gonna try get some acoustic treatment in my room. i've got a pretty good idea of where im going to be putting my panels.
theres a local shop that sells really cheap acoustic egg carton kinda foam panels. like 15 dollars each one.
its not possible for me to make the acoustics worse by putting cheap foam everywhere is it? anything soft is better than the hard wall?
im not very familiar with this acoustic treatment stuff in general, so feel free to enlighten me.
At 1/11/15 11:02 AM, TheAudioGuy wrote: really cheap acoustic egg carton kinda foam panels.
Care to link the product?
its not possible for me to make the acoustics worse by putting cheap foam everywhere is it? anything soft is better than the hard wall?
It is possible to make it worse by overdoing it. You're just trying to control, not kill the acoustics.
Check out the Studio Rescue series on youtube with Francis Buckley. It's fun, educational, has obvious sponsor moments and deals with the common issues home studio owners face.
Gonna summon @Breed, he knows all about acoustics.
Here is a really simply explained thing on the basics of acoustic treatment!
http://www.darkroommastering.com/blog/room-acoustics-and-sound-treatment
Do you like pork sausages?
Egg carton is very flammable and close to useless.
They dont absorb sound evenly at all, so you'll just be semi absorbing some very specific frequency ranges and coloring the room as such. The purpose of acoustics is to even out the sound of the room, and to reduce the warping of the sound caused by reflection issues. The goal definitely isnt just kill whatever you can with soft stuff, although generally an effect of acoustic treatment is the take out some of the livelyness, which is subsequently what everyone thinks the purpose is in the first place, but I assure you, it is not.
Hopefully that makes sense, if not I am happy to elaborate more. In the mean time I'd say if you use any, use it sparingly, and don't count on it doing much.
A DIY solution is to put several different materials together in a wooden panel and hang that on the wall in front of and behind where you work. Even better if you can hang it 1-2cm from the wall.
Corners, too - corners are the first culprits.
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At 1/11/15 04:14 PM, MetalRenard wrote:
Corners, too - corners are the first culprits.
I'd say the first and most addressable culprit is first reflections. Proper speaker placement and mid/high traps for the first reflections are much easier to accomplish then the bass traps needed for corners. First reflections is where he can/should put the egg carton stuff (not that I'm pro egg carton or anything).
Although technically yes, if addressable, standing waves are a little bit bigger of an issue.
+1 to everything said thus far -- good advice. Especially corners -- If you're on a budget, I'd tackle corners first. But do it RIGHT.
I'd stay away from foam generally -- you're much safer with acoustic panels built from mineral wool or fiberglass. Material like Rockwool isn't terribly expensive to DIY. I went with a Fiberglass panel setup (more expensive than rockwool) in my studio. I've got 4 broadband absorbers and 4 bass traps, and it cost me about $400. I bought frames pre-made, and assembled the panels myself (semi-DIY). A 100% DIY with rockwool (4 broadband and 4 bass traps) could probably be done in the area of $200, depending on where you live and availability.
You absolutely can go wrong with ANY treatment, not just foam. If you start throwing insulation everywhere without consideration, you could no only be wasting money, but you could be making your room worse. The issue with foam is that it struggles with low-end frequencies. It handles high-end frequencies very efficiently, but it looses effectiveness around the 300-500hz range (depending on thickness). I haven't personally tried foam "bass traps", but I'm highly skeptical.
If you throw foam everywhere, you're going to be treating the high ends, but not the low ends. That's going to result in an extremely bass-heavy, boomy room. That will translate to a very thin and tinny mix, since you'll be boosting the high end way too much and dropping out the low end to compensate.
GIK Acoustics has a great education section on the basics of acoustic treatment.They're great guys, and would be more than willing to help you out if you send them an email. And in the spirit of full disclosure: I have bought absolutely nothing from GIK -- I just have a lot of respect for the company.
I've said this before to some other folks, but my advice for inexpensive acoustic treatment of a space is simple: floor to ceiling bookcases with books and assorted crap (of the non-smelly variety). Make sure you have different sized things in different spots so its uneven (tasteful arrangement of items optional). In any open spaces on walls, hang wall hangings or any sort of thing that will interrupt any evenness of the wall. Open spaces leading into other places can also be good: remember, in all the acoustic treatment charts, the item with the greatest absorption is an open window (but gl;hf about sound coming IN from any openings). I have an exposed wooden ceiling (actually the floor of the first story) with open wooden joists and all sorts of unevenness and the likes directly above me. I'd stack the sound quality of my unfinished random-crap-horde basement man cave eyesore of a studio against most acoustic treatment aside from the high-quality stuff done by qualified acousticians (sound clips and picture below).
It's all in having as few large, flat, and/or hard faces as possible, which more or less goes completely against modern standards of housing and construction. I'd wager one would get almost as good acoustics ripping out all the drywall in their room as spending a few hundred bucks throwing stuff on top of said drywall... but unfortunately for a plethora of health, safety, utility, and other obvious reasons, that's NOT recommended. :P
Some examples of raw audio captured in the dungeon-esque landscape pictured below:
https://instaud.io/1Re
https://instaud.io/2WP (recorders, brass, zithers at start, vocals only)
https://instaud.io/1GY
https://instaud.io/2t1
Offtopic, but:
My monitors are both in corners (wall and furniture), asymmetrically placed along the longer side of a fairly long room, with one window on the side and echoey emptiness on the other. I have more room modes in my low end than there were bullets in the beaches of Normandy on D-Day.
Thank god for low volume listening.
Your daily confidence booster brought to you by: People with no sonic self worth.
Cheerio!
If you're going to use a hodgepodge of materials to treat your room, definitely do some sine sweeps as you're putting up material to check if you're making things better or worse. It is always possible to make things worse (even with proper treatment material). And again, get those corners in check first.
And again, definitely check out the GIK Acoustics articles on treatment.
Also a bit off topic, but worth mentioning -- I think it's safer to mix with a good pair of headphones than a poorly treated room.
