Room Treaments - Where To Begin...

Thanks dill for the link. I’ll be reading and watching videos for hours to come!

All the best.

JD

First thing you need to do is to seal all possible acoustic leaks. Imagine that your room is the vessel filled with water, then try to understand where the water could leaked out of the vessel, find that leaking spots and seal it as good as you can…we talking about AC or water pipes walls entering points, cables or electric outlets, windows and doors gaps etc.

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You can do all of this but it is sure makes for a hard listen. IF you don’t vent the room, YOUR ears are going to take all the pressure. The smaller the room the worse it is.. I like to be able to open windows or doors and be able to cover the openings with heavy acoustic curtains. They act like a weir too, they let waves out the openings and the curtains will dampen a certain amount. When the wave hits the walls in the other room and come back very little of the wave makes it back through the opening. The window it’s a one way, the pressure wave is gone..

I’m not into an Infinite Baffle room. I like mine ported and to be able to vary that..:-)

Regards

oldhvymec,

  Another point to consider. Just what can you get by with in the way maybe slightly opening a window with heavy curtains hanging before it? It could go on forever, but still I wonder. I do have a small coat closet in my listening room packed with the usual stuff. Even that would cause a difference when its door is open or shut. 

  Used to have a set of ceiling tiles Hinged together about the room. Just an experiment, yet the results were undeniable for better or worse depending on placement.

A rug, some toss pillows, a throw or two, and maybe a tapestry or two...you do not need hideous looking things hanging everywhere. I use Tannoys with concentric drivers, the toe in is quite extreme, and they are front ported. The room interaction is minimal. I sit approximately 7 to 7.5 feet away from the speakers. They are about the same distance apart. 

Listening first is a winner. When I bought our home (because my wife liked it), I tested out the lounge room and it was just terrible acoustically.
The master bedroom 24x15 was immensely better, the echo was considerably less of an issue. We had a smaller storage room that I was going to use, but when my wife suggested we use the bedroom as a dual purpose room, the idea appealed to me.

I’d seen other Agoners system pages, and yeah, many of us do go for a bit of a look at what others are up to in their rooms. I’d seen quite a few who’d put up reasonably cost effective absorption in between the speakers on the front wall.
I’d bought a $200 thick woolen rug from a garage sale and built a big frame for $200 for a fairly inexpensive science experiment.


Surprisingly this worked pretty well, the first reflections off the back wall (sent across to the front wall again) and the back energies from the ports were dealt with in a manner that cleaned up the higher frequencies pretty well. I did hear a cleaner and more revealing sound stage, where spacial information was more cohesive.

So I set about to have a crack at building some of Dennis Foley’s quadratic diffusers, bought the plans and managed through a friend (Kurtis) to find another guy (Paul, we also become great friends) who let me use tools in his cabinet making workshop and I finished the first two QRD17 diffusers (Paul is an audiophile now).

And modified my science experiment rug holder (well essentially that’s what my front wall absorber is) to fit two of these QRD17 on.


There are another two diffusers cut out, yet to be assembled. My wife and I both heard an improvement and curiously mostly in the lower end, where it seemed like my speakers finally had some depth in some bass.

I’ve changed focus for the moment, getting my electronics up off the floor onto a sprung isolation rack is the current project. I’ve only lived in this house a little over two years, so I’m going at it a little bit at a time, while getting out of the mortgage quickly (Dave Ramseying it).

My point is, that doing a bit of research and having a go at something is better than throwing your hands up in the air and not doing anything. A safe bet is to do some absorption and or diffusion on the front wall. I have a plan of attack, and it’s going to be done bit by bit and with listening as I go. I’m reading a lot about it, making informed and "safe bet choices".

You don’t have to break the bank to play around treating your room, read, plan, build and listen. I did mine a bit DIY, my wife is patient, and one day hopefully it’ll all come together as a nice looking, excellent sounding system :-)