What RT60 actually is
RT60 is the time, in seconds, for sound in a room to decay by 60 decibels after the source stops. 60 dB is a big drop — roughly from normal speech to nearly inaudible. So you can read RT60 as “how long sound lingers in your room.”
Too long vs too short
Too long (an empty, echoey room) and every note lands on the tail of the last one — music turns muddy, dialogue smears, bass blurs into a single note. Too short (a dead, over-damped room) and everything sounds boxed-in and lifeless. Neither is the goal; the goal is landing in the right range.
What a good value looks like
There’s no single right number — it depends on the room’s job. For a typical living-room setup, a mid-frequency RT60 around 0.3–0.5 s feels comfortable; home theater can run a touch longer, and a room you mix in wants to be shorter. Professional standards (EBU Tech 3276, THX) give a target curve by band — bass is allowed to ring longer than mids. So “is my RT60 okay” is a per-band question, not one number.
How it’s measured
The direct way is to make a short sound (a clap, a balloon, or a sweep) and record how fast the energy falls by 60 dB. In practice, engineers use Schroeder backwards integration to turn the decay into a smooth slope, then extrapolate RT60 from that slope — the rough clap method (T20/T30) and a precise sweep are the same idea underneath. Acouvero uses a sweep because it shrugs off background noise, and reports RT60 in six octave bands.
What Acouvero does with it
Acouvero measures your per-band RT60 at the listening position and lays it against the target curve for your kind of room — you can see at a glance which band runs long. If the low end rings too long (usually room modes at work), it prioritizes bass control in the plan, like adding bass traps. In other words, RT60 is one of the core measurements it uses to turn “your room” into “what to do about it.”