Im still far from building acoustic treatment, but boy.. Will this thread help me with engaging that! I guess ill need some private counseling when the measurements start and i will actually start designing the things
It would be good if you start posting your initial designs in your thread, so we can get an idea of where are right now, and where you want to go. Sometimes it-s good to have some extra pairs of eyes "looking over your shoulders" to see what you are doing, and maybe notice things you hadn't seen.
My thought was that it had to be around 5 milimeters thick, correct?
It's about half an inch, roughly 12mm. Thick enough to rob the slug of energy on each pass, but not so thick as to over-damp it. Going back to the "kid on a swing" analogy: you do want him dragging his feet through the water, and maybe even his ankles too, but you don't want the water up to his waist!
And you cant glue the insulation to the slats very firmly to not compress it too hard.
You can, as long as you are careful, and assuming that the slats are wide enough: just a thin bead of glue up the middle of each slat, but taking care to not get glue anywhere near where the air will be moving. Another option is to use something like chicken wire stapled to the side walls, and shaped to hold the insulation in place with just light pressure.
[quote I am designing a large desk in my studio that will hold equipment and some gear. I did design it as low profile as possible but I know for sure it will still present some acoustical problems. I designed everything with smooth angles [/quote]By careful use of ray-tracing, you can make your desk do the same as the RFZ concept, and redirect reflections away from your head.
Do you often treat the front of studio equipment to prevent reflections from its surfaces? And how thick do you treat them if you do?
Where necessary, I do use insulation on the rear side of the entire desk. Studio Three, for example, has about 4" of 703 on the front: I don't recall exactly... it might be only 2". But it was necessary to deal with some reflections from there that were getting reflected a second time from the soffits, and getting back to the mix position. There's also insulation on top of the wing surfaces, for the same reason: It's fairly dense and covered with thin carpet, so there's a reasonably solid working surface on those, at least for putting down your coffee mug or pizza plate...
What range of accuracy are you aiming at exactly with Franks room?
That depends on him! We can take it as far as he wants to go until we hit the physical limitations of the room and equipment, if he wants to do that. But there's a point of "diminishing returns", where each successive tweak makes smaller and smaller changes to the response. You get to the situation where you can no longer hear any change at all, even though the graphs are getting flatter and smoother: once you pass that milestone, there's not much point in going further, except for "bragging rights". If the acoustic response fully meets ITU BS.1116-3 specs (or EBU TECH-3276 specs, if you prefer), and you can't hear further improvements, then there's no more acoustical reason or psycho-acoustical reason to carry on... unless you just want to be able to say that your room response is perfect! It takes time to do each new tweak, and of course "time is money" ... in this case Frank's money, so when he runs out of money, then his room is done!
Great idea! But these usually come in very fixed widths and depths. I assume knowing how wide and deep they are you would differentiate the distances between them to get the effect you need?
Right, but what we are building now with Frank is not a tuned slot wall. It looks like it, but it is not sealed, and the gaps are far too wide to be tuned. Yes, it is "tuned" in a different sense: the width of each slat is designed to reflect a certain frequency range, and the gaps between them allow lower frequencies through, to be absorbed. So it is tuned in that sense, but not as a Helmholtz device.
- Stuart -