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In Reply to: RE: Combined Bass Traps on Ceiling? posted by Ferrstein on January 16, 2009 at 11:52:17
1- Depends on what your aims are. If all you want is bass trapping, then certainly there's nothing wrong with placing them on the ceiling and bass trapping is always useful. If you want to do some other things, like control first reflections from one or more walls, then ceiling treatments are in the wrong place.
2- For the most effective bass trapping you want them along the ceiling/wall interfaces. If you want some absorption at the ceiling first reflection points you'll need some elsewhere but that won't be down the centre of the room, it will be somewhere off centre on each side.
3- Depends on whether you only want bass trapping or if you want absorption over a broader frequency bandwidth than the bass alone. If you do you may be better off building resistive type bass traps rather than membrane panel traps using a plywood panel.
4- Depends on how much bass trapping you want and whether you can place traps in other locations where they will be most effective.
It seems to me that you're trying to kill 2 birds with one stone but while you know why you want to kill one of the birds (running the cables along the ceiling) you're still uncertain about why you want to kill the other bird and what you want to achieve by doing so (adding acoustic treatment). You've looked and found a trap type you can build which will allow you to use it to mask the cable run, but you haven't considered what you want to achieve with acoustic treatment. Until you know that you can't be certain that the panel traps you're considering are the best type of trap for your purposes, whether any of the locations you're considering for them are the best locations for them (you're thinking of location primarily in terms of hiding the cable run, not in terms of acoustic effectiveness), or what else, if anything, you might need to do and where the best places to put any other treatments you need might be.
If I were you, I'd work out the acoustic side of things first. That means knowing what kind of result I want to achieve by acoustic treatment, what treatments I needed to achieve that, and where they needed to go, then I'd look at how that fitted with the cable run requirements and how I could best utilise the treatments I was planning to hide the cables and whether I wanted to add some further treatment of some kind or do something else to mask any part of the cable run not concealed by the initial treatment plan. I can give you ideas for 2 or 3 different ways to treat a room and the end result will sound quite different for each of them. Some people will like one and some will like another one. There's no single treatment approach which will suit everyone. You can do things which will improve imaging and things which won't, things which will improve the sense of ambient space and things which don't, things which will produce a very expansive sound and things which produce a less expansive but much more focussed result. You need to design your treatment strategy in order to get the sort of result you want. You wouldn't buy a car without considering what you were going to use it for. Acoustic treatment is like buying a car. You need to consider what you want it to do before you start deciding what treatment to use and where to put it.
If it were me, I'd probably want to run the cables inside some form of channel that was closed off from the air space within the trap, and I'd rig some way of access to that channel which didn't require me to open up the trap to access the cables. That will prevent any accidental disturbance of the figreglass after the traps are compeleted and help prevent any fibre leakage into the listening room. It also enables you to get a good seal on the panel trap design so it doesn't leak air which would change its performance characteristics.
David Aiken
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