You can't have too many bass traps...


Hej

I've read that you can't have too many bass traps. Is that really true? 
simna
You can't have too many bass traps...[?]

Unequivocally: yes, you can. Too many of them and put the wrong the places they eat away of proper soundstage fill/size and kills overall energy and (natural) liveliness of the sound. It's about strategically placed bass traps, smaller ones at that and used sparingly - as I see it. To much bass trapping may have an alluring sense of bass control, but I'd rather live with the occasional unevenness of response to have a more natural overall presentation. I'd include diffusion predominantly over the Schroeder frequency and, again, light absorption below it to deal with bass modes.  
I know I'm grave digging here, but the information is so egregiously incorrect, I had to say something.

I'm going to assume we're not talking about tuned traps, but rather absorbers.

You cannot have too much bass trapping, for the simple reason that at a certain point, with enough traps, all reflections will be totally absorbed.

There's one major problem with most of these replies, they seem to assume the OP has a decent sized room, but chances are the room is small.

There are two approaches to eqing a room, tuning it by targeting problem frequencies, or damping until the whole thing is flat.

If you have a small room, approach 1 probably isn't going to work. Chances are the acoustics are so bad, you just need to remove them all. The only "liveliness" a small room has is the janky kind.

Thinking about most untuned traps, they are actually cutting the high end at a more efficient rate. So if you only put a few in, you'll end up effecting the high end first. As you add thicker and thicker trapping the low end starts to catch up, until finally you get to the point were everything is absorbed.

So the problem most people on this thread are probably having is using no where near enough bass trapping. Question: is it feasible to use that much? It doesn't take thaaaaat much. I mean you'll have to sacrifice real space, but trying to hang Owens corning here there and everywhere isn't terribly space efficient either.

Cheapest way, take a small room, measure off 1 meter, make a false wall with cheap timber and fill the entire cavity with cheap fluffy fiberglass insulation between 4000 and 6000 rayls/m (most is, but check the GFR first). You'll loose a meter of space, but you can use much cheaper insulation and it will be better down to waaay lower frequencies. Now test the room, if it's not pretty flat, add more and make them thick.

Option two is to strategically try and tune the room, good luck with that.
Right. Bass traps are worthless as tits on a bull. You need an intelligent room, subwoofers and digital bass management. The wavelengths are too long for anything the size of bass traps to do anything. All they do is absorb and redirect higher frequencies. If you decrease higher frequencies the bass becomes relatively louder. This give the illusion of more bass. Nice racket.
All of you who think you know what you are doing need to get yourselves a calibrated mic and impulse measurement program. Learn what is really happening rather than falling prey to myths and marketing.