Hey all,
So I just moved into my new house and in doing so, I decided to put together a comparison between before and after acoustic treatment in my home studio. I've included the raw files from my field recorder in the video description so you can play around with it and do some analysis. I'd love to hear what you guys think of the difference and I'm more than happy to answer any questions you may have.
I highly recommend you download the raw recordings in the description of the video for a better understanding of the difference. Youtube can do some funky things to audio files and you might not hear certain things while watching.
Bass Traps and Early Reflections
My room dimensions are 11.5' x 11.5' with a 7.5' ceiling. I decided to treat my left and right side early reflection points with 4" absorbers that are 32" wide and go from floor to ceiling. To treat the 2 corners behind my speakers, I made 2 large bass traps (not superchunk, just regular panels) that are 6" deep and 47 inches wide, floor to ceiling. For the rear corners, I used regular 4" panels parallel to the wall since my door blocks the ability to have a panel that straddles the corner.
All of the traps use Roxul Safe 'N Sound. I was able to salvage it from my old traps that I made. Honestly the biggest and longest part of building these was the finish. Cutting, sanding, staining, and finishing the outside wood frame took waaaay longer than just building the 2x4 frame and stuffing it with rigid fiberglass. I will say all in all though I love the way they look. Another downside is the money you need to spend to do those cosmetic parts of the project.
Quadratic Diffusers
At my last house, I didn't really do much to treat the walls behind me. That room was about 14' long from the side my speakers were on to the other side. I did a lot of research on how how diffusion works and how to calculate the most optimal build, and so I set forth and decided to build some quadratic diffusers.
Let me tell you, this was a tremendous pain in the ass to build and cost me a lot more money than I care to admit. Every cut I made had to be exact, and I only used a circular saw for the entire studio build. It was a lot of tedious cuts, a lot of double measuring, and a lot of those white monster energy drinks to propel me through each sleepless night.
I used QRDude to do all of the calculations that I needed. I decided to go with an 11 well design because I figured it gave me the most bang for the buck while also not being impossibly detailed to build. One thing that's awesome about it is that it gives you the minimum distance from your sitting position to the back wall as part of your calculation.
Now, the deeper that you build them, the lower frequencies it can diffuse. In my case, I decided to go with a 7.25" depth for my room. which treats down to about 765hz. Technically that 765hz is true diffusion, but I hear people talk about how there are still some things going on to about an octave below that. I could have technically gone deeper since my sitting position is a bit farther than that, but I tried to do as much as I could to balance between the ideal measurements and whatever I could do to buy lumber that meet those requirements as far as dimensions to save me from more cuts.
I typically see that diffusers are built maybe only a few feet tall and are hung from ceilings or wall mounted. My understanding is that this is mostly due to manufacturing costs, shipping limitations, and cost. I built mine floor to ceiling because I didn't want to have to damage any of the walls at my new house trying to mount a heavy diffuser. So I ended up building 3 and putting them all side by side. Any more than that, and you start running into issues with periodicity. You can read more about that here https://books.google.com/books?id=IDAuR3dn5ZsC&pg=PA248&dq=the+curse+of+periodicity&ei=zCTFSqSGGqeKlQSOo7zDAw&hl=en#v=onepage&q=the curse of periodicity&f=false
I included my QRDude final calculations as well below
https://imgur.com/a/Ifqhq
If you're not super good with power tools and working with wood, I'd stay far away from building these types of diffusers unless you're really willing to put in the immense amount of time that they take. You're probably better off just treating them with more absorbers, but in my case I wanted to do something different. One big thing I've noticed since I put them in is my room sounds larger than it actually is. It's hard to describe and I don't think that translates super well in the audio clips I provided.
Final Thoughts
After doing these audio comparisons, I came to a few conclusions about the treatment I ended up doing.
So I just moved into my new house and in doing so, I decided to put together a comparison between before and after acoustic treatment in my home studio. I've included the raw files from my field recorder in the video description so you can play around with it and do some analysis. I'd love to hear what you guys think of the difference and I'm more than happy to answer any questions you may have.
I highly recommend you download the raw recordings in the description of the video for a better understanding of the difference. Youtube can do some funky things to audio files and you might not hear certain things while watching.
Bass Traps and Early Reflections
My room dimensions are 11.5' x 11.5' with a 7.5' ceiling. I decided to treat my left and right side early reflection points with 4" absorbers that are 32" wide and go from floor to ceiling. To treat the 2 corners behind my speakers, I made 2 large bass traps (not superchunk, just regular panels) that are 6" deep and 47 inches wide, floor to ceiling. For the rear corners, I used regular 4" panels parallel to the wall since my door blocks the ability to have a panel that straddles the corner.
All of the traps use Roxul Safe 'N Sound. I was able to salvage it from my old traps that I made. Honestly the biggest and longest part of building these was the finish. Cutting, sanding, staining, and finishing the outside wood frame took waaaay longer than just building the 2x4 frame and stuffing it with rigid fiberglass. I will say all in all though I love the way they look. Another downside is the money you need to spend to do those cosmetic parts of the project.
Quadratic Diffusers
At my last house, I didn't really do much to treat the walls behind me. That room was about 14' long from the side my speakers were on to the other side. I did a lot of research on how how diffusion works and how to calculate the most optimal build, and so I set forth and decided to build some quadratic diffusers.
Let me tell you, this was a tremendous pain in the ass to build and cost me a lot more money than I care to admit. Every cut I made had to be exact, and I only used a circular saw for the entire studio build. It was a lot of tedious cuts, a lot of double measuring, and a lot of those white monster energy drinks to propel me through each sleepless night.
I used QRDude to do all of the calculations that I needed. I decided to go with an 11 well design because I figured it gave me the most bang for the buck while also not being impossibly detailed to build. One thing that's awesome about it is that it gives you the minimum distance from your sitting position to the back wall as part of your calculation.
Now, the deeper that you build them, the lower frequencies it can diffuse. In my case, I decided to go with a 7.25" depth for my room. which treats down to about 765hz. Technically that 765hz is true diffusion, but I hear people talk about how there are still some things going on to about an octave below that. I could have technically gone deeper since my sitting position is a bit farther than that, but I tried to do as much as I could to balance between the ideal measurements and whatever I could do to buy lumber that meet those requirements as far as dimensions to save me from more cuts.
I typically see that diffusers are built maybe only a few feet tall and are hung from ceilings or wall mounted. My understanding is that this is mostly due to manufacturing costs, shipping limitations, and cost. I built mine floor to ceiling because I didn't want to have to damage any of the walls at my new house trying to mount a heavy diffuser. So I ended up building 3 and putting them all side by side. Any more than that, and you start running into issues with periodicity. You can read more about that here https://books.google.com/books?id=IDAuR3dn5ZsC&pg=PA248&dq=the+curse+of+periodicity&ei=zCTFSqSGGqeKlQSOo7zDAw&hl=en#v=onepage&q=the curse of periodicity&f=false
I included my QRDude final calculations as well below
https://imgur.com/a/Ifqhq
If you're not super good with power tools and working with wood, I'd stay far away from building these types of diffusers unless you're really willing to put in the immense amount of time that they take. You're probably better off just treating them with more absorbers, but in my case I wanted to do something different. One big thing I've noticed since I put them in is my room sounds larger than it actually is. It's hard to describe and I don't think that translates super well in the audio clips I provided.
Final Thoughts
After doing these audio comparisons, I came to a few conclusions about the treatment I ended up doing.
- You would think by adding bass absorbers, that the bass would get quieter since it's being absorbed. However what I found is that the bass is much more prominent now and well defined. I presume this is because there was cancellation in the lower frequencies which left it inaudible. I noticed big nulls around 70hz and 140hz
- After doing my tests, the treated room sounds much more like the original audio than the untreated room. The untreated room lacks any definition below 150hz and the reflections were real bad. It made it sound like a really bad sounding quick reverb was on the tracks.
- In the comparisons, it's clear to me that the stereo image has been cleaned up and there's more information that's much wider.
- There was a certain mid range honk before the treatment was done, this seemed to disappear after the fact.
- I still think there is a null at about 100hz based on my comparisons. But everything already sounds much better, so I can't complain too much
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