https://www.acoustimac.com
Various size DIY or assembled panels at reasonable prices, numerous color linen cloth cover material and hanging tools. Highly recommended.
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If you are concerned with aesthetics and not scared of some basic math and geometry you might consider treating your room using the Sabine equation. The trend seems to be hanging panels on the wall which don’t actually address the problem frequencies. Many rooms can be fine in the upper frequencies that these panels treat if they are furnished with sofas and carpets, which many home theatres tend to be. By treating the fundamental problem frequencies you will improve your harmonics across the spectrum. Aim for about 500 milliseconds.
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The thin, foam things may help a little, but barely. Anyone can make really cheap but really good looking panels. OC 703 is good to use in those. Ideally, you want the panels installed so the absorption parts are an inch or two off the wall. This allows absorption on the way in, to bounce off the wall behind it, and absorb it again on the way out.
Focus on first reflection points to the MLP. Side walls and ceiling and floor (thick carpet). Diffusion can be just as important.
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When a speaker emits sound waves, they travel to your listening position but also to the ceiling, sides walls and floor, where they are reflected toward the listening position. While these first reflections arrive later and are measurably distinct from the initial signal, they reach our ears too soon for our psychoacoustic system to distinguish them from the initial signal and they become one in our head. What can be lost or overwhelmed by this wave interference are the subtler sounds that can help depict hall size, performer placement, soundstage width and depth, and the music’s overall tonal signature. This is more the "psycho" part of psychoacoustics and is distinct from the later reflections that bounce around the room and result in frequency peaks and nulls that accrue from room modes and the like. These later reflections might also interfere with the initial speaker signal much as first reflections do, but they further screw up the sound as they contribute to a less than smooth room frequency curve and/or cause “ringing”. Treatment at first reflection points helps a lot, but whole room treatment is necessary to deal with these later reflections.
Absorption simply captures these interfering wave reflections and converts them to heat. Diffusion breaks the waves up and reflects them in different directions instead of directly back at you. To better understand diffusion’s role, imagine being in a room and shooting a shotgun directly at a flat wall (no diffusion) versus against a rock wall (diffusion). The return path of the former is predictable and most are flying directly back at you. The latter will have much of the shot going elsewhere and taking a more circuitous route, bouncing off the surfaces of the room and even bumping into other shot before they might return to you. Because they are fewer, have been delayed, and have a lower energy, their return will not bother you as much as if they came flying straight back at you. Similarly, diffusion provides a time delay along with a weaker signal, allowing your psychoacoustic system to ignore or at least differentiate the reflections from the initial signal. Scattering panels work similarly and often are combined with absorption.
At a minimum, you want to avoid "first reflections" and instead have either "first absorption" or diffusion. Opinions are mixed as to which is better. It is probably easier to do absorption with standard home goods/furnishings such as rugs, blankets, curtains, overstuffed couches, etc. Some suggest that books and records have significant absorption properties, but I would argue they are primarily reflective and if there is absorption, it is over an extremely limited frequency range. Bookshelves, racks, and the like do not give a predictable diffusion pattern. You may be getting different reflections from various media or equipment but they will not have the significant and ordered differences in depth to achieve meaningful diffusion. Neither will a popcorn ceiling nor textured wallpaper. On the other hand, if you wanted to arrange your equipment or books to follow a QRD pattern, you might see some benefit. Also, while too much absorption can be a bad thing as it sucks the reverberant life out of the room, I am not sure there is such a thing as too much diffusion.
If you cannot go full Monty because of WAF, expense, room layout, etc., at the least put a rug down in front of you, avoid any hard surfaces such as a table between you and the speakers, and hang draperies on your windows and tapestries on your wall at the first reflection points.
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I strongly recommend you get in touch with the guys at Music City Acoustics. They absolutely transformed my listening experience with very well-made products at a reasonable cost.
https://www.musiccityacoustics.com/
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