Acoustic room treatment

[just4kinks]

Does anyone have experience with acoustic treatments for wall surfaces?

Previously my audio room was a loft with a sloped ceiling, open walls, without many parallel surfaces. The sound was good, and I took it for granted.

I moved, and now my audio room is rectangular with a hardwood floor and one brick wall. It sounds horrible, the echoes are driving me nuts. I plan on putting down a thick rug, but I don't think it will be enough.

Does anyone have any suggestions? My wife has already vetoed "eggcrate" foam tiles (women... sheesh! :D) but I bet I could get away with fabric acoustic tiles. Is there anything that hangs and looks like regular drywall? Anything I can use on the ceiling? The only real restriction is that I can't change the shape of the room.

[NickH]

Put a big rug down. That should help some.

[Ruediger]

... the Master Handbook of Acoustics from Alton Everest.

Ruediger

[Ed Kreamer]

Get a copy of Floyd Tooles book SOUND REPRODUCTION. It is very readable and will help in your quest. It did for me

[DavidF]

I have not installed any treatments as yet. But know I need them and that is next up in the budget.

I would suggest a query to these folks....http://www.gikacoustics.com/

Send them your room dimensions and layout and see if they can provide some initial guidance on wall treatments.

[invstbiker]

Does anyone have experience with acoustic treatments for wall surfaces?

Previously my audio room was a loft with a sloped ceiling, open walls, without many parallel surfaces. The sound was good, and I took it for granted.

I moved, and now my audio room is rectangular with a hardwood floor and one brick wall. It sounds horrible, the echoes are driving me nuts. I plan on putting down a thick rug, but I don't think it will be enough.

Does anyone have any suggestions? My wife has already vetoed "eggcrate" foam tiles (women... sheesh! :D) but I bet I could get away with fabric acoustic tiles. Is there anything that hangs and looks like regular drywall? Anything I can use on the ceiling? The only real restriction is that I can't change the shape of the room.

http://www.acoustimac.com/acoustic-panels/suede-acoustic-panels/

[Mr. Widget]

Does anyone have experience with acoustic treatments for wall surfaces?Your need a combination of diffusion and absorption. This doesn't mean you need to make the room look like a science experiment or a recording studio... nothing wrong with the recording studio aesthetic, but sometimes you don't want your living room to look like a studio.

You can use bookcases and other "normal" design items as diffusors, and for absorption the simplest answer is to use curtains. Better yet are curtains in front of acoustic panels. Another option is fabric covered walls with diffusion and absorption behind the fabric. The fabric panels can look like wall paper, or like fabric accents, or even simulate smooth drywall. There is a fabric from Europe made for this purpose, it is very smooth textured and comes in very wide rolls. It is available in white, cream, and other colors. It really looks like smooth drywall or plaster when stretched tightly on a frame.

If you have the budget, shoot me a note and I'll refer you to a professional I work with who installs acoustic materials and fabric walls.


Widget

[Baron030]

Here is a link to Room Reverb / Sabine Calculator:
http://www.marktaw.com/recording/Acoustics/RoomReverbSabineCalculato.html
I would recommend running the calculations on your existing room conditions and then play around with it a bit.

In my own man cave, I added 32 square feet of Sonex Pyramid Acoustical panels (4" thick). The reverb time dropped by 0.6 second at 500Hz. which was very noticeable. I later added 4 RPG Skyline panels on the back wall, which also was a very noticeable improvement. So, adding absorbing and diffusion panels can make a huge difference.

If you plan on making your own sound absorbing panels then take a look "UltraTouch Denim Insulation", its itch free and carries a class-a fire rating. Link: http://www.bondedlogic.com/

Baron030:)

[just4kinks]

The "Master Handbook of Acoustics" has been in my Amazon cart for ages, I'll pull the trigger and finally buy it. I'll pick up "Sound Reproduction" too.

Thanks for the tips on the panels, fabrics, insulation, etc. Widget, my budget has already been spent ;), I'm hoping to DIY as much of this as possible. I guess I'll start by getting these books and doing some reading.

[Carl_Huff]

Ethan Winer does a good job. His company is 'RealTraps' and I have found his products to be cost affective and functional.

http://www.realtraps.com/
_____________
Best Regards,
Carl Huff

[Mr. Widget]

Ethan Winer does a good job. His company is 'RealTraps' and I have found his products to be cost affective and functional.

http://www.realtraps.com/
_____________
Best Regards,
Carl HuffThe problem with Real Traps, Sonex panels etc. are that in most situations you don't want these "science project" in your home. In a dedicated listening room you may or may not care about the aesthetics, but if the room is a living room or a family room these products are typically not going to blend in with your decor.

That aside, I have found you need a ton of real traps to make much of a difference. They do work well, but the cost adds up quickly.


Widget

[Titanium Dome]

If you're starting from scratch, like I did with my downstairs HT, then some of the following comments would be different. Given that most of us start with the rooms we have rather than the rooms we want, I think the following order of importance reflects my experience and taste.

1. Choice of loudspeaker(s)
2. Placement of loudspeaker(s)
3. Placement of listening position
4. Absorption
5. Diffusion/Reflection
6. EQ/Calibration
7. Pre/Receiver
8. Source
9. Media
10. Amplification
11. All the rest

If you're at absorption, then you've already done the best you could with 1, 2, and 3.

Floyd Toole addresses both absorption and diffusion in some pretty simple ways that are room friendly. He's a pretty smart guy with many loudspeaker and acoustical design credits, including numerous publications. For an easy read, look here: http://www.hometheater.com/content/advice-audio-insider

More in depth, reading this paper and others mentioned in it, caused me to be frugal with any treatments on my main floor. http://www.harmanaudio.com/all_about_audio/loudspeakers_rooms.pdf

It's important to note that he refers to absorption and diffusion/reflection in the same breath most of the time, while I've separated them as 4 and 5 on my list above. This is mostly to draw attention to diffusion/reflection as being an important element in managing sound in a room. I ignored it most of my life, until Chris Neumann insisted on it being a part of the Synthesis® build downstairs. It was a revelation!

Diffusion and reflection are not exactly the same thing, of course, and when it comes to acoustic room treatment (title of the thread), absorption, reflection, and diffusion are the three parameters to be addressed. (Not sure parameter is the correct word, but it's all I can think of atm.)

[JBLAddict]

Floyd Toole addresses both absorption and diffusion in some pretty simple ways that are room friendly. He's a pretty smart guy with many loudspeaker and acoustical design credits, including numerous publications. For an easy read, look here: http://www.hometheater.com/content/advice-audio-insider



I found it slightly ironic to find Floyd has a pair of TiK's in his bedroom.

I have a copy of the Audio Critic Issue 28 from 2002 that pretty much slams them and was a substantial factor in my final decision not to buy the harman ebay units. The front cover has a cartoon of Floyd in a superman costume with a speaker replacing the S, as the feature article is a reprint of the 2001 Audio Engineering Society Keynote. I always associated the slamming of the TiK with Floyd somehow.

[Steve Schell]

Opinions vary on this subject (as with most others) but I regard a room as basically evil with nothing positive to contribute to the sound of my system. Many of the best listening experiences I have ever had were when I dragged my gear outdoors. I favor very heavy damping of the listening room to eliminate its sound to the extent possible and to unmask many of the fine details in recordings that the room would otherwise shout over.

I just checked my 14' by 17' living room and found a total of 18 fiberglass filled panels, all covered with tan burlap to help with the looks and control loose fibers to some extent. Usually in these discussions the subject of possible health hazards of breathing the fibers comes up at some point, but I have been living with fiberglass-stuffed rooms since 1980 and have not begun to wheeze yet. Seven of the panels are 3' by 8' by 6" thick and are made from sound absorbing board frames stuffed with R-19 glass. The rest are more recently built, 2' by 6' by 1.5" thick and use an outer 1 by 2 frame and hard, dense 1.5" thick glass panels. It helps with these projects to know an HVAC contractor to find these dense panels. Building them yourself will save probably 90% of the cost of buying commercially available room treatment products.

By all means get the Everest book; it was my guide years ago. As an experiment to see if this approach might work for you, summon every mattress, box spring, blanket and loose carpet in the house and deploy them to cover as many hard surfaces as possible. Most importantly cover any surface (floor, wall) that would provide a reflection between your speakers and your listening position. The imaging of your system should immediately improve, especially if you stretch a string from the center of your listening chair and make sure that your speakers are equally distant (within 1/8") from your listening position.

[Fort Knox]

Does anyone have experience with acoustic treatments for wall surfaces?

Previously my audio room was a loft with a sloped ceiling, open walls, without many parallel surfaces. The sound was good, and I took it for granted.

I moved, and now my audio room is rectangular with a hardwood floor and one brick wall. It sounds horrible, the echoes are driving me nuts. I plan on putting down a thick rug, but I don't think it will be enough.

Does anyone have any suggestions? My wife has already vetoed "eggcrate" foam tiles (women... sheesh! :D) but I bet I could get away with fabric acoustic tiles. Is there anything that hangs and looks like regular drywall? Anything I can use on the ceiling? The only real restriction is that I can't change the shape of the room.

I think when you gave up the loft ...You need to move ....BACK.....:)

[Fort Knox]

I don't wana leave you hanging
If you don,t Have a surround system......

an alt. is to implement one

It takes the room out of the equation...as sound

levels can be kept quite low ....by comparison....

a sound processor,..... reverb .... and eq also can help