Room Treatments

Tim

Can't tell you more just now. When I can..I will post it here.

Tom

Hi all - at the risk of self-promotion, I wanted to let you know that I got my side wall reflective baffles (i.e. horizontal oak planks) installed a little while back. Pictures of the room are in my "System."

The planks are 3/4" thick Oak and there are 3 rows per side wall: the top plank is 12" wide whereas the middle and bottom are both 24" wide. All are about 12 feet long. They are mounted using piano hinges on 2"*4" and I use doweling to push the bottom of the plank away from the wall to whatever angle I think sounds best. By changing the doweling length I have complete control over adjusting the angle from 0-90 degrees.

The bottom plank - which is at ear height - is at about 40 degrees (42 actually using trigonometry to calculate it) and reflects sound upwards to the ceiling where I have 12 RPG Skyline diffusers. The middle and top planks are at 30 and 20 degrees respectively, also reflecting sound upwards to the ceiling.

Besides looking cool IMHO, they are a welcome sonic addition to the tricked-out room. By splitting up the vertical space on the side wall across three planks, I can choose to listen to different amounts of 1st reflections at ear level compared to spots higher on the wall than ear level. I've found that with the bottom plank 'closed' - meaning, open a small angle (e.g. 10degrees) - that the plank actually absorbs bass and the sound becomes bass-shy and anemic sounding, but when the plank angle is increased to say 40-50 degrees the bass returns and sounds more natural and engaging.

I'm also playing around with putting a GIK Monster (that is a custom smaller sized unit) and GIK D1 diffuser on the bottom plank at the 1st reflection points to see what effect it has. The 40 degree angle does a good job of minimizing the 1st reflections upwards and over my head but doesn't do it 100% because when I add the Monster absorber the soundstage width gets a bit narrower and I can hear a few more musical details. (I suspect that with a larger angle of the bottom plank that there would be no sound difference between it and an absorbing panel at the 1st reflection point as in both cases early reflections don't make it to my ear as they're either reflected overhead or absorbed.) What the D1 diffuser does is make sure that more reflections come my way (when the QRD wells are oriented vertically so as to diffuse sound laterally). It sounds more live-sounding with more MF/HF energy sent to the ears.

I still have more experimenting to be done with the angles of the middle and upper planks before settling in on the perfect setup. But as an acoustical experiment it is doing an admiral job of reducing flutter echos down the length of the side walls and reducing MF comb filtering (which may or may not be a good or necessary thing). The built-in flexibility of varying reflective angles and adding optional absorption or diffusion at ear level makes for some fun experimentation. Any guesses on what will sound best?! ;-)

Hope this is of some help to the larger community.

Wondering if someone can help me here. I've just relocated and purchased a new home. Unfortunately it's smaller than my last home in which I had a perfect listening room. In the new home I only have a loft area that overlooks my great room with 20+ foot ceilings to use as my listening space. Obviously this is not an optimal setup as I feel sound is escaping into the open great room over the balcony. My B&W 685s sound really good but not great. Any thoughts on what I can do to maintain good sound quality (outside of building a wall or hanging a curtain, which will promptly lead to a divorce)?

Boy you have some learning to do. Room is 50% of the final sound and you can over do it, and it will take some time.

My advise is start small, hit the corners on the wall behind you speakers, the center area wall behind your speaker and then listen, then grap a mirror and find the 1st refection point on each wall then grap a rug or something and dampen that area and listen, play with that setup for awhile, remove a panel and listen again, and slowly your ear will be trained to pick up the changes for good or for that so good.

Use google and research on line and read. Every room is different so you have to looks at yours as a one of a kind with its own needs.