Incidentially, last weekend I found a room with highly reflective one-meter thick stone walls and highly dissipative/non-reflective weak timber ceiling and floor (with thick carpets on floor) to produce very little colouration, weak hard to notice modes and no reverb. It was like 30m^2 rectangle.
Later I went to the basement and I discovered that the sound was happily traveling through the floor with little attenuation at all frequencies. This explains the absence of strong modes.
In contrast, I have concrete walls, floor and ceiling at home, and while they do a good job in confining the sound inside the rooms, the resulting colouration, reverb and modes are quite disgusting.
Everyday I'm more convinced that any boom-box can sound better in rooms such as the one that I described than the best high-end system in one of my untreated concrete rooms.
A good friend of mine once lend me the pair of brand new BW speakers he was so proud of, and when he came to my place to get them back, he listened to them in one of my rooms and he thought that I had done something terrible to them because of how bad they sounded... Fortunately everything went back to normal when he installed the speakers back in his home.
BTW: How about a room with weak walls built inside a bigger room with concrete walls? (and the gap filled with loose absorbing stuff...)
Later I went to the basement and I discovered that the sound was happily traveling through the floor with little attenuation at all frequencies. This explains the absence of strong modes.
In contrast, I have concrete walls, floor and ceiling at home, and while they do a good job in confining the sound inside the rooms, the resulting colouration, reverb and modes are quite disgusting.
Everyday I'm more convinced that any boom-box can sound better in rooms such as the one that I described than the best high-end system in one of my untreated concrete rooms.
A good friend of mine once lend me the pair of brand new BW speakers he was so proud of, and when he came to my place to get them back, he listened to them in one of my rooms and he thought that I had done something terrible to them because of how bad they sounded... Fortunately everything went back to normal when he installed the speakers back in his home.
BTW: How about a room with weak walls built inside a bigger room with concrete walls? (and the gap filled with loose absorbing stuff...)
Eva, that's quite a good idea. If I were building from scratch I'd probably do a room with carpet on particleboard flooring, plasterboard walls and ceiling, with a corridor all around, ceiling space above and concrete floor and an outer envelope that is much more solid (probably windowless brick veneer with multiple plasterboard layers.
Eva said:
this does not make sense.
i mean i understand the motivation behind this scheme but i don't think this would be a good way of addressing the problem at all.
it wouldn't work as good as a real room with lossy floor and would be more labor intensive than other room treatments.
Better to have a room with inherently suitable acoustic properties to start with, than create acoustic problems and then try to fix them with add on treatment as if this were a room that was a given. And you think that is easier? A room of conventional light timber framed construction with timber flooring and plasterboard walls/ceiling will have a decent amount of bass damping. Most homes are done this way because it is cost effective. The outer room is perhaps the labour intensive part, and may be necessary purely for sound isolation purposes. You may argue that it's better to build a concrete bunker then fill the thing with bass absorbing treatment, but I doubt that in the end this would make more sense considering time, cost and performance.
the problem i have with this room within a room is - what makes you think that the external concrete room is not going to exert its influence through the timber room's walls ?
i think once you build that second room around the first one you will back at the point that you started from.
why not instead do something creative like bass trap furniture ? like a book case with 1" thick plexiglas door that also acts as a giant bass trap ? turn every door, every closet into a bass trap. convert everything that has internal volume into a bass trap.
you can then add a hung ceiling and turn it into a giant sound absorbing panel ... you could even put some storage into this ceiling.
i mean why not try to be creative and efficient about using space ? where i live space costs more than that stuff we keep in it.
i think once you build that second room around the first one you will back at the point that you started from.
why not instead do something creative like bass trap furniture ? like a book case with 1" thick plexiglas door that also acts as a giant bass trap ? turn every door, every closet into a bass trap. convert everything that has internal volume into a bass trap.
you can then add a hung ceiling and turn it into a giant sound absorbing panel ... you could even put some storage into this ceiling.
i mean why not try to be creative and efficient about using space ? where i live space costs more than that stuff we keep in it.
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