I knew room treatments were in my future.


For those of you that have been following my posts. I bought a new house, leaving my great 24' square listening room of 36 years. The best prospect is the basement room 12'x 18'. Home for my new Hegel H390. Thick carpet, concrete block on the end wall and one 18' side. The other side is 2x4 construction with paneling. 
My dealer said he can help with treatments. 
Bryston A2 wired speakers. 
My best guess is placing my speakers from the 12' wall towards the 18' end. 
Thanks for any suggestions.
golden210

Showing 2 responses by lemonhaze

Good advice here to use REW. Also free is HolmImpulse. I recommend you heed the advice and familiarise yourself with either of these essential tools and read up on what is needed to optimise the room behaviour.

Someone suggested contacting a company to help you with products to suit the type of music you like? It does not work that way.

I will try and keep this short. Bass traps will have the biggest affect and paradoxically also improve the midrange and tops. But the bass traps need to be generously sized because low frequencies have long wavelengths. The dinky little bits of foam that Amazon sells are totally useless. All domestic rooms need bass traps.


The object here is to get the sound in your room to decay by 60dB within a certain time frame, known as T60, across the spectrum. This is about 400ms for the average size room. REW will allow you to measure this and the waterfall plots (CSD) will provide data on the decay time and show the peaks and nulls. Now you add the bass traps and measure again. The CSD,s will now show that the peaks have been tamed and the nulls and partial nulls have filled in, so smoothing the response. The peaks were making mud out of the sound and the filling in of nulls will provide music info that was partially missing.

Broad-band absorption panels can be introduced to reduce any long decay time above the Schroeder frequency where the sound becomes a reverberant field. Below that it is a modal region and is where the bass traps work.

This may sound daunting but get started and it falls into place. Know that this will elevate your sound beyond any component upgrade. If you're handy then DIY will save a bunch. Google super-chunk bass traps.

Advice to wall-to-wall carpet and hang drapes everywhere is to be avoided. I can see guys raising their eyebrows at this. W to W carpet and drapes will be  narrow-band absorbers and target just a very limited range of frequencies. Because the carpet is everywhere the affect is to mostly remove those frequencies. This is not what is wanted. Better to have a scatter rug or two. Better still is to prevent floor/ceiling bounce by hanging about a 4ft. X 8ft. panel overhead.

To take it further consider multiple subs such as a DBA which in combination with some acoustic correction will amaze, thrill and astound you.



 


Oh and to retain your sanity it's probably best to just ignore ebm. I am sure he is a nice guy when he hasn't forgotten to take his meds.