Room acoustic advice

[satterfi]

I use one of my basement rooms as a ‘sit down and enjoy the music’ room.

Should I try to make it acoustically dead like the interior of a speaker?

Can a small room sound great if you do it right?

satterfi

[cjd]

Some people like totally dead rooms, others prefer a mix... dead-end/live-end, top/bottom, all sorts of variations.

It's an engineering project on its own!

C

[joetama]

I have listened to stuff in rooms with and with out padding, I personally like to hear the room a little bit (NOT A LOT). A fully dead room just sounds too plain or with out life for me.... But other people love them.....

[BobEllis]

2 channel or multi channel? With multi channel you probably want your room a little deader than 2 channel. If space constraints require speakers fairly close to walls, deaden the walls near the speakers to kill early reflections. Early reflections muddy up the image and obscure a whole lot of detail.

Overall, you'll want a mix of absorption and diffusion to make a room sound right. Ever notice that concert halls that sound good are often architecturally interesting? No parallel walls, odd shapes on the walls, reflectors and refractors all over?

check out the recommended reading thread for a number of resources.

[chasw98]

Can a small room sound great if you do it right?

satterfi

As the others have mentioned, it can. Current thinking, according to what I have read, espouse the elusive "reflection free zone" or RFZ. One simple trick you can do with a mirror and 2 people is to sit in the main listening position and have someone move the mirror along the wall, ceiling, and floor until you see the speaker in the mirror. Mark these locations with a piece of tape (remember you will see the left and right speaker in the left wall and vice versa), and after you have them marked, try covering the locations with an acoustically dead material like a quilt or a piece of carpet. Then listen. Do you hear a difference? If so start building some absaorbers. They can be done very cheap for DIY. Another experiment recommended to me by Ethan Winer was to go buy 8 bales of fiberglass at Home Depot and place 2 bales in each corner and then listen to see if your bottom end tightens up at all. After you are done experimenting, return the bales to Home Depot and get your money back. A good source of info is here at Ethan's company site RealTraps. http://www.realtraps.com/info.htm

[Dennis H]

First step, you need measurement gear to tune a room. If you don't know what's wrong, you don't know what to do to fix it. For a good-sounding room, you want the RT-60 at different frequencies to be about the same. That usually means you need to do some serious absorbing in the bass region and to be careful to not damp the highs too much.

[satterfi]

Thanks all for the advice.

Cdj probably summed it up best, "It's an engineering project on its own!"

I’ll need to step up and buy/build measurement instruments as recommended by Dennis H. But as he and chasw98 said, I’ll need bass traps.

How do I fabricate my own bass trap? I’ve got ¼" sheet rock, 3/8" styrofoam panels, felt, carpet, carpet padding and of course, corrugated fiber too work with.

I'm a bit perplexed with the RT60 info available on the net. I don't get it. I'll work on that latter.

satterfi

[ThomasW]

http://home.comcast.net/~thomasw-2/SubwooferSetupandEQpage9.html

Here's the best R/T 60 spreadsheet I know of...

http://forum.studiotips.com/large_files/RoomModeCalculator.zip

[satterfi]

Thanks, now we're talking stuff I can build without my wife noticing I'm spending money.

I'll be asking questions regarding RT60 after I learn more about it. The version of Excel on my PC too old to run http://forum.studiotips.com/large_fi...Calculator.zip

My daughter's PC is up to date with modern software so I'll go over there to figure that out.

satterfi