“Y axis is reverberation time in milliseconds, X axis is frequency. Ideally the curves are flat lines at about 400-500 ms. This is as close as I’ve ever seen to even in any space I’ve ever measured.” said my good friend and professional sound engineer. I found the last sentence quite hard to believe, but he’s not known to mess around with such statements.
Anyway, the orange line is pre-treatment and the blue is post treatment. He used a very expensive sound level meter and popped balloons with his assistant to get these measurements. I have another big thing of info, but this is the clearest. Anyway…wanted to do what I said I would do and am a very big believer in treatments and knowing what the heck they are doing, or potentially not doing, in my listening room.
I have both GIK and ATS products. I have the ATS corner bass traps but went with GIK wall absorbers because of the tuned membrane feature and ability to add diffuser plates.
The ATS products seem to be a notch better for build quality without breaking the bank.
Yes, I tried some GIK treatments but the build quality was so bad I sent them all back for a refund at a cost to me of about $150 in return shipping.
I used to have a fair number of ATS panels on my walls, but when I moved from a pair of dynamic speakers to a pair of planars, all the panels came back off the walls.
My GIK experience was back in 2017, so it’s clear they haven’t felt the need to improve build fit and finish.
ATS construction has always been impeccable, and I love their mounting system and templates.
I hope the picture that has a guitar in it has the guitar stuffed with concrete.
I have a pair of 42" Chinese vases and they’re stuffed with pillows because years ago I once was playing a track very loud and pressed siop and the honk from those vases needed to be beard to be believed.
Photo on acoustic board is much more than just decorative art for the wall. Photo acoustic panels act as sound-absorbing images that reduce noise and significantly improve the indoor climate. acoustic panels have
example - a sound absorption of up to 0.95-1.0, which means that only 0-5% of the sound energy is reflected when it hits the acoustic image. They do not just jump off the wall like that…
They come in many qualities and sizes
It has nothing to do with china vases …
This is a vase. You can see a couple of RPG Superedges in the corner (the Anthony Gallo Strada 2 is connected to my TV sound - it has nothing to do with my massive active main speakers). The blue panel that can also be seen is a 4" thick 60cm * 2700cm panel which is just a fraction of the absorption in my 30’ * 20’ lounge. I also have a photo of one of my cars printed on a 60cm * 40cm 1" thick panel (not shown). I have lots of bass trapping and absorption!!!
Nearly 7’ tall in large transmission line enclosures - -3db @17hz, approx 123db.
The scratchy thing is a Garrard 301 with SME 3012 and an Audio Technica AT-OC9XSL cartridge (which I’m very pleased with for a cheap MC). I rarely play records. I primarlly use a Melco server via a Chord M Scaler into a DEQX digital EQ/Crossover into 3 Directstreams into 2 BHK250s for mid/treble and a Crown CE4000 for bass driving the massive (by UK standards) PMC speakers. There’s masses of room treatment with very low reverberation times.
Honestly, you’re playing around with panels. This little room (OK, it seats 1,400) has 1,500 computer controlled moveable panels. The room has a complete outer skin creating a 10ft deep reverberation chamber, and the reverberation can be varied from 0.3 to 2.3 seconds. The seating can be moved up or down (of course). All you need is a little imagination and about $500m. The sound is … well … really quite good.
It’d be great to have more room to play with. My reverb times are around 150ms above 200Hz and about 250ms below that (before the bass trapping reverb times at bass frequencies were around 450ms).
My system is so revealing that the tiniest change of a power cable or interconnect will be noticeable. The DEQX digital crossover gives me several parametric equalisers to play with. I altered the cable to the Crown bass amp and needed to up the treble by about 0.05db to balance out the change in bass. It took months, literally, to get the EQ to a sound that I was happy with overall. Unfortunately there’s not much that can be done to counteract recordings that were mastered to sound bassy in a small room - they just sound thin in my room, however recordings made by someone like Boris Blank / Malia or Hans Zimmer sound astonishing. I love this hobby.
My room is about 6m wide by 9m long by 2.4m high (the speakers fire along the long part of the room - the wide section would produce far too much bass resonance) . Two of the corners each have a pair of RPG Superedge bass traps. The other two corners have doors near them so there are small GIK bass traps with other absorption panels in front of them. The ceiling has 9 largish 1" thick panels suspended 4" from the ceiling. The front/rear walls each have the equivalent of about 1.2m by 4m of 100mm thick absorption. The windows/doors are mostly covered by medium thickness wool cinema grade curtains. The main speakers can be used as the left/right fronts of a 7.1.4 system using a Sony 4K projector onto a 10’ electric screen (the .4 speakers are on the ceiling).
The floor is tiled (it has underfloor heating) and I have three soft settees and a rug on the floor to help the reflection from the speaker to the listening position.
I have always used transmission line speakers - in about 1975 I bought four Leak 2075 transmission lines (I had a Denon quad decoder and have a few quadrophonic LPs including Dark Side Of The Moon). The four Leak 2075s form the rearmost four speakers of the 7.1.4 system (all other speakers are PMC).
UPDATE - Michael, if you were asking about measuring reverberation times etc I didn’t do it myself. I asked an acoustic engineer to come round - he used both a professional measuring system and a mobile phone based system (this was in 2014) and provided a report and recommendations, most of which I implemented (there was nothing wrong with all the treatment I’d put in but he recommended the RPG Superedges to really sort out the bass trapping). He came back after I’d put in the extra bits and pieces and did a quick remeasure - that’s how I know the reverb times had been tamed as much as could be expected.
I believe it. Furnishings in our listening rooms can cause all kinds of extraneous sounds. Had a wire CD rack for a while, and if you were listening loudly and hit pause, you could hear the ringing of the rack quite clearly. Also my current equipment rack is constructed with hollow metal tubes, which ring like crazy. Ended up attaching Blue Tac to the tubes which eliminated the ringing.
A while back I tried to get tickets for the Elbephilharmonie because Hamburg is close enough to stay in Denmark. No luck, obviously very popular with lots of members.
After a concert at Harpa, not wanting to stay in Reykjavik, I drove 250km in winter at night mostly on single track ice in a van to a campsite in Blonduos. It was 12 below and blowing 80mph. That was possibly the most stupid thing I’ve ever done. At least in Germany they have proper roads. I will get there one day.
