An attempt at treating a small room

[ShinOBIWAN]

Not speaker related per se but am redoing the room with lots of acoustic treatment goodies thrown in. The room is rubbish for acoustics ie. too small, speakers in corners but this should make a dent in those problems. Will be interesting when I finally get to do a before and after comparison.

The treatments consist of Rockwool RW3 rigid fibreglass, in both 2" and 3" thickness's which will be framed and covered in Alcantara. The rear wall of the room where the speakers are, is floated away from the structural wall by 1 foot and the space is filled with Rockwool RW5 rigid fibreglass then covered over with Alcantara fabric. This effectively creates a giant bass trap at one end of the room. At the rear of the room I'm going to do a 6ft x 3ft DIY diffuser based around the skyline style diffusers that are commercially available.

This is the preliminary draft to give an idea of the look and area of the treatments







Any suggestions or thoughts?

[ackcheng]

Hi Shin,

I gathered that you are using DRC with Acourate. Since DRC are quite effective in dealing with low frequency, would you be paying more attention to the mid to high frequency in room treatment?

[stryker1959]

Shin,beautiful render,but methinks that you have too much speaker for your room
What you should do is ship them to me(I'll cover the shipping) so you can relieve any clutter and scale it down to a simple MTM design with a few subs

[Dr.EM]

Look forward to seeing these set up for real

[PeteMcK]

"too much speaker for your room" - yeah, just knock out that left-hand wall...

[ShinOBIWAN]

Originally posted by ackcheng
Hi Shin,

I gathered that you are using DRC with Acourate. Since DRC are quite effective in dealing with low frequency, would you be paying more attention to the mid to high frequency in room treatment?

Hey Arthur,

Number one priority is the side wall reflections and taming the bass because the speakers are unfortunately backed right into a corner.

The whole of the rear wall behind the speakers is in effect a bass trap - its moved out 12" from the real wall and has heavy rigid fibre glass placed there and then is covered in fabric. I'm hoping this improves the bass issues related to placing the speakers in the corner.

As for the side wall reflections, at the minute its 100% absorption with 3" and 2" Rockwool RW3. This should be effective down to around 200hz so fairly broadband. What I'm worried about is that yes it may virtually kill or greatly reduce first reflections off the wall but is it going to suck the live quality from the sound and make it a dead mess. I've thought about a mix of diffusers and absorption on those side walls but the diffusors would likely only be effective to around 1Khz due to me wanting to keep the depth of the treatments to a max of 3" or 75mm.

If anyone has any thoughts about this I'd love to hear them please.

[DaveM]

I certainly don't have any solutions for you, but if you deaden every surface, you can always undo that. If the whole wall is sound absorbent, simply add some glass paned pictures or paintings that will increase the room reflections. I think in your case you are going to need more than not. So, I say go for it and plan to add back some reflective surfaces. Also, if you have a hard floor covered by an area rug, you can then control that as well.

[Ray Collins]

Ant,
Have you healed and are (apparently) back in action??

Ray

[ShinOBIWAN]

Yes, thanks for asking Ray.

[ShinOBIWAN]

Originally posted by DaveM
I certainly don't have any solutions for you, but if you deaden every surface, you can always undo that. If the whole wall is sound absorbent, simply add some glass paned pictures or paintings that will increase the room reflections. I think in your case you are going to need more than not. So, I say go for it and plan to add back some reflective surfaces. Also, if you have a hard floor covered by an area rug, you can then control that as well.

Good point Dave,

I could also add some thin 3mm ply panels with perforations behind the fabric but in front of the fibreglass. This could be done in a spot treatment fashion so there's a mix of with and without to allow for some tune-ability.