Room Treatments - How?


I need to treat my dedicated listening room. It's small, bare and the dimensions are not ideal. I have been reading many recommendations here on Audiogon and elsewhere, so I understand that I need to analyze my room using one of a number of products like Room EQ Wizard or CARA.I also see the links to companies that will sell me pre-made traps, panels or the materials to build my own.

OK, then what? How do I get from here to there? These programs seem to do a great job of measuring and modeling the room, but how do I turn a bunch of measurements into a useable plan for designing a plan for treating the room? How am I supposed to know what I need to build or buy and apply to the room?

Am I missing a middle step here someplace?
bodotes

Showing 1 response by bigby

I tried to take room measurements and treat my room, but without experience in acoustics the measurements didn't mean much, even after reading Alton Everest's book and visiting many websites. I finally talked with Rives (they designed a plan that I used), RPG and RealTraps. Then I went through two stages of adding room treatments. The first stage got the room to where Blues, Jazz and Rock sounded good. In the second phase I added more bass absorption along the front wall-ceiling and back wall-ceiling and diffusion on the ceiling. Now I enjoy listening to classical music in addition to the other music. The change is amazing.

After I added the room treatments in the first phase, I had my room professionally measured by an engineer using acoustical software. The engineer created a virtual room, added the treatments and got the hypothetical reverb times. Then we measured the room to validate the calculated results. The software was spot on! It also showed that I need to move my CD rack to get better balanced imaging. In a couple of weeks I'm going to have my room re-measured using waterfall plots to see the final results.