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Best DIY Sound Dampening Materials?

Do you have any recommendations on sound dampening materials for a DIY project? I have a wonderful system, but a not so wonderfully small space (12 feet x 12 feet), and I need to dampen the acoustics off the walls and floor.

For the walls, I'm considering taking 4 inch foam (do you have any recommended purchasing sources?), cutting 4x3 foot squares, framing it, canvasing it and hanging a series of these pictures up on the walls (painting the canvas a slight hue of the wall paint). To keep peace with the girlfriend, I need to dampen my room in an aesthetically pleasing way - yes, she's worth it. So, will this work? Are there better alternatives?

For the floor, I'd like to create a removable 16x16 inch wall to trap and avoid the Allison affect. Am I crazy?

Help ... please!

Thanks
dds_hifi
rushton's avatar
rushton
2,445 posts
 
Dds_hifi, instead of dampening the room, consider diffusers that will make your room physically smaller but acoustically much larger without losing energy to the dampening materials. Read Steve Deckart's fascinating article about his experience adding DIY diffusser panels to his 13x15 room:
http://www.decware.com/achowto.htm.

If you're interested in following up on this path, in addition to Mr. Deckart's DIY plans, Tom_nice has some plans he has offered to send to people in the past. See the following Audiogon thread:
http://audiogo1.iserver.net/cgi-bin/forum5.pl?ymisc&957302144&read&3&4&

Or, take a look at the sources Jon Risch has published in his posting to Audio Asylum:
http://audioasylum.com/audio/tweaks/messages/35692.html
sean
6,231 posts
 
I think if you do a search in one of the Asylum forums, you'll find someone that did a direct comparison between the Decware Diffusers and Risch's absorption panels. For sake of removing bias from the comparison, the person had several people listen to the system and then vote accordingly. While every situation and room is different, i think that Jon's panels won by a landslide in that specific installation. Keep in mind that tonal balance WILL be altered by either of these. Both of them are relatively cheap to build. Sean
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tom_nice
387 posts
 
I'll be glad to paste my DIY RPG-style diffusor plans--one and two dimensional--into an email, to give you a quick look at them. Aesthetically acceptable? Not for me to say, but my wife is willing to see them as modern sculptures. You'll need serious bass absorption too, I'm afraid, to overcome the room modes associated with your square room. A recent idea on that comes from Bob Riggle, former Arcici designer who has a fabulous isolation platform, by the way. He's made something like an Argent Room Lens with 4" PVC tubes joined at the bottoms to form an 180 degree continuous tube, and he says it absorbs (in Helmholtz resonator fashion) down to 30 Hz. I haven't tried it yet myself.

My email: nicetom@sonic.net
tom_nice
387 posts
 
An afterthought: why not read F. Alton Everest's "Sound Studio Construction on a Budget" or his "Master Handbook of Acoustics", 4th Edition, and, along with seeing a huge list of absorption and diffusion devices, learn how to analyze your room's resonant modes--simple arithmetic, and it will tell you where your problems below 300 Hz are. The "Sound Studio" book discusses all kinds of rooms, some smallish.
dds_hifi OP
26 posts
 
Tom nice,

Thanks! I'll definitely get those two books. From my perspective, this is a relatively low cost way to signficantly improve my sound quality. I'm surprised more people don't manage this side of their listening experience.

I'll email you for your diffuser plans.

Thanks again!
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