Room Treatment Suggestions

M

MAC1

Member
Looking for some advice on how to add acoustic treatment to my home office to improve sound when playing through my FRFR setup (Adam A5Xs). My office is a relatively small space and I’ve noticed that most presets sound quite muddy or muffled through my setup without significant tweaking in the EQ or changing out IRs entirely. All of the feedback I’ve gotten is that it’s likely the room that is the issue as opposed to my speakers, guitar or preset. Was hoping anyone could provide some suggestions regarding what I could buy or do to make a real difference in sound quality while playing in my office. Appreciate any tips! Thanks.
 
When you play music from an actual CD through your system, does it sound acceptable? If the answer is yes then the presets are most likely the problem and not the room. I find the factory presets to be completely unusable without significant tweaking just as you stated.
 
The two main issues will be trying to control wall reflections, which kind of "smear" the sound, and low end buildup, which makes the lows muddy. Dealing with the low end is most difficult.
to control reflections, a rule of thumb trick one can do is to sit in your listening position and have a pal move a small mirror around on the wall. anywhere on the wall where you can see the speakers from the listening position is a good place to put something absorptive, like an absorber panel or drapes, etc.
For low-end, your biggest bang for the buck will be to fill the room's corners with as much absorptive material as you can get away with, or straddle the corner with an acoustic absorber. One cheap-ish easy solution is to but rolls of pink insulation and stack them in the room corners. you can cover them with fabric to make them less ugly, and if you need to, you can sell them or return them to Home Depot or wherever.

Both of these companies sell acoustic products and have great resources for learning about this stuff. I have bought some of their products on occasion, but I made a ton of rectangular absorbers similar to their offerings when I renovated my studio a few years ago. I don't have any affiliation with them, other than being an occasional customer.

oops, forum wouldn't allow the links to be posted, but they are at dot coms:

realtraps
gikacoustics
 
Ocnor said:
When you play music from an actual CD through your system, does it sound acceptable? If the answer is yes then the presets are most likely the problem and not the room. I find the factory presets to be completely unusable without significant tweaking just as you stated.
Click to expand...
The sound has similar issues when playing a song or CD through the speakers in the room - sounds a bit muddy and muffled.
 
michaeltonight said:
The two main issues will be trying to control wall reflections, which kind of "smear" the sound, and low end buildup, which makes the lows muddy. Dealing with the low end is most difficult.
to control reflections, a rule of thumb trick one can do is to sit in your listening position and have a pal move a small mirror around on the wall. anywhere on the wall where you can see the speakers from the listening position is a good place to put something absorptive, like an absorber panel or drapes, etc.
For low-end, your biggest bang for the buck will be to fill the room's corners with as much absorptive material as you can get away with, or straddle the corner with an acoustic absorber. One cheap-ish easy solution is to but rolls of pink insulation and stack them in the room corners. you can cover them with fabric to make them less ugly, and if you need to, you can sell them or return them to Home Depot or wherever.

Both of these companies sell acoustic products and have great resources for learning about this stuff. I have bought some of their products on occasion, but I made a ton of rectangular absorbers similar to their offerings when I renovated my studio a few years ago. I don't have any affiliation with them, other than being an occasional customer.

oops, forum wouldn't allow the links to be posted, but they are at dot coms:

realtraps
gikacoustics
Click to expand...
Thanks - I’ll definitely try buying some of those stuff. Sounds like much of the problem is in the low end but I’m not entirely sure.
 
I'd probably start with getting a mic (UMIK-1) and measuring via REW from your listening position. That will tell you more than anyone can speculate on within this thread. Share your measurements and folks can suggest mitigations to whatever problem the measurements surface.
 
I used a UMIK-1 to measure my room, although given what you're hearing and bc your room is small, I guarantee that attacking the corners with some absorption is the way to go. I wouldn't worry about targeting specific frequencies until you have a good amount of overall bass absorption. Counterintuitively, reducing bass resonance in a room doesn't thin out the low end, it just makes it clearer.
For cost purposes, I ended up building my own absorbers, and if you're at all handy, you can save a LOT of money making your own. Definitely at least check out the educational materials on those companies' websites, and you may decide it's worth it to buy pre-made treatments, which is well worth it if you can afford it.
 
I agree with michaeltonight above, bass is much harder to control. Here's some stuff I've learned over the years as I've done a lot of research on this and measured and built treatment for a few residential rooms:

Read all 4 pages of this article. That covers monitor placement, room dimensions, symmetry, etc.

Once you have the monitors set up correctly, play pink noise or a song and walk around listening to the bass. The bass will be dramatically louder in the corners. Obviously fully treating the 4 walls would eliminate the bass problems in the corners but that is not doable in most residential rooms so it's more cost-effective to treat the corners with bass traps and the walls (& ceiling!) with broadband panels.

If you overdo it with thin insulation panels (i.e. 3-4") you'll absorb all the highs and just end up with a creepy/dead sounding room with massive peaks and nulls in the lower frequencies.

Put panels at the first reflection points on the walls and ceiling, as thick as you can make them, with as big an air gap as possible behind (not thicker than the panel itself tho). I used safe n' sound for these due to their higher gas flow resistivity and 2'x4'3" size so doubling them up results in 6" panels. Again, thicker is better so if you can do 9" then go for it. It takes almost the same labor to build thicker panels as thinner ones, so on the same budget go with fewer thicker panels vs. more thin panels. For the ceiling it's easier to just make one big panel for your cloud than to try to get several smaller panels aligned when hanging. If you have an unfinished basement for example with visible framing then you can turn the entire ceiling into a bass trap.

Put floor to ceiling traps in the corners as thick as you can make them, just copy GIK's soffit bass trap design with 1x2's and R30 insulation. Good idea to make 2 for each corner and stack them vertically so you can move them in a normal sized car in the future. It's counter intuitive but at equivalent thicknesses material with lower gas flow resistivity (R30) absorbs lower frequencies better than higher gas flow resistivity (Safe n' Sound). You can verify this and the effectiveness of all your treatment with this calculator (R30 is around 1650 Pa.s/m2, SnS is around 8000). The corners with 3 intersecting surfaces are the most important but bass traps can also be effective in the corners along the ceiling and even the corners where the walls meet the floor. Unlike with higher frequencies, you really can't have too much bass trapping so build as much as your budget allows.
 
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