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RE: First reflection points on the floor

Posted by David Aiken (A) on January 6, 2011 at 12:11:51

In Reply to: RE: First reflection points on the floor posted by Hifisound on January 6, 2011 at 07:43:27:

By "carpet" do you mean "rug"? I think most people refer to "carpet" when talking of wall to wall carpeting and to "rugs" when talking about smaller areas of carpet placed somewhere on the floor within a room.

Any floor material I know—timber, concrete—is reflective. Some floor coverings such as stone and ceramic tiles are definitely reflective. Others such as vinyl and lino are probably going to be less reflective than hard tiles but still wouldn't be recommended for absorption.

Basically I think the usual option for an absorptive floor covering is carpet (natural fibre such as wool, not synthetic) in the form of wall to wall carpeting or rugs. You could use carpet tiles to cover a small area but that's effectively using them for what you would normally use a rug for and I would expect a rug to work better acoustically than carpet tiles which have the carpet fabric embedded in a rubber/synthetic layer unless the actual carpet layer of the tile was as thick as the rug you're comparing it to. Most carpet tiles I've seen have only very thin carpet layers.

The only other approach I've seen is used by a person with marble tiled floors which are normally left bare. When he settles in for a serious listening session he spreads a quilt over the floor between the listening position and the speakers and takes it up again at the end of the listening session.

If ease of maintenance is a big problem, my recommendation would be to get a good quality thick woolen rug of a size that fits between the speakers and your listening position and to place it in position when listening and roll it up and store it elsewhere when not listening. That way it will get little foot traffic and need minimal care and maintenance. Carpet tiles have the advantage that you can remove individual tiles for cleaning or replacement, and you can also swap tiles from areas that get heavy foot traffic with ones from other areas of the tiled area in order to spread the wear and tear more evenly over the whole surface, but they will still need more maintenance than a tiled floor.

That's about all I can think of.


David Aiken

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