n80..............hmm.......OK, heavy curtains will help attenuate high and some mid frequencies, everything will bounce off the brick, uncovered windows and any other hard, flat surface. Carpet will soak up a bit of the higher frequencies also. None of this will have much if any effect on bass response..............Ok, what's the whole point to the exercise? All rooms, ALL rooms have acoustics issues, even professionally designed rooms, that part is a given. ............Think of it this way. Think of your speakers as flashlights in a very dark room. When they come on, the beams of light are primarily focused forward, towards where they are aimed. However, you also see the entire room light up to varying degrees due to reflected light. Sound from you speakers in essence, does the same thing...................with light, this is usually considered a good thing. The more you can see, the better.
With sound, all that reflected energy is arriving at your ears at slightly different times from a thousand different directions in the room. That confuses your brain because it's trying to sort out all those inputs and make sense out of them. ...........No doubt you've had or tried to have a conversation with someone in a stairwell or commercial bathroom, were you could hear the voices echo and it made it a bit difficult to understand each other. The very same thing happens in your room..or mine, or anybodies when playing music, only to a more subtle degree.
What we are attempting to do, with room treatment, is to minimize some percentage of those reflections by soaking them up with acoustic panels. This improves the ratio of direct sound from your speakers, to the reflected sound of your room, making it far easier to hear the details of the music.
You'll often hear acoustic panels referred to as bass traps and depending on the particulars of the panel and placement, it will have some effect on bass frequencies, upper bass mostly. Mid range and higher frequencies have much shorter wave lengths and are much easier to soak up. Bass frequencies have very long wave lengths, several feet or more, making them more difficult to soak up with panels, but you CAN have a positive effect on much of it.
To some degree it sounds counter intuitive........to get better sound, you want to soak up sound......to get better bass, you want bass traps to soak up bass................What you're actually trying to do is minimize the REFLECTED sound, allowing you to hear more of the direct sound............Hope this is making some sense. It's late and I'm trying to condense a lot of information into a reasonable space.
No, you do NOT want to make your room "inert"..or dead. Some degree of reflection actually makes the music sound better and more alive, so the point is not to kill off all reflections, just some percentage of them......
How much is enough??? Trial and error is your friend there. In my case, I knew it would make things better, but I wasn't sure how much better or how much treatment I needed, so I built a few panels at a time, installed them and listened to well recorded music before proceeding.......each time the music got cleaner, clearer, the bass got deeper and tighter. I was able to pick out details in the music that I had never even heard before ....to the extent that many familiar recordings sounded so different, it was like I was hearing them for the first time...............that wasn't always good by the way, because it also showcased the difference between a well recorded disc and a poorly recorded one, meaning good music sounded much better, but lesser recordings were somewhat disappointing.
You can reach a point at which the sound begins to go in the wrong direction and sound "dead".....It's hard to describe, but when you hear it you know that maybe you went too far.
In my case I ended up with 22 panels, 3 inches thick, 16 inches wide by 36 inches long..........The more typical dimensions for commercial panels are two feet by two feet or two feet by four feet......My dimensions were based on locally available sizes of rock wool for the panels............Some are on the ceiling, most are straddling the wall-ceiling corners around the room, with a few at specific locations on the walls..........The improvement was quite remarkable.....best money I ever spent in the hobby.
This was a long winded way to squeeze a LOT of info into a short version.....I hope it helps........there are many good articles on all this on line....I tried to condense it..................
Thank you for your condolences.......I miss my wife, very much, every day..............Happy to help if I can. I try to stick as close to factual stuff as possible and keep my opinions to myself .........that just starts arguments. LOL
