Acoustic advice for my room (with details and pics)

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pjchappy

Please see the attached pic for details of my listening room.

Note a correction regarding room height.  Room height is 7.98'.

I would like ideas for placement of acoustic treatments.  I would likely go the DIY route, wrapping 2" OC 703 or 2" rock wool in burlap or speaker grill cloth.

As for the corners, I would likely place a double (4") sheet in the corners by the speakers.  As for the sides, please see the pic.  Both reflection points (need to figure out), I would use a 2" piece and put them on a stand.

Here's a direct link to the pic that is below.  It is not to scale, but is very detailed.  Let me know if you need more info.

Thanks in advance,

Paul




« Last Edit: 5 Nov 2009, 06:22 am by pjchappy »

pjchappy

Re: Acoustic advice for my room. . .
« Reply #1 on: 5 Nov 2009, 05:23 am »
For a better understanding of the room / set-up, just took several pics.  You can find them here.

JLM

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Re: Acoustic advice for my room (with details and pics)
« Reply #2 on: 5 Nov 2009, 11:08 am »
You're certainly on the right track with 4 inch high density fiberglass in the front corners and 2 inch at side wall first reflection points.  Unfortunately the room is nearly square and the height to length in nearly a "perfect" 2:3 ratio, so I'd expect quite a few peaks/valleys in the room response.  For audio use the TV should be removed (or at least covered with a heavy quilt when listening only).  Without the TV you could play around with non-symmetrical (skewed) layouts to help randomize side wall reflections.

Although its a small room, you need to move first move the listening position out into the room (to avoid back wall bass reverb) and second move the speakers out into the room too (for better depth of soundstage).  You should always play around with the absorption panel locations.  In this case with the nearly square room, I'd start with putting all the panels on the same side of the room.

Because you barely avoid back wall bass reverb in this small room, I'd also consider diffusion and/or absorption panels on the back wall.  There are nice looking kits or DIY recipes, but keep in mind that most designs (to stay relatively small) are only designed to work from roughly 1,000 Hz on up.

bpape

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Re: Acoustic advice for my room (with details and pics)
« Reply #3 on: 5 Nov 2009, 11:18 am »
Agreed. 

Move the seat forward is the first thing I'd do.

4" straddling the corners will work well.

Probably absorption on the rear wall since you can't really get far enough away to really totally avoid the proximity effect of the boundary.

Bryan

youngho

Re: Acoustic advice for my room (with details and pics)
« Reply #4 on: 5 Nov 2009, 11:56 am »
From an amateur enthusiast, not an expert:

This is a small room with the speakers placed relatively close to the front wall and the listener placed extremely close to the back wall. The location of the window actually helps a little, since bass tends to leak more easily through glass than drywall or concrete, so this transmission loss helps a little. The doors may help somewhat ameliorate the relative similarity of the length and width.

The two most important places to start here are behind the speakers and behind the couch. Because you want the broadest band absorption possible in these two locations in order to address as much of the frequency spectrum as possible, especially down into the lower frequencies, I would use no less than 3-4" thick absorption, and it would be better if you could use even thicker, as much as 6-8" if possible, directly behind the listening position. If you're making it yourself, you might consider layering two or three different densities of material, with the densest material closer to the wall, which might theoretically result in less reflection/refraction of higher frequencies by the denser material (think of the acoustical equivalent of Snell's law), but this is kind of a style point.

Once you've begun to address the front wall (adjacent boundary to the front speakers, will cause relative null around 150 Hz because sound will travel back, hit the front wall, and happen to arrive out of phase with the speaker at around this frequency, based on the measurements you gave, which will get more absorption from thicker absorption) and the rear wall (listener is very close, will experience too much relative bass boost because of adjacent boundary, plus too much reflected signal from an undesirable direction), then I would add a much thicker layer to the floor, preferably a cut pile carpet with an open backing, then a thick felt underlay beneath that. The cut pile will aid absorption compared to loop pile, and the underlay will extend absorption somewhat in the lower frequency spectrum.

If you're making absorption panels on stands, I would suggest making one or two to put in front of the television during serious listening sessions. Again, I would start with 3-4" if possible. These will be the most important places for absorption: behind and between the speakers, directly behind the listener. Too much 2" thick absorption runs the risk of resulting in a room that's "dead" in the mids and highs but boomy in the bass.

For making DIY bass panels straddling the corners, I would consider using denser material with a facing, like FRK 705. Here, the thickness of the panel is less important that getting more of the corner surfaces covered. The facing will change the absorption from purely resistive (depends on particle velocity, which is higher away from the boundary surface) to something more like damped resonance (depends on pressure fluctuations). I would actually try to use these to cover as much wall-wall corner and each wall-ceiling corner surface area as possible, making each product as wide up to 1 foot as tolerated. The reflectiveness of the facing may be slightly beneficial in keeping the room from getting too "dead"-sounding.

For the side walls, treating these may be somewhat optional, depending on whether you prefer more focussed localization (treat) or more pleasant spaciousness (don't necessarily need to treat). For this reason, I would put it lower on the priority list than the front and rear walls and the floor. I wouldn't leave the walls quite so bare, though. You could put up paintings or pictures hung at an angle to direct the reflection more into the floor (which you'd previously treated to be more absorbent) or taller bookshelves to diffract and somewhat diffuse the sound. If I were you, I would experiment here with the panels on stands that you'd previously made to cover the television to see what your individual preference is, since this can be extremely variable.

At this point, a ceiling "cloud" of absorption or lateral diffusion may be beneficial (or, with something like a curved BAD panel from RPG, a little of both), as might some diffusion elements located towards the sides of the rear wall to restore a little "life" into the room. You're simply too close to the rear wall for diffusion directly behind you, so absorption would be much better in that location.

I'd argue that small cushions in the corners of the room would probably produce less measurable improvement than the previous suggestions, although what you might perceive could be a different story. I'll leave it at that.

pjchappy

Re: Acoustic advice for my room (with details and pics)
« Reply #5 on: 5 Nov 2009, 08:00 pm »
Thanks, everyone.

I know the room is less than ideal, to say the least.  It's been recently rearranged and is about the best set-up I can get.  It's a multi-purpose room and I am stuck with it for awhile.  Also, in terms of the set-up, the only thing I can really do right now is move the speakers a little bit (a matter of inches, however).  I also doubt I will be able to put anything on the ceiling.  However, everything else I could do.

I have an SPL meter on order and I will be able to take measurements of the room with Room EQ Wizard in a few days.  I will take measurements with the SPL meter, using an available calibration file.  I will also try it by using the SPL meter just to calibrate the EQ Wizard and I will be using a fairly pricey omni-directional microphone with the following response:



What this image doesn't show is the response is about +0.5 dB @ 30Hz; +1 dB @ 20Hz; and +2.5 dB @ 10Hz.  So, I can keep this in mind when using the program and just take measurements out to about 6KHz.

Now, once I get these measurements, will they be pretty helpful in determining more of the treatments I will need? 

I'm also PC based, so I'm assuming a bit of Foobar or iTunes EQ can help tame some peaks, etc., once I get these measurements?