Room Treatments

Go to the Realtraps site. Every room needs bass and first refelction point absorption. Foam sound absorbers just won't do...they deaden the sound. The idea is to flatten out the frequency response in your room. Realtraps are frequency tuned. It will be the greatest sound quality improvment you can ever do...really !

There are ways to make effective room treatments more (but not totally) wife friendly. Most panels can be ordered or retro-fitted with printed artwork, for example. Wooden baffle diffusors can look interesting (or use book cases).

In a small room, I have found that the single most effective treatment is usually corner traps. These are also the hardest of all things to sneak into a room. While it has been said that soft music leads to romance, it has been my experience that bass traps tend to have the opposite effect.

Hi all ! I had GIK acoustics look at pictures of my listening room (living room ) and they made recommendations. I picked the artwork on eack item . I used two corner traps and three 2' x 4' panels on the walls . Eliminated the echo and hard sound and people dont even notice because they look like pictures .

I use a number of room treatment products including those from Real Traps and the defunct Eighth Nerve. I do agree they can provide improvements in sound if set up properly. The last part being the key as it can be easy to over treat a room, especially a small one. For example, in my room I tend to treat corners and seams and forgo the side reflections. You might want to go over to Audio Asylum and check out the Rives Forum. Ethan Weiner and David Aiken are two members who offer very sound advice.

One other thing though not mentioned is something I have tried with success as well. If your system and particularly your speakers allow for it, try near field listening. In this arrangement you sit very close to the speakers, maybe forming an equilateral triangle of 6 - 8'. The benefit of sitting this close is that that you potentially neutralize the room reflections and take the room out of the equation. However, some people do not prefer to sit this close and it does take some getting used to from my experience.

The best antidote to an untreated ,bad sounding room, is to invest in a good set of headphones and a good headphone amp.

In fact I'll go so far as to say, that anyone who is seriously thinking about making component upgrades,should invest in a good headphone set up first.

A lot of people trade one colouration for another and as good as some DIY attempts at room tuning can be( I'm a DIY room tuner, but far from great)most times if you don't know what's on your cd or record in the first place, you'll never know if adding a ton of acoustic fabric has done more harm than good.

Then again, there are other options for the folks who don't have their own dedicated listening rooms and are at the mercy of their wives.

Try some room correcting audio black boxes.
Lots of them out there , some are quite pricey,but some are now being built into two channel integrated-re Harmon Kardon, so all hope for better sound is not hinged just on how many(if any)absorbing panels and tube traps the wife gives her consent to.

The refernce to headphones was meant to illustrate what our gear can sound like when the room is taken out of the picture.It's not to imply that what you hear thru the phones is perfect.It's also coloured, but the colourations are not those of the room.

It's just somthing to compare when you start down the room tuning path.

If the life is sucked out of the cymbals and you've lost any sense of the air and life around the instruments compared to what you hear thru the phones, then you'll know you've added too much.

And just as you can have too little room tuning, you can also overdo it.

I have followed a lot of the tips from the Master book of acoustics by Everet,it's a great place to start.