don’t need that many panels to notice a difference, and it’s possible to cover the basics with just a handful. Sure, you can cover the whole room, walls, and ceiling. For most people, the number of panels to get the job done is measured in the single digits, and modern panel designs make them easy on the eyes.

Reverberation, or “reverb” for short, is what you hear in a room when sound is produced. There’s direct sound–the waves of sound in the air that go from the speaker to you directly–but the sound is propagated in a wave out in all directions from the source. Because of that, it has a chance to bounce off all the surfaces in a room before it gets back to you. The sound from the speaker might come to you directly, but it also bounces off the ceiling and down to you, off the walls to your side and diagonal to you, off the wall behind you, etc.

You may be able to hang up sound dampening panels inside a room facing out. That, in theory, would reduce sound coming in through the wall, but this is uncharted territory. Let's see how Eazy Computer Solutions, an influencer with over 57.3K subscribers upgraded his entertainment room at home.