Is room treatment a science?

Big problem. It’s not really science.

Lol! Science. Clearly a stranger to you. Allow me to introduce you to the subject.

Sound travels in waves. Like all waves when they encounter changes in density they reflect or refract. In other words sound bounces off walls just like light reflects off a mirror.

Another thing waves do is cancel and reinforce. When two wave crests meet we get reinforcement and the resulting wave is greater= louder. When they cancel we have a null or dead spot. 

The length of a sound wave is related to its frequency. The higher the frequency the shorter the wavelength. The wavelength of sounds we can hear ranges from around 50 feet or more at the lowest bass to less than an inch at the highest treble.

So in the scientific view of acoustics we have a lot of different waves propagating back and forth across the room. Our scientific goal is to minimize the cancellations and reinforcements in order to hear the original signal as clear and undistorted as possible. 

One way to do this is attenuation or absorption. We can do this with a medium such as a fiberglass panel. Sound waves move the fibers in the panel. This movement transfers the mechanical motion of the air into mechanical motion of the fibers according to Newton's Law, with the thickness of the panel determining the peak frequency of absorption. Because, remember, wavelength.

Too much of this and the room sounds dead. If only there were some way of spreading the waves around, dispersing them more evenly, so we can keep that spacious sound without so much of the troublesome reinforcements and cancellations. 

Science to the rescue! Since we know sound is waves we can build panels to diffract the waves. They can be small flat surfaces of differing heights or large flat surfaces of differing angles. All these things audiophiles will have seen- and who knows maybe even you too. Now you know the science behind them. 

Why did mc misquote me? Why is he putting words in my mouth? Maybe because I was attacking his foolhardy trial and error routine, which is the opposite of scientific. Maybe a ....reading comprehension issue, who knows? Careful, don’t blow a head gasket. 🤯

My two suggestions are, talk to GIK Acoustics or learn everything in Floyd Toole's book:  Sound Reproduction: The Acoustics and Psychoacoustics of Loudspeakers and Rooms


https://amzn.to/35WboEV


and ignore the trial and error people. :)


Best,

E

What does the ideal room even look like. If you can't Precisely answer that question, then you have no hope of stumbling across the right answer...and certainly not by looking at anything that 'seems like a good idea'. The physics will necessarily prove to be too involved to guess at. Nothing at all will be right until you get the bass (100 Hz and below) right. No matter how much you spend on the 100-Hz-and-Up solution - if you spend it before you get the bass exactly right, whatever 100Hz-and-up solution you've already implemented is Guaranteed to be wrong and will have to be entirely redone once the correct 100-Hz-down solution is established. No matter how much money you dumped into the 100Hz-Up, if you've already done the 100Hz-and-up thing, it will All have to come out and you will have to start that part over from scratch. 

Also, the bass is very hard and usually expensive to get right even in a good room and is too poor a value to attempt to solve in a bad room. If you have a "bad" room (almost every room is bad), you should walk away from the idea of treating it altogether, period. You will have no other real choice than to consider getting a good room. But, there is more to getting the bass right than room volume (although that's a start). As I say, you will need to know what the ideal room looks like. Drywall over 2x4's are not it...neither are 8 ft ceilings. If you have either of those things, you are already starting off in a supremely expensive hole. And about 98% of all the "bass traps" out there cannot fix the problem (never buy Anything advertised as a "bass trap").

If you find yourself in the 'I-think-it-should-be-easy-if-you-just-follow-logic-and-common-sense' camp, then go to acousticfields.com and watch Every video that Dennis Foley has made over the years and then tell me how easy it looks...that should pretty much slap you around some. As others have pointed out, you can't approach the right solution (the right one being the only one that truly works) by guessing or without access to expertise in the field. The physics just won't allow an easy, affordable answer...that really IS a pipe dream.

If you cannot afford the right solution or you would rather consider the wrong solution because you know it's cheaper, then financially you are much better off walking away from all but the very least expensive treatments at the first reflection points and calling it a day.

Take a look at the Realtraps website for good info and excellent, well engineered products:

https://realtraps.com/