Acoustic treatment question: do you agree with Dennis Foley that $46k to $65k is required?

One of the things I like to think about is that room acoustics spend doesn't necessarily scale like other parts of gear.

$6k of room treatment in a modest, average living room is really nice.  That may be all you can spend due to room aesthetic considerations. Once you have that, you can scale up your electronics and speakers as much as you want to, your room acoustic treatments will remain.

The question is what would you pay if you made as many of these treatments yourself as is possible. Without question most enthusiasts dont spend what they should on their room.

For this amount of money I would take my room down to studs and rebuild from this point on with double dry wall, nonparallel surfaces, etc. What is critical is that you do YOUR homework and not listen to a single expert especially one that sells treatments.

audition_audio makes a great point here.  If you are talking 100K, you could build a pretty good room with optimal materials and dimensions.

That said, I'm not as sold on the non parallel surfaces concept as I used to be.   Non parallel surfaces will not eliminate modes, it will make the modes less predictable.  The existing models (that I know of) won't work on non parallel surfaces, which makes the room an expensive experiment.

I'd take a room that is roughly 23 x 16 x11 on a concrete slab with medium weight carpeting and go from there.   Use of a distributed bass array and judicious use of the right kind of treatments in the right locations and you would have a really good room pretty quickly. 

I thought I would jump in on this conversation about Acoustic Fields product cost. I spent the last four years converting my dinning room into an exceptional world class dedicated listening room. I started my journey watching and reading as much of Dennis' online material as I could. I purchased 14 bags of his activated carbon and got started. I ended up building in my garage just about every product he sells. I went as far as to building my own in-wall/ front and rear wall diaphragmatic activated carbon bass absorption,  Early on Dennis coached me through some of the design work, but I ended up having to figure it out for myself; I couldn't afford his products or consultation. It takes a lot of time and material costs to build his products, especially if using nice wood trim. I've experimented with many acoustic products from the GIK and others. I can say without a doubt, Acoustic Field's low frequency absorption is hands down, the best! Worth the cost. For mid and high frequency absorption, there are many inexpensive products out there that do a great job. Again, the cost of building heavy carbon panels, ACDA absorbers as well as Acoustic Field's QRD wood diffusers can run anywhere between $300 - $1500 just in material, not including labor and other business costs. I don't necessarily agree with all advice provided by Acoustic Fields, but there is a lot of good stuff to be learned from Dennis. I estimate I've spent close to $17k on converting and building out my dinning room. If I had paid Acoustic Fields to design and build my room, it could have easily cost $45 -$60k. The only way I was able to accomplish this was do it myself. I get it, it's tough to spend big money on acoustic treatment, but sometimes, it may require taking a big step to get the room sounding as good as it possibly can. My room is very small 15x13x9, but it sounds amazing down to 30Hz. See my Agon virtual system 


https://systems.audiogon.com/systems/8747 

shalommorgan,  VERY impressive work and a really nice looking system.   In an earlier post, I mentioned that I found the carbon panels conceptually intriguing.  I did not realize one could purchase the plans and carbon from Foley to build the traps.