Acoustic Room Treatments

Don’t be afraid you will overdamp the room. 

“adequate” control is required, overdamping is not recommended as per acoustic consultants who see this commonly

@ghdprentice - did you hire an outside consultant for sonic analysis? I thinking about doing so in my new space.

Get a baseline measurement with REW on a laptop with a decent mic.  Experiment with speaker and listening position first and dial that in.  For early reflection points, try diffusers like curved poly's (easy to diy) if the mid and high room reverberation is mostly controlled, or absorption if the room is too lively.  Also experiment with a mix of both.  Auralex GeoFusers sound nice without any bad habits.  I like them on the ceiling over main listening position and rear wall.  4" of Owens Corning 705 will absorb well down to 80Hz and then drop like a rock below.  Pressure based diaphragmatic absorbers will need to be used for subbass frequencies (50Hz,63Hz, etc.).  Something like the BBC A10 on steroids.  And will have to be large to have enough horsepower to do any good, 3'x3' or 4'x4' each.  Or 4-5 feet thick of velocity based absorption ("pink fluffy" fiberglass).  Welti style multi subs works well for smoothing the low end freq curve compared to a single.  Have fun.

I have a small cube dedicated room, 11.5 x 11.5 x 10.  I have an 8x10 carpet.  GIK is great, but their suggestions for my room were basically to cover the entire room and ceiling with panels at $$$$.  I was so confused about what to do that I have done nothing.  Even within GIK's suggestions, there were many choices of bass traps, diffusion, etc. such that I became paralyzed.  I am going to give them a call and may they can guide me on some basics like the bass traps, and first point reflections.  What I would really like is someone local (in Miami) who will just tell me the specific products that I need for starters and work from there!  Any suggestions?

I used the following to acoustically treat my room:  I purchased the housecurve app and ran a sweep of my room using my iphone (yes, better mics will get better results, but as a starter this was very good.). I captured the results as well as a photograph of my room and loaded them into ChatGPT.  ChatGPT analyzed the results and identified opportunities to improve and offered suggestions.  I followed the suggestions (as well as my ears) moving speakers, adjusting sitting position, toe-in,  placing acoustic treatment on first reflection areas as well as bass traps and an overhead soundcloud.  Every time I made an adjustment, I would re-sweep the room and load it into ChatGPT.  At least for me, the results were significant.  It was a great place to start.

Moto_man I get you, I had the same experience when first contacting GIK, but then I made an appointment to talk to them on the phone, the guy who’d made recommendations and that was very helpful.  I started out with a few panels (bass traps as they call them) for the front wall and front to side wall corners, with great effect, over time I added first reflection point dampening and a rear wall panel with a diffusion face on it…..my room is very small, has lots of hard wall surfaces and this ha created a very good listening space.