Archive for the ‘Audio’ Category
Remodeling your Room Acoustics

Acoustic treatment of a room in a home or commercial building can be a DIY project with just a little planning assistance from an expert. Such things as changing the locations of the speakers or adding a few panels made from sound dampening materials such as Owens Corning 705 can make a tremendous difference in the sound quality of most problem rooms.
Owens Corning 705 is a rigid fiberglass matrix material that is placed in front of walls that are causing unwanted acoustic reflections that interfere with the clarity and spectral balance of music or even spoken voices in an enclosed space. By reducing theses echoes, the listener gets a much higher percentage of sound directly from the source. This helps reduce anomalous peaks and valleys within the audio spectrum.
Echoes from reverberant surfaces within the room can either add to or subtract from the level of the sound that is reaching the listener at any given point within the room. Typically, it actually does both at once at different frequencies. For example, because sound waves of different frequencies are of different lengths, a listener might experience a cancellation of bass frequencies while receiving a perceptible boost or over-emphasis in some of the higher frequencies. This can make the music or voice sound overly bright and harsh. This will often cause listener fatigue over time and make the listening experience unpleasant.
Consulting with an expert about the specific characteristics of your room can help you decide what sort of acoustic treatment is right. Whether you are trying to improve the acoustics of your home theater room or your church acoustics, they can make some basic recommendations. Online suppliers of acoustic treatment panels and bass traps, such as ReadyAcoustics.com can offer you not only the materials you need, but also expert advice about the type of acoustic treatment and the placement of acoustic materials within your space.
The other alternative is to contract with an acoustic engineering firm to come to your location and perform the analysis and installations. That option can be dramatically more expensive. If you can perform such simple tasks as hanging a tapestry on the wall or setting up a free-standing partition, then you can certainly handle the installation or acoustic treatment panels by yourself or with the aid of a friend.
With most acoustic panels systems, the panels can be easily moved if your first placement doesn’t give you the results you wanted and some people even use the trial and error method to find just the right spots for acoustic treatments. If you have access to expert advice from your supplier, though, that will clearly save you some time and provide superior results. After all, if you are looking at acoustic treatment options in the first place, it’s because you want the best possible result.