Room Treatments - ATS Corner Bass Trap

@hbarrel You are very welcome

I updated my TN systems page with new pics of the room and the traps. I have smaller triangle bas traps in the rear corners also behind the Real Traps diffusers.

jsalerno277 - congrats on your discovery that treatments can provide real substantive sound quality benefits.  I am a bit surprised at how a single trap made so much of a difference that you listed, especially in an open concept room - I don't doubt your findings and would encourage you to expand your coverage as WAF, budget, and space allows.  Absorption of bass energy helps:

• remove modal peaks and fill in nulls for better symmetry of Left/Right speaker loudness.
• reduce bass decay times that are too long relative to the average midrange decay times and as such can improve midrange clarity by reducing what was bass masking before the treatments.  Aim for your lowest 1/3rd octave interval of <500ms or ~150% of the avg midrange decay times, whichever is lower.  For example, if your EDM music has a tempo of 120 beats per minute which is 1 beat every half second or 500ms, you want the first beat to decay down to the noise floor before the second beat begins otherwise the second beat begins while the 1st is still decaying and heard which adds to the one-note bass effect.  But the bass decay time should be relative to its mids (see point below)
• a Bass Decay and "Warmth" is a ratio that considers how well the bass and midrange integrate.  It takes the average decay times of two bass octaves and divides it by 2 midrange octaves average values and should be between 1.1 - 1.45.  I wrote an article about it here:  https://www.thesilo.ca/combining-bass-loudness-decay-times-to-improve-stereo-quality/#google_vignette
• invest in both velocity (insulation filled) and pressure (membrane, diaphragm, Helm Holtz) type bass traps for best results

Keep going!!!
 

Agreed with @kevinzoe , although I have no experience with membrane traps.  Filling your rear corners are top priorities for trapping, with as much as you can get in there loosely (using R19 or R13 type stuff, the fluffy kind) and then covering with enough fireproof material to keep the insulation from exiting the unit.

And then if you can at least get your first reflections with 4" minimum, 6-8" preferred paneling, again as large as possible, you will see another giant difference.  The thicker the panel, the lower the frequencies it will cover typically as far as absorption. 

It’s best to get an expert at somewhere like gik acoustics, or many of the other reputable acoustics companies to dial in your room.  If you really want to go down the rabbit hole and get your system singing, get room EQ wizard, and a umik and check your frequency response curve on each channel, as well as your waterfall, rt60 graphs.  Rooms account for a large portion of the sound you’re hearing because in most rooms, most of the sound you are hearing is indirect sound (sound coming from reflections and the room), vs direct sound (coming from the speaker directly to your ears).  Physics!  But the main thing is to enjoy your system, and in particular the music that is coming out of them.  It can be easy to forget that in all of this work to achieve great sound :D

I recently was working with Yamaha Music (Canada) on determining if some pesky bass modes could be absorbed enough or if structural room changes were needed.  When 9 membrane bass traps (6 GIK Scopus T40 units and 3 Studio Solution units) were added to the room and placed in corners where pressure was highest (think of drywall over exterior bricks/cinder blocks, not internal drywall walls) we reduced a 69Hz modal peak by 9dB!!  And using a whack load of 6" thick GIK Monster traps with and without FlexRange and Tri-Traps, a 130Hz modal peak fell by 6.5dB in one channel and 8dB in the other channel.  Avoiding the use of EQ was their goal so getting the right amount of Sabins (unit of measure of absorption)  placed in the right spots was critical.

@jrareform I agree with their comments that you might wish to invest in your learning and use of acoustic measurement software like Room EQ Wizard or Dayton Audio's OmniMic.

For what it's worth, if you do use EQ (parametric or Finite Impulse Response (FIR) types) then the bass traps while helping somewhat with frequency response will likely do more for your decay times (T20/T30/T40 metrics).

Start with Early Reflections (where a sound hits a single surface before arriving at your ears) of the sidewalls from the closest speaker (Left_Speaker->Left wall) and farthest speaker (Right_Speaker->Left wall), floor and ceiling to achieve inter-channel symmetry meaning at most a 3dB difference in loudness between the channels for every midrange/bass musical notes (e.g. Middle C=261Hz or Concert A=440Hz) for octaves centered at 500Hz and 1kHz for tonal symmetry, and at most 2dB for the octave centered at 2kHz or higher for imaging symmetry.