I've deliberately been keeping my nose out of this for a variety of reasons but I can only take it so long....
Sorry. Those are not diffusers or anything like diffusers. A single angled hard flat surface is anything but diffusion. Diffusion by definition scatters evenly and randomly both in the time and spatial domains. This does nothing but reflect at a different angle.
'nuff said.... carry on.
Bryan
Hi Bryan
Actually, people do use Sound Shutters as diffusers by putting the different sizes in various patterns and angles, and tensions. I however do not use them that way. I use Sound Shutters as organizers. I'm not too crazy about disorganizing waves. In fact as far as the book shelf thing goes, I can understand if someone wants to play with the differences that this can make, but most of my clients either turn around the cases to make resonators out of them or get rid of them altogether. being a designer in acoustics forever I've seem people go through all types of stages and what I tell folks is you have to keep in mind what recordings do and what they are for. I say this because people get locked into thinking of recording in general as an absolute and unfortunately the more anyone moves toward a fixed sound it starts to limit their ability to adjust per recording. Which gets into the plug and play thing vs the adjustable thing.
When I'm sitting down to listen at first because the room was set for a different recording, along with the electronics and speaker I listen a couple of minutes to see if I like the presentation well enough to keep it where it is or do I wish to change it. Most of the time I will make a small adjustment and continue on. I'm not thinking about what technology is being use, I'm thinking about patterns I wish to create that make the sound to my liking. Unless someone is actually tuning like werd is starting to do it's hard to visualize what I'm saying. Tuneland can help a lot in this area, but basically what I'm saying I try to keep away from fixed anything. i have always let the fights between theories play themselves out in that arena, but for me I'm purley thinking recording code, flexible system, now how do I get there.
This isn't fair but let me give a case and point. Pick out a recording at home and take it to an audio trade show with you and start taking it room to room. You will never hear the recording sound the same in any of the rooms. many times the press and the clients make decisions based on this. well in all honesty none of these systems have been tuned into that recording any the system you chose was the one that was the closest for the recording. the next day go in with a recording with a completely different code, different studio, label, engineer, style. You will choose a different system. At the end of the show your walking around saying this play it well and that played that well. Unless you are going to have 20 or so different rooms in your home it might be a good idea to figure out what is going on in the process of playback and how do you want to attack it on a per recording basis or do you only want to listen to a few pieces of music that you call your references.
Outside of my world I see people talking about dampening vs trapping vs diffusion a lot and I look at it like this. For myself the sound of materials in a room stick out like a sore thumb if you don't find a balance of how much of what. No matter what the designers say they do, you can hear what they are made out of. acoustical theories never make the sound of the materials the product is made out of disappear.
