I have 4 systems, and I like to play around in this hobby. My biggest room is 17 x 25 feet, but opens to other different rooms, helping bass escape.... Other rooms are 14 x 16, 10 x12, etc., but have to be closed not to disturb...
Should the 1st Third of the Room (Speaker-side) Contain the Most Treatments or Spread Evenly?
- Thread starter caesar
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I have 4 systems, and I like to play around in this hobby. My biggest room is 17 x 25 feet, but opens to other different rooms, helping bass escape.... Other rooms are 14 x 16, 10 x12, etc., but have to be closed not to disturb...
as i was doing my room tuning back 4 years ago now, i found that for 'girl + guitar' or, a string quartet, or small combo jazz, or acoustic rock.....many changes i made did not matter. i had 100+ tracks that i would play every time i made a minor change. and understand i was treating every sq inch of wall surface in my room to see it it mattered. with larger scale music, big progressive rock, or full orchestral, or big band....where the dynamics would engage every molecule of the room, the the walls next to me, behind me, and even on my ceiling behind my head....mattered. i had to play large scale music at realistic levels to tune those spaces. there is a lot of energy projected with large scale music and the dynamic room equation changes. your amps and speakers are also more challenged to hold together and so the headroom of your signal path is also an issue.
your room needs to be able to hold together to meet your expectations if that kind of music is important. yet if it's not important then you can focus your assets on what is important.
typically easy to determine. most absorption is mobile to some degree. not that the living situation always allows for the elimination.....but at least it can be understood.
my 2 cents is that common sense about gear synergy is a given. and i find that most dacs objectively get the job done for solid musical enjoyment. there are good dacs, better dacs, very much better dacs, and fantastic dacs. but few dacs i actually don't like to listen to.
10-15 years ago there were dacs i did not care to hear redbook on. but those are now a distant (if not lost) memory. it's trivial now to make a decent sounding dac. if your dac sounds like crap, look elsewhere for the cause.
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Agreed. If you want to play demanding music at a loud level, room distortions can be brutal and need to be tamed. I found out just how much my ceiling had distorted the treble only after installing ceiling diffusers. I had thought there might be a problem, but I had no clue just how much. And frankly, I don't think the problem is perfectly solved yet.
By the way, I find string quartet very demanding on the room too, but then I usually play at loud levels (as if sitting close to the performers in a small venue). In fact, I find it to be among the things that are most revealing about room issues.
depends on how the String Quartet is mic'd. some are very dynamic and scale. others not so much.
Of all of the room treatment companies I've dealt with, I found one that really does a great job in recommending what treatment to use, where to place it and they can give you a strategy in terms of getting what will give you the best bang for the buck and what to buy later when you have more money. If you are experienced carpenter with a table saw and time on your hands, they also sell build plans for their products so all you have to do is buy the fill material for their low frequency absorption cabinets because they have patents on it and they mfg. their own fill material. And their acoustic foam since it's also proprietary, but hands down, they have the best stuff I've run across. I've never been in a better sounding room than what they do. They actually got the room to have no sound and it was so natural, not over absorbed at all.
But if you are going the DIY route to save money, you do need some experience in using a table saw, but their instructions are very clear and they can advise you on what you need to build and where to place the units. OR, you can actually build your own rooms as they have low frequency absorption that they build within the actual wall structure so you don't have to have lots of boxes around the room.
They do factor in things like number of bass drivers, size of the bass driver, how loud you listen to music or movies as that will also depend on how much low frequency absorption you'll need. But typically for absorption, the front wall is the most important and the side walls. Diffusion does open up the sound stage. As far as modal pressures are concerned, it all depends on the room dimensions and volume will dictate where the model pressure zones are and it depends on how big of a peak you are trying to manage and how flat you want your room's reponse curve..
Their units are big, heavy, and expensive, but they do have the most effective products I've seen. with regards to low frequencies, especially in the 30hz to 50 hz range, which are always the hardest to deal with. I spent many months searching all of the companies that sell "bass traps" and found they had the best on the market for 30hz to 50hz.
The company is Acoustic Fields. They have lots of videos that provide a wealth of information and they do guarantee their products so if you buy their products and you don't like it, they will refund your money, but I highly doubt you will be disappointed….
so, by all means, fill out and submit their room form and talk to them for an hour. You can always call other companies to get their suggestions and go with who you feel the most comfortable with.. But I would stay away from Auralex, I bought product from them and was disappointed with what they sell. Also, you have to be very careful as to what companies call a. "Bass Trap". many companies sell what are heavily misleading products that do NOT do well in the low frequencies in the 30hz to 50hz range, which are the hardest to deal with.
The thing that impressed me the most about Acoustic Fields is they do a lot more with regards to finding out what your usage is, and other factors that will impact what treatment you'll need. Generally speaking, for 2 channel listening, you don't necessarily want it to be treated the same as a control room in a studio or a home theater application. Different usages require different types of treatment.
And no, I don't work for them, I just love their products and their recommendations.
best of luck to you..
Eliminating the reflections off of the wall behind the speakers is the top priority if you have to do it sequentially, followed by the first reflection points and the wall behind the seating position. All three need to be treated. Note that the ceiling and floor are also reflection points. I have RPG BAD panels and ASI Sugar Cubes on the ceiling (photo below)
. The right kind of rug will help with the floor - even better with an acoustical underlayment.
. The right kind of rug will help with the floor - even better with an acoustical underlayment.
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It is necessary and at the same time to do processing in the front and rear, just combining different materials, the front part should be treated with absorbers to remove the early reflections and other negative sound derivatives, the rear part should be treated with diffusers. Thus you get rid of over-reflections in the listening position, while leaving the back of the room alive. There is a certain style of LEDE studios (Live end Dead end), but this is one style, and there are many and everyone likes his own.
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