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Posts: 5109
Location: Brisbane
Joined: September 25, 1999
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Good question, and one I've had to face a couple of times.
I've tried various things on the "open" side and always failed to get a good balance. What has worked for me is absorption on the wall side, but there are 2 reflection points to treat: the first reflection point for the speaker that's close to the wall and also the first reflection point for the other speaker. That second point will be a bit more toward you than the first one. They may well be close enough together to treat with a single panel but I'd aim for a wide one if I went that way. I need to treat both reflection points on my left wall and I use 2 RealTrap panels with a bit of space between them so a single panel in my setup would need to be around 5' wide to work well. It may well be easier to go with separate panels as I have.
I don't think you have to worry about creating a "black hole" since you will usually get some reflection from an absorbing panel.
I've tried diffusion years ago in a different room than my current room. I used a DIY room lens and didn't get brilliant results but then I was only trying to treat the first reflection point for the speaker that was closest to the wall, and the room lens isn't a particularly wide device. My feeling about diffusion is that you're going to get a stronger reflection than you will from an absorbing panel, and you'll also be getting the reflection from a wider area since you'll actually get scattered reflections from most of the diffuser area, all arriving within a ms or two of each other and they're going to be stronger in total, and arriving earlier, than the reflections from the opposite side wall. Since those reflections are going to be quite low in level relative to the level of the direct sound, I think it's best to absorb rather than diffuse the two first reflections from the close wall in order to reduce their levels as much as possible.
Having said that, something like the RPG BAD panels may work if used on both sides and if you treat the first reflection points for each speaker on each side. I haven't tried the BAD panels so I simply don't know. I do know that in my room with absorption on the side opposite the opening, I do get a balanced sound stage with a centred centre image.
If you do decide to try and make something to provide a reflective surface for the open area, then I think the best thing to do would be to try and make that surface as similar in reflection properties as possible to the closer wall. Unfortunately that's likely to result in a fairly solid construction of some sort and it's going to need to be a fair size, around the same size as the area you cover with absorption if you were to go with absorption on the close wall, since you need to create a first reflection point for each speaker. I don't know how that will fit in visually with your room, I know it wouldn't work particularly well in my current room or my previous room.
So that's my recommendation: leave the open side as it is and use absorption on the close wall, but use absorption for the first reflection points for both speakers.
David Aiken
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RE: How do I "fake" a side wall? - David Aiken 19:56:19 08/19/09
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