Fixing Wall Shudder
When I moved to my new place a few years ago, my audio quality took a huge hit. I’ve worked through some power supply issues (lose neutral lug in the meter socket). Something about the room always seemed off, forcing me to try multiple rooms for my audio setup without success. Bass was the biggest issue. Multiple JL audio W6v3 subs in sealed boxes with DSP sounds bad? That doesn’t add up. Especially when they sounded amazing at my last place.
The room/wall construction isn’t anything special but it wasn’t at my last place either and I got excellent results. I think I’ve narrowed down the problem to contractor grade wall construction. If you pound on the walls with your fist, it sounds like lightweight construction and also let’s out a booming sound.
I recently read an article about wall shudder and I think that’s the cause of most of my issues. From the article:
“When a pressure spike hits a wall or ceiling it delivers a short solid blow to the surface. This vibrational surface twangs back and forth with its own resonant tone. These mechanical reverb times are long, easily over 1.2 seconds. The walls and ceiling of most rooms vibrate too freely to be used for any kind of powerful audio in music listening rooms. Explosive transients in an unconditioned room are not tight and clean, they stimulate structural vibration which creates new sounds that are heard but which are not in the program material.”
And
“The best way to imagine what contractor grade flexible walls behave like in high power audio rooms is to imagine a big subwoofer installed in the middle of each wall and a bigger one in the ceiling.”
and
“All audiophiles know how loud they can play their room. It might be around 75 dB,A, or maybe 80 or even 85 dB,A. But whatever it was, you just can’t play the room any harder without it falling apart… every room has its threshold, above which, the room cannot dissipate any more power, and when that happens, the room transforms into a vibrating, quaking, thundering twanging badly built giant guitar box… the room will “break-up” just like a loudspeaker cone will break-up. This is the reason for sound level limits in listening rooms.”
My question is this: What can be done without taking the walls down to the studs and building a proper wall? Can I achieve good results by adding more screws to the studs, securing the sheetrock better, or by adding another layer of Sheetrock? Am I kidding myself and I just need to do a full-on construction project and take everything down to the studs and start fresh?
