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RE: Stupid questions perhaps...

Posted by David Aiken (A) on February 3, 2009 at 18:39:41

In Reply to: Stupid questions perhaps... posted by pretzel_logic on February 3, 2009 at 16:38:01:

Trapping will help but your "acoustic space" is not the same as your "listening space".

The listening area is open to the dining area and the acoustic space is the combined area, plus any other areas open to either of those two areas. The bigger the acoustic space, the more bass trapping you tend to need to smooth the room response. It's unlikely that you can fit enough bass trapping into the listening area to smooth the response of the combined space, or that you would want to, and unfortunately you can't smooth the response of the listening area on its own.

My advice would be to trap what corners you conveniently can. The result will not be a totally smooth response and the "layout" of the high pressure zones with strong bass response and low pressure zones with poor bass response will not be symmetrical within the listening area because it is being determined by the sound behaviour in the total combined area. You will need to experiment a bit with speaker and listening position placement but bass trapping will help produce a more natural sound. I had a similar situation years ago in my previous home where the listening area was one half of a 22' x 11' combined living/dining area with a part dividing wall in the middle. There were only 2 physical corners in the listening area and adding DIY traps to both those corners certainly improved the sound noticeably in that room.

You will definitely get some benefit from adding bass traps. How much benefit will depend on how many traps you add, what the absorption properties of those traps are, and the size and behaviour of both your listening area and the spaces linked to it. Basically I'd say the amount of benefit is unpredictable but if you put a reasonable amount of trapping in each corner of the listening area that you can put traps in, then I think you will appreciate the results.



David Aiken

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