Would Acoustic Foam On The Ceiling Help My Room?

[Ron Resnick]

Do not use diffusion until you have your reverberation times within the room managed correctly. Diffusion will make your room sound worse without proper Rt-30/60 time signature management.

Very interesting advice. Thank you!

 

[Dennis Foley]

Very interesting advice. Thank you!

Here is a video I did showing the criteria for a diffused sound field.

 

[stehno]

Unfortunately it is a family room with a 65" TV/entertainment stand and the speakers are also part of the surround sound system. The seating position can't really be moved either so I'm kinda stuck with how far out I can bring the speakersand where I can sit.

I'd suggest following Peter's lead in this matter.

I get that the world is full of compromises but there is no substitution for speaker positioning / placement. Speakers must be able to breathe otherwise the presentation becomes flat / lifeless with sloppy bass, etc.

If you leave the speakers as-is, then you've most likely already compromised their ability to perform as they should / could. Perhaps even greatly compromised. Leaving them in their potentially compromised position and then adding acoustic treatments can at best only make the compromised presentation a bit more tolerable to listen to. Measuring from the speakers' front face, they really need to be out about 4ft to 6ft from the front wall to perform their best for bass and a more 3-dimensional soundstage. Maybe a slightly different room configuration / arrangement could give you this???

Many of us have 8ft. ceilings and sure it would be nice to have 10 ft. ceilings but 8ft can work quite well and I would not consider that an issue in any way. Moreover, it sounds like your room is already filled / overfilled with items that are potentially working for or against your playback presentation already.

In addition to Peter's suggestions, I'd also recommend you consider doing away with the surround sound config and instead focus on the most musical 2-channel + subwoofer playback presentation you can muster. This focus could easily give you a far better musical presentation for music or watching movies / concerts than any compromised surround sound config could offer plus such a strategy will make the room simpler / less cluttered which in turn could provide more options - like more breathing room for people and speakers?

Keeping it simple is always the best strategy from a performance perspective. By keeping it simple, there's less crap to focus on and for those areas you do focus on, you can dedicate more resources (time, money, etc) on those remaining primary areas that might really need your attention.

When it comes to real performance, less is always more. Though you might have to look at other performance-oriented industries to see this strategy in action.

 

[Robh3606]

I have a dual set-up as well and have it prioritized for 2 channel and found that once I had the 2 channel dialed in the surround improved as well. You could try a set-up disk. This ones been around but its good and offers some very useful tracks. Has some great tracks to test set-up and imaging.

Delos Test CD

Strauss, Richard, Respighi, Ottorino, York, Andrew, Palestrina, Giovanni Pierluigi da, Handel, George Frideric, Bach, Johann Sebastian, Wagner, Richard, Grofe, Ferde, Copland, Aaron, Durufle, Maurice, Satie, Erik, Debussy, Claude, Dvorak, Antonin, Vi

Strauss, Richard, Respighi, Ottorino, York, Andrew, Palestrina, Giovanni Pierluigi da, Handel, George Frideric, Bach, Johann Sebastian, Wagner, Richard, Grofe, Ferde, Copland, Aaron, Durufle, Maurice, Satie, Erik, Debussy, Claude, Dvorak, Antonin, Vivaldi, Antonio, Gershwin, George, Falla...

www.amazon.com

Rob