Easier Alternatives to Hanging Panels for Ceiling Treatment?

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Since I'm generally pretty bad with most DIY home maintenance, I worry about placing acoustic panels on my ceiling. I am especially bad about working with anything over my head so I can see myself having to do this several times before I get the positioning correct.

Are there clever alternatives I can use if I'm not too worried about aesthetics? I would prefer any solution that looks nice, of course, but I would be willing to sacrifice some looks for simplicity. Alternatively, if I do have to hang panels, how could I go about finding the lightest possible panel that can get the job done without a lot of trial and error?
 
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Hi Mark,

Hangers can be very effective but i fear that your ceiling will be to low for the use i've seen of them. And there is different kind of hangers and strategy with them. For example you'll see some used in very large resonnant space to tame the rt time and a bit the 100hz range (big swimmingpools, some halls) they are usually commercial made panels spaced 1 or 2 meter away between them and located sparsely on the ceiling.

In studios i've seen an other kind used: they are made of porous fiber material (from the one i've seen, rockwool 120cmx 60cm x 10cm depth) glued to soft cardboard (in france this is called isorel) and densely packed (one each 30cm approximately) on the whole ceiling (behind a streched fabric 'false ceiling'), sometime on side walls too (here again hidden behind stretched fabric or other acoustical treatments) and sometimes on back wall (relative to listening position, facing the speakers). For the side or back wall they can be either vertically or horizontally oriented and most of the time angled - kind of sawtooth shape). The idea behind that strategy is to tame the whole low end modes as the lower ones tends to have most pressure around the room's boundary.

As a bonus they act as broadband absorbers. This is quite effective as i you move one on one side of the room you'll see the chain reaction for the whole row until it stop moving. That said it was in room with ceiling height of 4/4,5m and total surface of more than 50 square meter (6x8 meters). Difficult to implement in a non dedicated (big) space!

So about the hanger you plan to use what do you expect them to perform? Other strategy could be used in place of them.
 
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Hi krivium,


I am simply wanting to tame the reflection from the ceiling. My initial plan was to hang DIY panels in the same manner I did for the horizontal walls. Since it's harder to ensure you mount them in the correct spot on the ceiling than the other walls, I was hoping for something that generates the same effect but easier to implement.
 
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Ok, take a look at your other thread. But i'll give you my point of view about it anyway here: absorbtion may help but diffusion is more likely to be effective ime. A mix of both wiil be even better.

Why not only absorption: being the smaller dimension in the room, ceiling height absorption won't help as much as sound have a lower distance to travel from speakers to the absorption on ceiling than with side wall ( each time you double distance traveled by sound you loose 6db, from 1meter to 2meter to 4meter,etc,etc,etc,...).

Absortion is effective but don't expect more than 6db by the material itself ( sometimes it could be bigger but don't expect...). Most of the absorption is from the distance traveled by reflection, absorption material is just another layer which help ( this is how i see things).

In the case of ceiling you'll have more chance if you break specular reflection and spread them all around with different phase relationship and level. Exactly what a diffiusor do. If you surround them ( you'll need some of them located with a strategy in mind) by absorbent ceiling tiles ( as i already given link) you could really lower the level and issue of it. Frequency of interest is relatively high too ( don't expect results below 1khz) so diffuser should be relatively thin (10cm for 1khz) and rockwool/rockfon ceiling tiles ( or equivalent) effective for this kind of frequency range.
 
Question: it has long been held that tucking away absorbent 'most anywhere in the room is additively beneficial*. Like under your sofa and behind your desk. I suppose that is true of a lengthy stat like RT60. But is near-wall or near-ceiling bounce, as OP is interested in, a different matter?

Or if you are a comb-filter skeptic?

B.
*and that's what I was told when I studied highway noise inside neighbouring houses in 1974
 
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more to the point of being able to re-position panels i've used this...

Yes, another suggestion.

But the ultimate core question (for OP and others) is, "Do you own the ceiling?" Or can you do as you please provided you can fix it later? Or if a renter, what does your lease say?

If you own the ceiling there are lots of reliable fastenings but some of them make big holes when you remove the panels. Some good fixings leave holes, but just little ones that are easily patched but your landlord has to be ready to paint for the next tenant. Some stick-up or glue solutions ruin the ceiling for re-painting unless specially pre-treated before painting.

And so on.

B.
 
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turk, how much weight can those strips hold? I like the idea, but I'm worried they may not support panels. I also like the ceiling tiles. If nothing else, I can pick them up at a home improvement store and throw up a few just to see how it goes while I look into diffusion for the ceiling.


ben, I do own the home and don't plan on moving anytime soon so no worries there. I'm looking to treat the first reflection points and not just throw up absorption which is the difficulty for me; I need to have it cover a certain area to be any good.
 
I do own the home and don't plan on moving anytime soon so no worries there. I'm looking to treat the first reflection points and not just throw up absorption which is the difficulty for me; I need to have it cover a certain area to be any good.
Take care using sticky-stuff, may leave unpaintable residue.

Isn't ceiling a bit remote in terms of reflections and timing and directionality of your speakers?

I've been dipole so long, hard for me to relate to the widely feared comb filter problem... except generally skeptical based on some grasp of human hearing.

When you do a comb filter treatment you are also doing an RT60 treatment. So who can distinguish one from the other? I've seen many textbook pictures of the horrors of comb filtering, but can't remember any acoustic measurements in a home.

B.
 
they will hold a fair bit but i don't recommend them long term for horizontal hold (it does better with stuff on vertical hold) just as a short term solution to help find the"right location or amount"

i've only ever seen a problem with this stuff on unpainted drywall or primer coat, leaves oily residue that yes can be a problem at the re-paint stage but nothing that this stuff can't fix https://www.homehardware.ca/en/37l-1-2-3-bulls-eye-latex-primer-sealer/p/1850946
 
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An alternative to sticky strips:

In a rented apartment, I glued some neo magnets to the ceiling (painted white to match the ceiling).

I made some small treatment panels, by laminating several layers of cardboard together (corrugated cardboard from packing boxes). I drove a coarse screw into each cardboard 'brick', so it could be attached to a magnet.

When I moved out, it was easy to detach the panels, leaving behind just the (nearly invisible) magnets.
 
how did you make the cardboard panels?
No rocket science: I just painted a sheet with PVA glue, placed the next sheet on top and stacked on some weight. Wallpaper glue would probably work well, and be very good value for money - a small packet of powder makes a large volume of glue.

I've heard several layers of cardboard stuck together with green glue can make very dead baffles.
I dunno if GG would be money well spent - its job is to add flexibility to rigid materials. From the FAQ:
"used between two rigid layers of material, typically drywall [...] Green Glue Noiseproofing Sealant is a polymer that is designed to remain flexible over time"

...but the idea of using cardboard seems legit: cardboard furniture can take heavy loads when designed well / laminated into blocks.

If I were to do it, my approach would be to arrange corrugated cardboard so that the air voids were in communication with the rear of the speaker. That way, I could build a 'box' that was about 80% wall, since the wall wouldn't detract (much) from internal volume.

That is: I'd make something like the pictured wine rack, and then put a relatively thin skin (paper mache, decoupage, fibreglass, sheet metal, whatever) onto it.
 

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Thanks, with your panels are the voids perpendicular to the ceiling?

I only did a few as proof of concept & to see how large a tile I could hang from each magnet. Therefore I can't be sure which orientation = most effective.

At a guess, hanging strips or a lattice from the ceiling (imagine combining the attached pictures) would give a good return on materials & time, and not weigh very much.
 

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