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Tweakers' Asylum Tweaks for systems, rooms and Do It Yourself (DIY) help. FAQ. |
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Tweakers' Asylum Tweaks for systems, rooms and Do It Yourself (DIY) help. FAQ. |
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In Reply to: Why stop a process that's worked well so far? posted by Japesgalore on October 24, 2009 at 04:15:00:
My adventures in bass trapping land have been limited.
I started off playing with DIY acoustic treatment by building some room lens clones back when my listening space in my previous home was 11' x 11' so there wasn't much space. They made a difference that I liked and I lived with them for a while but then decided to try something more and that happened to be 2 bass traps which were a variant of Jon Risch's quick and dirty bass trap design. I couldn't find the rolls of insulation he recommended here in Australia and I didn't want to use fibreglass anyway so I got some polyester batts and compressed them to the density he recommended with a wire mesh cage. They were a little under 4' high and about 18" square and made a noticeable improvement. I covered them with some loose weave curtain material.
When I shifted to my current home a bit over 7 years ago those traps came with me. A few months later I bought some more batts and extended them floor to ceiling in the front corners but reduced the cross section slightly to around 15" x 18". Another improvement. Subsequently I added 2 more traps in the rear corners (1 in each corner running around half room height) and some panels based on Jon's designs at the front and side wall first reflection points. They also helped a bit with the upper bass.
I should add that there was other absorption in the room in the form of around 70 sq ft of bookshelves full of books, curtains on the windows, and a sound absorbing curtain lining hidden behind the 50+ sq ft curtain area on the front wall.
In April last year I replaced my treatments with RealTrap Mondo Traps—a corner Mondo Trap in each corner of the room and high frequency Mondo Traps replacing my panels at the first reflection points. I wasn't expecting a big improvement because I thought my DIY traps and panels were working quite well and my main reason for replacing them was appearance since I'm not a brilliant handyman and I wanted something that looked better. I went for RealTraps because I could get them here in Australia and the only other treatments I could source were foam which I didn't think would work as well. Many of the products available in the US simply never get here because shipping costs add too much to the price and the market would be too small. Despite the fact that the corner traps were smaller in volume than my DIY traps and did not extend floor to ceiling I found they did a better job at bass frequencies than my traps had done. That certainly surprised me.
Since then I've added another RealTrap HF MiniTrap at one further first reflection point in my L-shaped room to deal with an asymmetrical reflection issue.
Apart from that the only changes to my acoustic treatment have been subtractive, removing the books and curtain lining which made the room noticeably livelier and improved the dynamics and also the tonal characteristics. Obviously the books and curtain lining weren't as smooth or broad band in their absorption spectrum as the RealTraps are.
I'd say both Jon and Ethan would question whether I have enough bass trapping in my room but the room is not quite the normal room. The L-shape introduces a second length and width dimension so I have 5 axial modes rather than the 3 of a rectangular room and that seems to help a bit, plus there are also 2 permanently open archway entrances to the room which are quite wide and link the room to a hallway and open plan area respectively. That also reduces pressure buildup at bass frequencies so I think the room's natural response at low frequencies is actually not too bad overall. The shape and openings create other problems with asymmetrical reflections pulling the soundstage to one side but dealing with first reflections has corrected that quite well and the soundstage and imaging I get are among the best I've ever heard.
Like you I think about adding some more bass trapping from time to time. I wonder about adding the RealTrap triangular traps to the corners, at least at the front of the room. The location of the rear archway entrance doesn't give me space to add them at one of the rear corners where I can just fit in a Mondo Trap. So far I haven't gone down that route because the Australian distributor for RealTraps doesn't routinely stock the triangular traps and it's not easy getting them to accept and process a special order which is what I had to do to get the corner Mondo Traps and high frequency Mondo Traps. Plus there's the fact that the sound I'm getting is the best I've ever heard from my system and also quite good in comparison to the other systems I've heard. I also suspect that my next priority for upgrading the system is actually going to be replacing my source rather than anything else.
So that's my adventures. Along the way I read a lot on room acoustics, especially about DIY treatments, and participated in a lot of threads on the topic here which I found useful.
As to your question "Why stop a process that's worked well so far?", the answer is what I said in my previous post. You can do better but there are a number of costs in doing better. At some point you start to wonder whether the benefits are no longer worth the cost. I'm at that point on that question when I wonder about adding the triangular traps to my room. I suspect that the additional trapping would be worth the cost in dollars but I don't want to go through the hassles of placing a special order with the local distributor who is 2 states away from me and RealTraps won't sell direct to customers in Australia. In addition I've been spending on things other than audio this year and I still need to do a few more things before I start some more serious audio spending.
You're going to have to make your own mind up about whether it's worth adding more but one thing I think is always worth doing with room treatment is living with what you've got for a while before making changes. It can take time to adapt to a changed sound and to come to fully appreciate what you've got. It's also worth looking at other things in the room that may be affecting the sound and seeing what happens if you play with them. That's what I did when I removed the books and curtain lining. You may well find that you can make things sound better by removing some other things rather than adding more treatment, and find in the process that the treatments you do have work somewhat better than you currently think they do.
David Aiken
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Follow Ups
- RE: Why stop a process that's worked well so far? - David Aiken 13:59:30 10/24/09 (0)
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