Treat These Areas First: Where to begin Acoustic Treatment
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Published 2021-09-21
www.gikacoustics.com/acoustic-advice-form/
Every single room has its own issues that require their own treatment strategy, but no matter what kind of room you’re treating: whether it’s mixing, mastering or recreational listening, certain methods will always be useful for beginning your treatment strategy.
If you want to improve your imaging there’s no better place to start than by treating your first reflections. The reflected sound that bounces off your walls and ceiling mixes with the original sound. When these reflections are delayed enough you hear them as reverb, but the early reflections arrive at the listening position with so little delay that you can’t parse the reflected sound from the original sound.
Remember that overlapping sound waves interfere with each other and cause phase interference. Those early reflections can arrive close enough to the original sound to create patterns of constructive and destructive interference that result in things like comb filtering.
The thickest panels you can afford and fit are always the best solution. While thinner panels would be able to tackle the reflective region of sounds, using a thinner panel means we’ve used up some of our budget and available space without treating the mid bass frequencies.
For example: The 242 is a fantastic panel for reflection reduction, but with just a modest investment increase we can use a 244 panel which will absorb more of the bass resonances that plague small rooms.
Rooms with ceilings in the 7-9’ range especially benefit from 244 panels on the ceiling first reflections as they are capable of hitting the height axis node that will cause frequency dips in the mid bass at seated ear level.
We have a handy video guide for finding your first reflections if you need help, but think of it this way: Imagine your speaker is a cue ball, your walls and ceiling are billiard table rails and your ear is a pocket.
You can “line up the shot” and know you are hitting the reflection point. Rather than expecting your head to remain in a singular location when you listen, it’s best to envision these billiard shots for every location your head goes to when you lean in or kick back or stand up. The more reflection angles you cover between you and your speakers, the larger the sweet spot will be for you to work/compose and listen in.
Mixing and mastering situations should favor pure broadband absorption for treatment of the first reflections for the most neutral impression of their speakers. However, in a recreational listening scenario like a high-fi room or home theatre, it’s not entirely wrong to use diffusion in these locations. While either option is unequivocally better than a reflective wall “the artist holding the brush” should seek a neutral look at their work rather than the hyped and deeper version that diffusion would impart.
The second step is to treat your corners with thick bass traps. All Rooms have Room modes. These are frequencies that correspond to the dimensions of the room. The three room modes that are the strongest are the wavelengths that measure the same as the height, depth, and width of the room. By treating the corners,we treat two room modes at once.
This concept extends to the horizontal corners that run along your room’s floor and ceiling. Though these areas can be more difficult to treat, they are still corners of your room and an opportunity to get a more and more linear and accurate low end response from your speakers.
In a perfect world you’ll be deploying bass traps that are thick enough to reach the lowest resonances that your room will impart on your ears. GIK’s soffit bass trap has great effect as low as 40Hz, making it the ideal choice of rooms in the 12-14’ range.
While a single soffit stood alone can only affect to about 40Hz, the coupling effect of several soffits run butted or stacked can reach lower and lower regions.
Defining a #1 as first reflections and corners as #2 is a very close call. However, if you’ll recall we’re recommending first reflection zones to be treated with thicker panels so it’s not as if you’d be leaving that region of the speaker entirely unaddressed if you’re starting there exclusively.
Just treating these three areas: first reflections, corners, and backwall, will bring your room’s audio quality up dramatically. Further improvements can be made by testing and experimenting with additional treatment. If you’re struggling to get your room under control, check out our website where you can get customized advice for your room and application.
All Comments (21)
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It's always best to squeeze as many of our panels into the room as you can afford then finance the rest. This will eliminate all the reflections coming from your bank account, unfortunately, we have not been able to design panels yet that will quiet the screaming coming directly at your ears from your spouses mouth
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Thin panels reduce high end.. thicker deal with low. a 6" panel with a 2" gap that is sealed in the frame & mounted flush to the wall the will isolate the lower end making the best option for trapping low end. defusion behind you absorption in front & to the sides. you can defuse on the side also depending on the room! This is a summery from the last 3 years of interviews with studio designers & builders.
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I am very appreciative of your video series, as well as the look-alike Vandersteen speakers at 3:03!
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Came for the advice. Stayed for the eyebrows.
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Very clear presentation.very professional presenter
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Awesome, this was very helpful. Thanks 👍🏻
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Very nice and informative video! I'm planning on doing some DIY poly-diffuser/absorbers. I've read so many forum posts with people replacing their 1st/early reflection points with diffusers (either poly or semi-open absorber/diffuser kinda like the abfusers) with better results. I hate when a room sounds too dead and not alive. I do mostly soundtrack with strings and pianos and some synthwave stuff with long reverb tails etc, 80's stuff. My plan is to have one 120cm long poly-diffuser bass trap in each of the front corners and cut one into 2x60cm as my 1st reflection poly diffusers. Hard on the facing surface but open in the top and bottom, maybe have a little gap with a totally open backside next to the wall. I'm also planning on having a horizontal (not vertical) long 120cm polyfuser on the rear wall behind me like you have at 4:03 or do 2x 60cm's vertical facing my monitors on the rear wall. - But I really don't know if I should have cuts in the front surface on my side wall polys like a vicoustic wavewood diffuser that is semi open but still concave, or a completely solid surface facing me? Let me know what you think it'd be super interesting to hear this from you! I hope the poly bass traps will do a good job in doing a more open stereo sound to my room and the rest can help. I don't think it will be too much poly diffusors in that room. :) All the best and thanks in advance!
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Great educational video. Thanks.
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If I could do it again, I’d go with monster traps and soffits. And use air gaps behind everything
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Thanks for the cool vid and showcasing a really boomy voice recording. Is it just the mic-placement + no EQ or why does it sound like that? It's not really a great ad for what you are trying to sell. I hope this doesn't come across too harsh. All the best, Timo.
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Great advice! wish i had a few for my new mini room. Cheers from Australia!
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You don’t want it too dry though. Over treatment is also a big no no
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Can the 244s be used to treat bass and highs in a small room?
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Is it best to just get as many monster traps as you can afford and forget thinner panels (especially if you make music with heavy sub and kicks)? Or should you always mix them with 244 or 242? Might as well go full range no?
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Given the first Left and Right reflection points I am only able to treat one of them. What would you recommend if we can only treat one of the points? i.e. Only treating 1 of the opposing walls. What would be the disadvantage of this?
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What about the front wall? I thought that was most important too
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I have a couple 100 pound dogs, things get very dusty and dirty fast. I want to avoid foam and fabric that will become disgusting allergen traps. What are my treatment options?
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There are many videos on treating an existing room, but is there an advice for building a house/room in the house so it would be acoustically correct?
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Excellent! Are your products available in india?
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My room is somewhat oddly shaped, as it 's upstairs, and I have a traditional triangular roof. So my front wall (behind speakers) slopes up vertically about 4 ft, then goes up diagonally 'over my head, from listening position's pov' to make a triangle to a 13 feet highest point behind me. Is this good or bad for acoustics? My simple brain thinks it might help in that there's less reflections from the ceiling, but I might be totally wrong here :-D
