Studio Acoustic Tiles/Panels for listening room?


How come I rarely hear about people using these for their sound systems? Won't paneling all 4 walls + ceiling + back of your door, of your listening room with acoustic tiles do wonders to your sound? E.g. aurally expanding the size of your room, etc.

Thanks for your comments.

Cheers,
benny
atzen811

Showing 2 responses by rives

Bufus is right. The attenuation is in the middle band and upper frequencies. It is likely to through the RT-60 (reverberation time for 60 dB attenuation) off. You typically need a variety of absorbers and diffusors to get the right balance in a room--I've never seen one material work.
Your room needs help. Our company can of course help you, but let me give you a few pointers that might help significantly. I'm not entirely clear on the room shape and location of the vanity, but that could be one source of problems--it depends a lot on whether or not it's on the forward part or rear part of the right wall. The other obvious area is the glass windows. These create two problems. One, they leak sound (bass) badly. Unless you are willing to board them up or go to a triple glazed glass (which both I doubt) you really can't do much about the loss of bass, except that you know why you have a loss in the bass frequencies and know the limitations for correcting it. The second aspect to the window is it is on one side and likely throwing the balance of the system off quite a bit. I would recommend looking into Hunter Douglas honeycomb vertical blinds. These have a very good attenuation and dispersion effect due to the texture of the material. You can also "tune" them by adjusting the angle. This will help get the balance back. The other consideration might be to place the speakers on the window wall (or opposite) which then might (although I don't really know the rest of the room and still am not sure about the location of the vanity) balance the system right to left better. The other thing you mentioned is having a mid bass bump in the room. You should test the room to find out where this frequency is. We have a Test CD that is calibrated for use with the Radio Shack analog SPL meter. The combination for the 2 items is less than $40--and unless you have a more sophisticated method of taking acoustical measurements--it's a wise investment. Find out what frequencies are boosted. Then determine if this is caused by room mode problems, (We have a tutorial on this on our website as well) or caused by uneven attenuation. If it's room modes the solution may be difficult, particularly for frequencies below about 150Hz. If it's higher frequencies appropriately tuned diffusors and absorbers can be used to even out the room response.