Feel the heat? Diaphragmatic/panel/membrane bass traps need to sealed. The closer you get to the wall, the lower particle velocity gets. There’s lots of great info out there but I wanted to create a practical guide that people can reference as they treat their room. Overall your soundstage will sound more unified and naturally balanced with tighter definition between tones.
How would I install bass traps behind my desk on the curved wall?Ridley, concave curves are generally very undesirable in mixing rooms as they focus the sound.
If you notice a particular location has high sound pressure at 50 Hz, that would be a great place to put an absorber with a resonant frequency of ~50 Hz. But what if you don’t have all four power corners available? If one sidewall has a window, that could effect how you treat the other sidewall.What about when you have a rectangle room, but the ceiling isn’t flat, but rather peak up in the shape of a pyramid ?Treat the peak as an extra corner that can be put to great use. They attenuate low-to-mid frequencies by providing flow resistance and damping.
The projection screen falls over the doors and we face that way.Because of the 2 doors at front 2 corners, the best place i found for the sub-woofer was in the rear left corner – first of all, is that a good place?
Low frequency absorption is a huge topic but I’ve tried to cover the key practical points. But there are more interesting ways to do it, depending on the size and shape of your room, if you design with attention to the Hhaas effect, initial signal delay gap and RFZ (reflection free zone) criteria. If you don’t like this sidewall straddle approach (it’s pure function over aesthetics), then simply mount the panels on the sloped part of the sidewalls at your first reflection points, ideally with an air gap.As to how to make this look presentable… that’s another story :-).Could you be so kind and give me some advice also? I just hope to have some simple advises if it’s possible! Porous or fibrous absorbers, like 3” thick panels of Owens Corning 703, Roxul Safe’n’Sound or acoustic batt insulation, do not provide low frequency absorption when you mount them flat on your wall. Hopefully more audio heads who are installing bass traps will find it it in the future.I wish you the best with the finishing touches on your studio. You need a lot of space to absorb low frequencies using porous absorption! And once you get over a certain thickness it actually starts to reflect low frequencies because it has a high gas flow resistivity.People will call anything a “bass trap” these days, but don’t be fooled.
Hi Tim, I don’t know if I’m too late for a reply, but I will ask you anyway: Is there any way this kind of soundtraps will work in a plain plasterboard room 6 x 4 meters with only a heavy fire door on a side? Floor-to-ceiling corner bass absorbers are an efficient strategy to control room modes and reduce other low frequency problems like comb filtering caused by speaker placement relative to walls. Most acoustical engineers don’t have experience with numerical methods, so there’s an opportunity there.Thanks for the response Tim!
Thanks again for your kind words and for spreading the word. In this case bass traps will provide some help, but the most effective way to tame this null is to tweak your speaker placement using one of the three recommendations I give here: Thank you for this TOP NOTCH/EXCELLENT 101 guide !! The author explains that bass traps have plywood fronts which transition … I’m not sure is it worth trying to treat my kind of setup because it’s really irregular. If we give some heat back to the ice, it returns to a liquid state.
My Leanfractal or Leanfuser design (a modulated array of 5 or 7 panels) would work. It doesn’t surprise me that corner 3 also has a lot of bass buildup, as it’s opposite from the pocket. The alcove may allow sound to be reflected in undesirable ways (e.g., flutter echo), so I suggest you treat at least two walls of the 3’x3′ alcove.Carpet is not a replacement for acoustic panels. Really ‘sound’ (sorry!) In this article we’ll examine what a Bass Trap (bass absorber) is, why we recommend putting bass traps in certain places in the room, and we’ll explore the options and benefits of bass traps. Hybrid surfaces are a good option as they let you absorb mids while scattering / diffusing high frequencies. A key goal in small room acoustics is to tighten up the bass without rending the room completely dead at mid-high frequencies… because no one with an ounce of sanity wants to spend all day listening in an anechoic chamber.
One approach is to mount a perimeter of bass absorbers around the edges of the ceiling, along dihedral corners 9, 10, 11 and 12. Another big benefit is that if you add a reflective convex surface to the front of the bass trap, it’s a great surface for scattering sound. any recommendations?3.
I’m really stoked about this site and will recommend it dearly to friends! Corner placement is the loudest.