Room Treaments - Where To Begin...

First thing you need to do is to seal all possible acoustic leaks. Imagine that your room is the vessel filled with water, then try to understand where the water could leaked out of the vessel, find that leaking spots and seal it as good as you can…we talking about AC or water pipes walls entering points, cables or electric outlets, windows and doors gaps etc.

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You can do all of this but it is sure makes for a hard listen. IF you don’t vent the room, YOUR ears are going to take all the pressure. The smaller the room the worse it is.. I like to be able to open windows or doors and be able to cover the openings with heavy acoustic curtains. They act like a weir too, they let waves out the openings and the curtains will dampen a certain amount. When the wave hits the walls in the other room and come back very little of the wave makes it back through the opening. The window it’s a one way, the pressure wave is gone..

I’m not into an Infinite Baffle room. I like mine ported and to be able to vary that..:-)

Regards

oldhvymec,

  Another point to consider. Just what can you get by with in the way maybe slightly opening a window with heavy curtains hanging before it? It could go on forever, but still I wonder. I do have a small coat closet in my listening room packed with the usual stuff. Even that would cause a difference when its door is open or shut. 

  Used to have a set of ceiling tiles Hinged together about the room. Just an experiment, yet the results were undeniable for better or worse depending on placement.

A rug, some toss pillows, a throw or two, and maybe a tapestry or two...you do not need hideous looking things hanging everywhere. I use Tannoys with concentric drivers, the toe in is quite extreme, and they are front ported. The room interaction is minimal. I sit approximately 7 to 7.5 feet away from the speakers. They are about the same distance apart. 

Listening first is a winner. When I bought our home (because my wife liked it), I tested out the lounge room and it was just terrible acoustically.
The master bedroom 24x15 was immensely better, the echo was considerably less of an issue. We had a smaller storage room that I was going to use, but when my wife suggested we use the bedroom as a dual purpose room, the idea appealed to me.

I’d seen other Agoners system pages, and yeah, many of us do go for a bit of a look at what others are up to in their rooms. I’d seen quite a few who’d put up reasonably cost effective absorption in between the speakers on the front wall.
I’d bought a $200 thick woolen rug from a garage sale and built a big frame for $200 for a fairly inexpensive science experiment.


Surprisingly this worked pretty well, the first reflections off the back wall (sent across to the front wall again) and the back energies from the ports were dealt with in a manner that cleaned up the higher frequencies pretty well. I did hear a cleaner and more revealing sound stage, where spacial information was more cohesive.

So I set about to have a crack at building some of Dennis Foley’s quadratic diffusers, bought the plans and managed through a friend (Kurtis) to find another guy (Paul, we also become great friends) who let me use tools in his cabinet making workshop and I finished the first two QRD17 diffusers (Paul is an audiophile now).

And modified my science experiment rug holder (well essentially that’s what my front wall absorber is) to fit two of these QRD17 on.


There are another two diffusers cut out, yet to be assembled. My wife and I both heard an improvement and curiously mostly in the lower end, where it seemed like my speakers finally had some depth in some bass.

I’ve changed focus for the moment, getting my electronics up off the floor onto a sprung isolation rack is the current project. I’ve only lived in this house a little over two years, so I’m going at it a little bit at a time, while getting out of the mortgage quickly (Dave Ramseying it).

My point is, that doing a bit of research and having a go at something is better than throwing your hands up in the air and not doing anything. A safe bet is to do some absorption and or diffusion on the front wall. I have a plan of attack, and it’s going to be done bit by bit and with listening as I go. I’m reading a lot about it, making informed and "safe bet choices".

You don’t have to break the bank to play around treating your room, read, plan, build and listen. I did mine a bit DIY, my wife is patient, and one day hopefully it’ll all come together as a nice looking, excellent sounding system :-)

I'm constantly amazed that audiophiles can go on at length about VTA, upsampling, damping factor etc. but when it comes to the most important component, the room, they have little or no understanding. This is forgivable to an extent. Without having heard the enormous improvement attention to acoustics brings to the party it is difficult to conceptualise the transformative result.

All rooms need treatment, without exception. Even the Royal Albert Hall required  some monster upside down 'mushrooms' to kill excessive echo.

The second post you received from member @dill provided you with lots of good info and there is tons more. Obtaining your advice from those links is preferable to getting conflicting opinions from ill informed posters here on the 'gon.

Once you have gained some understanding, which you should relish with glee because this is the only way you will ever get to hear your system truly perform, you will soon realise that guesswork does not enter into the requirements of treatment.

You will understand about wavelengths , how to calculate and how to deal with them. You will also learn that a rug, drapes or wall hangings do very little because they only provide narrow-band absorption. Now I expect someone to counter with 'I just placed a rug between the speakers and it made a huge difference" Well yes of course there will be a small improvement and the comment simply comes from them never having heard what a carefully sorted room sounds like.

The biggest thing happens down low in the Schroeder frequency range where bass energy combines, sometimes creating peaks and sometimes nulls. Bear in mind that a full null means zero sound. I repeat, when there is a null there is no sound, zilch, nada. It's MIA and no, no DSP or equalisation can bring it back. Even a partial null, say 15dB below average, could not be corrected because your amp is not powerful enough and the speaker voice coil would instantly fry.

Above the Schroeder frequency, average about 250Hz you have a reverberant field which can be addressed with diffusers and absorbers. This is important: the smaller the room, the more absorption is needed. The bigger the room, the more diffusion is needed. In practice the average size living room need both.

My direct advice after reading the material @dill provided is to read even more and then buy a suitable mic. for less than $100 and download a free program like REW and get started. Even if you get the professionals in you will at least be able to measure the before and after results and so avoid the possibility of being oversupplied which has happened to a friend of mine when he left it all up to GIK.

Imagine now hearing all the missing details in the bass and the fact that unless you act appropriately things will not change. If you want to go all the way then look into a multi-sub addition which will smooth out the lows even more. Can this bass problem be sorted with multi subs only?  Well yes the extra subs will smooth the room nodes but you still have the issue of overly long decay across the full spectrum.  Looking at this another way:  installing multi-subs will smooth out the bass nodes and the addition of bass traps will reduce the long decay. Win win. Your ability to measure T60 yourself will get you to head of the class.

Have fun.