Listening room: simple fixes?

I've cruised this forum for, and can't find, a solution. My purpose to treat my room is only for listening to my stereo, not monitoring, not mixing and not recording. I hope you'll still help. i've treated my room with the simple corner traps described here and on Ethan's site. Many thanks, the results were beyond my expectations! My room is a basement rec room: 29' x 11'6" x 6'8 (hung ceiling - joists are maybe 3" above the foam and 6" tall). Concrete floor with industrial berber carpet. Walls are laminate faux wood panelling. A floor-to-ceiling fireplace is on the side wall, just inside the entrance. Less than ideal, I know. My picture depicts to sofas. My TV and gear sits between the speakers. Speakers are 33" from side walls and 37" from rear (placement based furniture, not science) and toed in slightly The improvement in the sound quality was dramatic with the corner bass traps. I have two panels temporarily leaning against the side walls on the inflection points. Some remaining fibre board is sitting on boxes, leaning against the rear wall until I decide what to do with it. Question: 1 - the vocals on recordings sound like they're in a tin can. instruments come through very clearly, with beautiful tone and precision. bass and mids seem balanced. what is the recommended treatment at this point? treat the front wall? with something for highs, mids? more bass trapping? I don't think I want a really dead room, as I'm interested in listening to recorded music, not producing it... Replacing the panelling with drywall is out of the question/budget at this point. I only spent ~$150 on the panels so far, I'm not interested in spending much more. This is only for recreational purposes and I'm only looking for the 80% solution, not the full monty. I'm clearly not a professional... I hope you can offer some help without too much effort.

1 - the vocals on recordings sound like they're in a tin can. instruments come through very clearly, with beautiful tone and precision. bass and mids seem balanced

Start by reading the links from this page (speach inteligibility) so you have an idea what you're looking for: http://meyersound.com/support/papers/speech/index.htm For example masking, perhaps caused by too high a noise floor is mentioned. Optimally (beyond what you want to do) one would do this sort of thing: http://www.sencore.com/newsletter/Nov03 ... lpart2.htm In your case what you probably want is some 2" thick absorbers behind the speakers, and perhaps on any ceiling wall early reflection points -- to deal with SBIR and delays. Perhaps even behind your head. The other thing you might try is something like RoomOptimizer to choose speaker and listener positions.

I'd agree overall with z's recommendations. Likely the issues are: - not enough decay time control in the front of the room. - paneling on the wall with no insulation behind potentially, ringing like a drum - fireplace opening is causing some hollowness. I'd try a couple more panels on the side walls, a couple on the front wall between the speakers, and stuffing the fireplace with something to keep it from echoing. Bryan

Thank you both. bpape, three of four walls are outside walls so i assume they are insulated. You're bang on about the long wall with the fireplace. I was intending to insulate anyway to reduce HVAC intrusion, but the drum effect is a very likely culprit. The fireplace is actually very crudely filled in. The bricks are angel stone style, so I would assume that they offer some diffusion and are not as bad as they could be if they were standard brick. Logical? Once again, not likely something I want to conquer anyway. I had knowingly neglected my ceiling. The standard ceiling panels likely aren't doing enough, if anything. q: Will it be sufficient just to stuff between the joists at the reflection points? I dread doing the entire room... Will extra panels behind the speakers remove too much high and mid? I guess not, if you think it's time decay. I never would have thought of that... Thanks again.

Pointe

I had knowingly neglected my ceiling. The standard ceiling panels likely aren't doing enough, if anything.

If they are down from the ceiling by say 16", and strong enough, then another possibility is putting R31 (9") of ownens corning fiberglass plain (no kraft paper) pink batts up there. This wouldn't change the HF absorption since the ceiling panels are likely already good at that, but it would boost the mid frequency absorption, and possibly the LF absorption. It may be that the ceiling panels are not the usual HF absorbant variety (like gypsum panels or plastic panels), in which case replacing them with something else might be an option. As for wether this is a good thing or bad for your room -- that's not entirely obvious. But it's certainly in your price range. http://www.bobgolds.com/AbsorberCeilingJoist/home.htm

Pointe

Will extra panels behind the speakers remove too much high and mid?

If it's SBIR like issues confusing the sound (or variations on this theme such as you can't detect really good imaging), then covering the entire front wall with 1/2" linacoustic, and the first reflection points on the side walls, and improving the absorption of the ceiling, might help get rid of reflections between 2ms and 30ms by absorbing them. If it's just the side walls that are the problem, the cheapest thing to do is to toe in the speakers and take advantage of speaker directionality to reduce the dB of the reflections off the walls. For one listener you can laser pointer point the speakers at that person, and set them up on an equalateral triangle (speaker, speaker, listener) -- I believe John Sayer's designs have one triangle point being a little behind the listener, but pointing straight at the listener might be ok too. If your floor is wood or incredibly thin carpet, consider a thick area rug between you and your speakers. If you can envision sound paths that make the sound that comes back to you as long a time as possible, and absorb the shorter paths, that might help too -- but I'm not sure. For stereo, you don't want too much of the room absorbing or you'll loose that nice instruments sound pleasant effect -- i.e. the room is helping the speakers sound better.

ok. Great insight. The room is in the basement, so concrete floors with wall-to-wall berber. I had already put a rug between me and the speakers. I had used bobgolds for inspiration prior to my project. Question: in that project, what would be used as a finishing product, covering the polyester? Question 2: where do i get that type of polyester (building centre, fabric store, and what do i ask for?)? Is it redundant if I use an adequate finishing material? I suppose I could redo my hung ceiling. I'm 6'4" and I don't appreciate the lost height anyway. Prior to the hung ceiling, I'm sure the previous owners had the oldschool pressed cardboard tiles, because the mounting straps are still in place on the bottom of the joists. Is there product that I could apply to those existing straps? more cardboard tiles? or do they negate the effect of the pink stuff? with the cardboard tiles, is the polyester still required? btw, I'm in Canada. I used Roxul RF 80 in my corners. Is their low density product (RF 40, i think) better than the other pink stuff? once again, apologies if this is covered somewhere else. many thanks again. hopefully this is useful for someone else. i appreciate that you recognise that I want some live-ness in the room. I have my speakers less toed-in than I have in previous places I've lived. Perhaps I'll play with that. I hadn't considered that 'toeing' would effect just one part of the sound, but given that my walls are probably ringing like drums, it might be a partial solution. I had straigtened them for sound staging, but perhaps it took away some richness. Thanks again

Pointe I used that thin layer of polyester just to catch the fiberglass fibers (some fall out over time, dust like). I got it at walmart in the fabric section in a bag. I'm not entirely sure about its fire rating (might be ok for stuffing cushions, but not for putting on walls).

I believe John Sayer's designs have one triangle point being a little behind the listener, but pointing straight at the listener might be ok too.

Bob, the toe-in has traditionally been the 30 degree angle, but I've used 45 straight at you to great effect. The pointing behind the listener occured because direct was too defining in the high end so when you were eqing the kick on channel one of an 10ft console or adjusting a unit in a side rack you were well outside the directivity of the speakers. By aiming them behind you, or in more accurate terms, stepping into the triangle, you covered the console with even top end response across it's length plus it allowed people either side of you to also hear an even high end. cheers john