Room Acoustics Forum by Rives Audio

RE: New room questions regarding shape & trapping

124.177.135.18

In Reply to: RE: New room questions regarding shape & trapping posted by Andrew_P on May 31, 2008 at 10:07:55

Klaus has stated that room dimensions aren't important and given his reasons. I've questioned one of his statements in relation to that in a response to him.

I don't think room dimensions are critical but the various ratios for optimum room dimensions do have the advantage of tending to produce rooms with proportions that work well for system setups. They exclude long, narrow rooms and square rooms, and that means that you end up getting a reasonable shaped space to work in so I would not throw your calculations away.

You can use the cavities in the wall space for bass trapping but in order to do so the wall surface has to be acoustically transparent at bass frequencies. That means that you can't hide the bass trapping behind a normal wall surface like plasterboard and expect it to be fully effective. You would need to use a stretched fabric surface of some kind. Klaus actually uses a ceiling treatment in his room that utilises just such a surface.

The "room" dimensions, if you go that hidden route, will include the concealed spaces in the cavities but the room dimensions aren't critical and the difference between an interior space with "optimum" dimensions and a total space, including cavities, with "optimum dimensions" isn't going to be significant if the room is appropriately treated in both cases.

If you're going to use bass trapping what you need to consider is whether it's simpler just to use commercial products from floor to ceiling in the corners, and to choose products which blend reasonably well into the corner in terms of style and colour, or to go to the trouble of constructing a special, acoustically transparent wall at each corner and concealing the absorption material behind it. Both approaches will work equally well with equivalent absorption material and any difference in effectiveness will depend simply on available surface area for absorption. The issues are really about whether you're overly concerned about visible or invisible treatments and whether you're prepared to put the construction work into creating a room with invisible treatments vs going the simpler, normal construction route and adding treatments which have the appropriate effectiveness visibly within the finished room.

David Aiken

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