?? Best Style of Carpet for Floor - Sound Dampening

[consonancebeckons]

We are finishing the studio and are down to the carpet choice. We had settled on a loose loop wool found here:



but are now considering the potential better option of a carpeting that is more the shag style, similar to what is found here:




We have a room with an 8' ceiling, which peaks at 10'6", that is 12' wide by 35' long. There are windows, a couple doors, and the walls are textured drywall. It is on grade/concrete slab, and has nothing above/around it (it's an addition to the side of our house).

Though we primarily produce with electronic instruments, there will be some acoustic recording, however, the purpose of the sound dampening in our case is more for mixing than recording. This is a home studio, semi-pro, and not for hire.

Other considerations: If we sell this house, this area/room will be listed as a mother-in-law suite, and therefore we must make decisions that are somewhat neutral for that purpose.

[Soundman2020]

Hi " consonancebeckons", and welcome!

Please read the forum rules for posting (click here). You seem to be missing a couple of things!

The bug question I would ask, is why you want carpet at all? Is your room way to bright in the very high frequencies, and that's why you want carpet? There aren't many reasons for putting carpet on studio floors, which is why you seldom see pro studios carpeted. In general, the recommendation is to keep the floor hard and reflective, and concrete slab on grade is about as good as it gets! If you don't like the look of concrete then you could use something like laminate flooring, ceramic tiles, or linoleum, which are all really good acoustically.

Before deciding on what type of carpet you need (if any) it would be better to run a simple acoustic analysis of the room, using the REW software (free!), and post the results here so we can analyze it, then figure out what treatment you need.

Is this a control room or a live room? From the size, I'm guessing it is a live room, in which case would be a good idea to make sure that you don't over-treat it, leaving the decay times too short for the associated control room.

It would also help if you could post pictures of the actual room, so we can get a better idea of what you are dealing with.



- Stuart -