Room Too Dead
Hello All,
I am looking for advice and ideas on how to condition my Home Theater room. I built the theater in my unfinished basement. The foundation walls are covered in insulation and vapor barrier. Instead of construction walls to cover them, I chose a "pipe and drape" to cover the walls. I believe that the room is too dead. It seems to affect overall soundstage in the midrange range. Does anybody have experience with this problem and ideas to add a little "excitement" to the room? Thank you all.
Hi @asctim - I really only got to hear this at a show in California where ASC was sponsoring the show. Mamy rooms had tube trabs all over and what I noticed was terrible bass. No matter the gear or the speakers, every system had 1 note that all the bass drums seemed to hit. I don't know if anyone else has used the term "one note bass" but that's really a great description. Better sounding rooms lacked the tube traps but had more traditional, broad band absorbers liberally used. |
Well that’s exactly the opposite of what we would hope to achieve with liberal use of TubeTraps, and not a complaint I’ve heard before concerning TubeTraps. One note bass has been used a lot to describe bass where a particular room mode is dominating. Why a lot of TubeTraps would cause it rather than lessen it is something that requires some deep thought. Was that the 2019 California Audio Show? I was at that show and got to hear several rooms before and after we treated them with TubeTraps. Honestly, I was struggling to notice much of a significant difference. I was new at the time, unfamiliar with the listening spaces, and unfamiliar with the audio equipment, and tired. Most of the rooms we treated were large and I don’t think we were able to put enough treatment in them to get something highly noticeable to happen. The people that were running the rooms felt there was significant improvement, and chose the amount they wanted based somewhat on our own recommendations but also on their ears. Often they wanted even more but we only had so many to offer. In my own experience, one note bass is mostly a speaker placement issue, but can also be addressed successfully with equalizing down peaks. I know some people are dead set against any kind of equalization, so if that’s out of the question, I think a distributed array of subs to break up the major modes is the only workable solution. Or, a very powerful and extensive array of bass absorbers. |
Easily achieve the same effect DIY? I guess that depends on your definition of easy. Dennis recommends very extensive treatments of absorbers that use activated carbon. To do what he suggests is going to take a lot of effort and money. Less money but more effort if you DIY. I got to hear a room he set up last year at the Pacific Audio Show. It sounded good, but there was not much bass because he said he didn’t bring enough subwoofer for the size of the room. He brought a semi-truck load worth of acoustics just to treat a portion of that one room. He basically built a room within a room, building four walls out of bass traps and diffusers. He also intentionally used a mid level Klipsch system with some basic electronics to prove the point that the acoustics could make even a lower end system sound great. On a similar note, at the 2019 California Audio Show we acoustically treated a conference room that had a basic Behringer PA system with an array of TubeTraps all around the room and flanking each speaker. The point of that room was to allow manufacturers to give presentations about their products. Between talks the system would play music. I had several people tell me that room was possibly the best sound at the show! I don't know if I would go that far myself, but it was very nice listening to movements from Swan Lake there. |
Assuming the bass absorbers are relatively broad band that's what I would have expected as well. Sadly my impression was, room after room, all the speakers bass sounded the same, as if they were playing the same song. 🤣 |
