Poll - Room Treatments

Do you use room treatments in your main listening room?

  • Yes, I use commercial sound panels or other commercial room treatment products

    Votes: 30 13.8%
  • Yes, I use DIY panels or other room treatments

    Votes: 39 17.9%
  • No, but I have chosen furniture and accessories to improve acoustics

    Votes: 18 8.3%
  • No, but I move around my speakers and furniture to optimize acoustics as best I can

    Votes: 76 34.9%
  • No, I just live with the acoustics I've got

    Votes: 66 30.3%

  • Total voters
    218
Any chance we could get pics? And I'm interested in hearing about the "masking" technique with the piano. I have a hot water heater in the corner right behind and to the side of my R channel speaker that I might need to consider doing that to.

The "attack wall" is pictured here:

http://www.audiokarma.org/forums/showpost.php?p=4900882&postcount=41

A diagram depicting the "masking" of the piano as well as the trapping of the rest of the, uh, very tricky room is a thumbnail here:

http://www.audiokarma.org/forums/showpost.php?p=4867465&postcount=28

The "mask" is simply an 11" trap interposed between the direct path of the right speaker's output and the nearest side of the piano.
 
Whatever else you do, do NOT do what I did. My wife and I consolidated her condo, and my house, and moved here to Carlsbad to a rented two-bedroom house. Her modular wire shelving had to go somewhere, as did the stereo. Guess - they both live in the back bedroom, and the wire resonates to any sound. Sound treatments? You've got to be kidding...
 
The "attack wall" is pictured here:

http://www.audiokarma.org/forums/showpost.php?p=4900882&postcount=41


The "mask" is simply an 11" trap interposed between the direct path of the right speaker's output and the nearest side of the piano.

In all honesty, you are not really attacking the wall, but re-shaping the forward dispersion pattern of the speaker. Attacking the wall would mean exactly that - treating the actual front wall with reflection reduction(or elimination if you could) treatments. If you are feeding full range information to those speakers, there is still some strong interaction in the bass frequencies with the front wall - I don't see anything behind the speaker that can control any reflections at those frequencies.

I would image that a floor "bounce" or reflection would still be present, and ceiling reflections to a lesser degree as you have only controlled the horizontal reflections, but not really the vertical ones.
 
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I use nothing in the way of 'treatments',however I did purchase this house for the express purpose of the listening area.

The system sits in a living room which adjoins a kitchen/dining area,the combined dimensions of these two are approx 40 feet in the longest dimension and 20 feet wide..The wall to the rear of the speakers(the one I face) is 12 feet high.The roof-line slopes down to the far side of the kitchen/dining area where it is 8 feet high.
The speakers are seven feet out from the wall behind them and five feet from the side walls.Ten feet apart.I sit about 12 feet from the speakers.

My listening chair and lounge sit in a 12 foot by 7 foot opening between the living room and dining/kitchen area.Thus then nearest boundary behind my head when I'm seated in the listening chair,is the far wall of the kitchen/dining area 20 feet away.

When I first bought the house I used a small pair of ProAcs.The Valencias which replaced the ProAcs, love the big area of the two combined rooms to 'throw their voice'.The Altecs are in what I ascertain as the best sounding position in the room.They don't sound anywhere near as good anywhere else I could find in the room(and the difference is not subtle.It's black and white.).

I have windows/curtains on one side-wall of the living room and record shelves on the other side-wall.The wall behind the speakers is a combination of a CRT my turntable stand/equipment rack and a tall bookshelf.This is where I could gain some ground with even a wall-hanging,but you know what?This is a great-sounding room for speakers and there isn't a lot of motivation to improve what you are very satisfied with.

All in all I chose what turned out to be a very nice dwelling for sound quality,even if it has a raft of other problems unrelated to sound quality.
 
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Fortunately, I stumbled on to this primer for acoustics: http://www.ethanwiner.com/acoustics.html while in the design phase on my dedicated listening room. Quite a few other members here reference Ethan's bass trap designs. I incorporated bass traps into the corners and mid/high traps utilising rigid fibreglass in the centre of the long walls and between speakers. The before/after changes were just amazing.
 
I have both.

The bass traps in the corners are from ATS ($26 ea.!!). The closed-back thin panels, I made using Owens Corning 703 attached to 1/4" plywood and covered with white burlap from the fabric store.

This is a rather stripped-away view. See the link in my sig for the finished set up.

And yes, I did find that behind the speakers was the most beneficial placement in my room.

picture.php
 
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In all honesty, you are not really attacking the wall, but re-shaping the forward dispersion pattern of the speaker. Attacking the wall would mean exactly that - treating the actual front wall with reflection reduction(or elimination if you could) treatments. If you are feeding full range information to those speakers, there is still some strong interaction in the bass frequencies with the front wall - I don't see anything behind the speaker that can control any reflections at those frequencies.

I would imag[in]e that a floor "bounce" or reflection would still be present, and ceiling reflections to a lesser degree as you have only controlled the horizontal reflections, but not really the vertical ones.

In all honesty, it works. And it was adopted precisely because my setup in a real-world living space precludes conventional full-bore front-wall treatment, including trapping the corners (there's no left corner per se, and equipment in the right corner rules out the placement of a trap there).

It's in fact a variant of an approach first used by an acoustic treatment manufacturer tasked with treating a rectangular but nonetheless problematic room for the promotional rollout of a new high-end speaker. The conventional approach didn't cut it sonically, so after a number of dry runs with different trapping configurations, some of which involved quite a number of traps in different locations, the porridge came up "just right" with the use of just six traps snugged up to the speakers themselves--similar to the alignment you see in my setup. In my case, the dispersion provided by the midwall trap "balanced" the lateral soundfield.

The floor bounce is offset somewhat by the irregular surface of the textured ceiling which in effect "sprays" reflections and, I suspect, to some degree by the presence of a "soft"-upholstered sofa on one side.

Audibly from my listening position 11 feet away, I get non-smear focus and articulation not only with "simple" but extremely complex and dynamic program material (e.g., massed and distinctively layered and positioned male and female Sofia Opera choristers belting out a fulsome, sometimes raucous paean to Khan Konchak in the "Polovtsian Dances" of Borodin's Prince Igor in completely intelligible Russian while the orchestra's going full tilt and not losing cohesion, coherence, or its assigned positions at high listening levels). Jane Monheit, on the other hand, doesn't wander from her centered position on her nuanced cover of Bread's "If," while her accompaniment is easily locatable behind her.

So whatever the theory may suggest for an ideal space (which mine is not by any stretch), I've concluded in this instance that the theory's an awful lot like the stats of a football game--they don't always reflect, no pun intended, the end result.
 
I have acoustic paels on the walls but I really need to add a couple bass traps in the opposite wall top corners from the speakers
 
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