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In Reply to: RE: Thanks posted by greg7 on December 20, 2007 at 18:55:23
Well, if you like the "barren" approach and want to keep things pretty much the way they are what I would do is think about the height of the panels as I suggested plus the spacing from the wall, but do one more thing: uncover them, place a half to 1 inch thick sheet of polyester quilting batting over the top of the fibreglass panels and recover them without pulling the cover cloth tight enough to really compress the batting. The batting will add a bit of HF to upper midrange absorption to what you're already getting.
Re flat to 20 kHz: The ear's response is not flat, it rolls off at both ends quite considerably. Take a look at the Fletcher Munson sensitivity curves. Musicians tend to commpensate for that by playing a bit more loudly at the bottom end, less so at the top since the highest fundamentals aren't too far above the ear's most sensitive range. A flat response lets the speakers reproduce things at the right levels relative to the mid range, but only if you're playing the music at the same level at which it was recorded. Play it louder than that and you're effectively 'turning up' the bass and treble to some extent, play it softer and you're turning them down.
Since you're sensitive to the HF side of things, my recommendation is to get the treatment right so that you're making the sound as clear as possible. That will enable you to listen at lower volume levels. In my experience we often turn things up a bit in order to hear something because it isn't quite clear. Make the sound clearer and you can listen at lower levels and listening at lower levels will ensure your ears are helping to 'turn down' the top end a bit so what you get as a side benefit of the improvement in clarity and lower listening levels will be the reduction in top end that you want plus a lower risk of hearing damage though I suspect that isn't a problem for you.
In order to increase the clarity, probably the best thing you could do since you say you have more panels is bring some of them back and straddle them diagonally across the corners to act as bass trap. That will tighten the bass and have a subjective effect that should extend right up into the mid range where lack of clarity is usually the biggest problem. You may well find with a bit of bass trapping that you gain a little more clarity everywhere and if you then listen at a slightly lower level you may well find the tonal and HF balance you're chasing.
Otherwise the brute force approach is to increase the HF absorption as per my first suggestion above re the polyester batting. The problem with that approach will be that it won't give you any gains in clarity and it may tempt you to turn things up a bit more if you lose too much air in the top end with the batting and turning things up will boost your ear's sensitivity to the highs a little more and you end up making things a little worse.
Since you've got the panels, just bring them in, place them at 45 degrees across the corners just standing on the floor or elevated a foot or so on a box, and see whether that plus a slightly lower volume level gives you what you want.
David Aiken
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