acoustic treatment!?

[FIXXXER]

as you may see on the pic my "recording desk" is placed in the
front/right corner of my living room.

the monitors are pretty close to the wall but i could
move the desk a bit further away from the wall.

i am planing to place an absorber behind every speaker
but i am not sure if this would make any sense at all.

i'm aware of it, this will surely not be a drastic
improvement but it could help a little i guess?

what do you guys think?

 

[Jormyn]

Almost all of the sound hitting that rear wall is going to be low-mids and bass - most speakers are reasonably focused toward the "front" once you get past 500Hz or so. As such, you may not see a huge improvement without putting some fairly hefty absorption behind them. It certainly won't hurt, but there are probably better things you could do.

Moving them away from the wall is a good idea, obviously, and farther away from the corner would be really good if possible. Bass builds up in corners, and having your speakers near the wall causes some sort of resonance/buildup/somethingbad in the low frequencies. However, since your speakers have their bass port (the big hole) facing forward, the wall shouldn't be as much of an issue for you.

 

[Spectivum]

I similarly just have a desk in the living room. I moved it to the center point of the wall and made DIY rockwool panels to put in the corners and Front/back reflection points. Bass frequencies are omnidirectional regardless of the speaker port orientation and also bass wavelength is quite long (100hz is like 3.5 meters) so it won't really help if you moved the speakers away from the wall 'a bit', room modes will be pretty much the same. Basically treat the corners with absorption as much as you can as that is the most effective in small rooms.

 

[FIXXXER]

Almost all of the sound hitting that rear wall is going to be low-mids and bass - most speakers are reasonably focused toward the "front" once you get past 500Hz or so. As such, you may not see a huge improvement without putting some fairly hefty absorption behind them. It certainly won't hurt, but there are probably better things you could do.

Moving them away from the wall is a good idea, obviously, and farther away from the corner would be really good if possible. Bass builds up in corners, and having your speakers near the wall causes some sort of resonance/buildup/somethingbad in the low frequencies. However, since your speakers have their bass port (the big hole) facing forward, the wall shouldn't be as much of an issue for you.

i could move the desk about 30-40cm to the left but that's it when it comes to placement. i have also been thinking about placing the desk diagonally in the right corner but i think that this may result in even more bass build up.
that's actually the only problem i have right now, it also happens only at 100-120hz, i get really huge spikes in this area.

I similarly just have a desk in the living room. I moved it to the center point of the wall and made DIY rockwool panels to put in the corners and Front/back reflection points. Bass frequencies are omnidirectional regardless of the speaker port orientation and also bass wavelength is quite long (100hz is like 3.5 meters) so it won't really help if you moved the speakers away from the wall 'a bit', room modes will be pretty much the same. Basically treat the corners with absorption as much as you can as that is the most effective in small rooms.

"unfortunately" there is just one corner as i can't place the desk central to the wall (living room door is in the middle) so i am not sure if a corner bass trap on the right side would make anything better. a corner trap on tehe left would totally block the door. i also tried to rearrange my furniture but i could not find a real solution for this. tricky shit...

 

[Jormyn]

Moving to the left will help a bit with reflections from your left speaker hitting the wall on your right - I'm sure it's causing some comb filtering, even if you aren't aware of it. Moving to the left and putting some absorption on the right wall would be even better. In general, when it comes to treatment for non-bass frequencies, the easiest way to go about it is to have a friend walk around the walls with a mirror. Anywhere that you can sit in your chair and see the front of either speaker is a place that you're getting reflections from. Put some acoustic foam there, or a couch, or a bookshelf if you're stuck using the living room furniture. This includes the ceiling and the wall behind you, if you can do anything with those.

I've read that in most normal rooms, since we all tend to have 8ft ceilings, modes around 100-150Hz are fairly common due to where you and your speakers end up vertically. A bass trap in one corner will definitely reduce the boominess, even if you can't treat all of them.

For arranging furniture, acoustically at least, you ideally want everything as symmetrical as possible. If the room is longer one way than the other, the best place is to have your desk centered on the shorter wall, so the long part of the room is your front/back, and obviously a couple of feet away from the wall. Whatever you can do to get closer to this will be helpful.

However, as long as you can figure out what problems you have in the room and mix around those, you can still get decent results. The cupboard and drawers in my desk resonate REALLY badly around 200Hz, so I know that I can't trust my ears to mix that range. I try to match, roughly, the amount of resonance I get from a pro mix, and I usually spend a lot of time staring at Voxengo SPAN, but eventually I just have to export the mix and play it on my stereo downstairs.

 

[FIXXXER]

would you recommend some DIY bass traps or could these be good enough?

CORNER TRAP

they are not that expensive but also they seem pretty "thin".
they are labeled as bass absorbers but i am not sure if they can really work being that thin!?

as for the mirror thing, i've heard about this but i am afraid that i would have to place absorbers all
over the walls in my living room

 

[Spectivum]

It is 10cm fiberglass so that is OK but you probably don't want all that black in your living room. Also, the experienced claim that you need to cover min 20% of the room surface to make a difference in room modes - even for just firefighting you will need around 6 I guess to hear anything so then these become expensive. My DIY traps cost around 10EUR each, they are the main attraction in the living room actually getting a lot of interest from guests so don't be afraid of putting them there, just choose a nice fabric.

 

[Jormyn]

There are a few things you can do with bass traps that will let a thinner trap work just as well. One method is leaving space behind the trap, which is what you would get by sticking one of those guys in the corner. However, I can't say how low the trap's usefulness would go - I'm still pretty new to the math for this stuff. Odds are they would help, and when you aren't able to treat the whole room properly they might be the best option.

The mirror thing... there should only be one spot on each wall/ceiling for each speaker. For the walls to either side, those spots are probably close enough together that they can be treated together. Again, whatever little bits you *can* do will help.