If you can afford both, great, this is just my personal opinion on order of importance. The only thing that moves the needle is MASS. Especially with bass. So a few quality pieces will help, but it will become far more noticeable as you get more mass in the room.
No free lunch, it's physics. If you really go to town on these locations, you'll be off to a great start. It's super light only the weight of the fiberglass plus fabric and super cheap, and I thought it was an interesting "hack".
I made very simple wooden frames for all my bass traps. They added a lot of weight, and also the wood is reflective. I experimented with drilling holes in the sides of the wood frame, and I experimented with all kinds of various designs. At this point I've made dozens. The difference has been phenomenal, and highly rewarding. If you can breathe through the fabric, it will work fine, so no shower curtains, etc. Don't pound and beat on them, don't vacuum through the fabric, there are little fibers and you want to keep all the fibers in the panel doing their job and not in your air.
Just common sense, not something to be paranoid about. I found the 3-inch depth to be "ok" and the 6-inch depth to be far smoother in it's absorption. Tripling the layers to 9-inches was better than 6-inches but only slightly so, and space starts to become an issue. You can make them into fancy corner traps like I did, or you can simply make deep rectangle ones and angle them catty-corner.
Cotton is highly flammable. Good luck! And just to pile on here, foam or not, depth is low frequency extension. Why would you ever make.. Because it looks 'fancy'.. Listen to the responses. I bought more foam than you are proposing to buy. Then I bought more foam. Then I stopped buying foam and started buying some effective fiber bass traps.
Skip to step number three. I agree with the poster who says to look at the GIK site videos and test results. You should also look at REW acoustic testing. In a squarish small room you will need to spend intelligently to get good results. But you can get there. For bass traps you want their panels denser! So I recommend going to a local Lowes or Home Depot and letting them order it for you. I recommend ordering 2 inch thick panels if available.
You can get the 1 inch thick ones but you'll need to stack four of them together instead of two because you want a total thickness of 4 inches. It's easiest to keep them in the exact shape they come in, though you'll find they're easy to cut. I literally used a dull butterknife to cut some of these in half when I did my entire DIY build.
You can use a marker to draw lines across them so you have a guide. Your next step is to build wooden frames to set the panels into. I advise using very light wood because they insulation is already kind of heavy. Your next question is whether you want this frame exposed visually when you hang them. I kept mine exposed and it was a pain in the rear to staple the fabric inside perfectly so it looked tucked in but still wrapped around the insulation. I'm going to fully wrap mine soon, so I recommend you do that from the start.
You want a fire-resistant fabric that's still breathable to air, and wrap your rectangles like a present and wrapping paper. You can staple the fabric to the back of the frame, and cut another rectangle piece for the sole purpose of covering the back. The point is to keep insulation fibers from floating around in the air.
To reiterate, your main concern here is simple but threefold. You want to ask yourself what color fabric you want, you want to make sure it's fire-resistant, and finally if you want to expose the frame or not. I suggest wrapping it completely, having done the opposite before as seen below. Hanging them is a challenge and nobody has "the right way.
I invented my own method as seen below that worked out okay:. For the sake of completion, here's what they all looked like when it was said in done, in an apartment about a decade ago:. I plan on wrapping those in dark grey fabric and building even more soon.
Try to think ahead and look at a lot of pictures of recording studios online to see different designs, because it's hard to undo or start over. It's a lot easier to get it right the first time! The panels I showed you above are critical for building front wall and back wall traps and even bass clouds.
But when it comes to your four main corners there's an elite method that is far more effective at absorbing bass waves, and that's called the Superchunk.
It looks like this:. As you can see, you can take a single Owens-Corning panel, cut it in half, and then cut each half into fourths diagonally. You're left with perfect triangles that can be stacked in a corner. So instead of having a sizable gap of air, you fill that entire pocket of air with more fiberglass! Having the sound waves bounce against the wall and pass back through a straddled rectangle panel is nice, but this is nicer.
Remember, when it comes to bass waves, thickness is a big deal, and this is thick. It also will cover the corner from floor to ceiling rather than just one section. My recommendation is to take every stack of about 10 triangles and wrap them in thin fabric tightly, then stack them in the corner.
From there, create a platform above them for the next batch of 10 triangles or 20, whatever seems right for you. This keeps the bottom of the stack from being overly compressed by the weight above, and helps keep the whole Superchunk more stable.
In the image above you can see a wooden frame built out in front of the stack to keep it tucked in the corner. You can either staple fabric to this frame, or create an entirely frame that attaches to this one. This secondary frame would be wrapped in fabric and exists to look pretty and give you access to the insides of the Superchunk.
That's it! There are a handful of quality companies out there now that sell pre-made traps. Just be aware that it's fairly expensive to have them pre-built and then to ship them.
Shipping them is a huge cost because they're large and heavy, eating up a lot of space in the trucks. There are others but their prices are way too inflated and they bully people in the industry forums so I'm not going to mention them. You know what they say about karma See this short article for more information. I will definitely try out a free consultation before spending any more money on the wrong products, or installing in the wrong positions.
Expert advice is of tremendous value. Since I currently have three non-identical subwoofers to experiment with, I'll also be trying the cancellation approach. Does this require that one of the subs be used with inverted polarity, or is this achieved by placement alone? The other thing that comes to mind, is whether it may be possible to use a single subwoofer on an opposing wall from the speakers that are creating the bass boominess. That is to say, rather than multiple subs, can a single sub cancel out the modes created by large full range speakers?
It is great to know there are some options available and this site has proven to be a great resource. The subs are run with normal polarity — it is putting them in opposite 'poles' of the standing wave that creates the mode cancelling effects.
It may be possible to use a single sub opposite say a full range speaker as long as there is significant acoustic overlap in the region of the mode in question AND the placement puts the speakers and sub in opposite poles for the standing wave. For example, if the mode you want to cancel is at 70Hz then you need both speakers and sub to be playing at pretty much the same level at that frequency.
Normally if you use a crossover between sub and mains then this will not be the case since the output of one is rolled off in the pass band of the other. Furthermore the placement of the mains is typically in a location where soundstaging and imaging is the best, and this placement is rarely going to coincide with a pole for the mode you are attempting to cancel….
We have found that a foil membrane on the front of a glasswool slab really improves the low frequency absorption. Any type of membrane will have the effect of transforming sound pressure into movement.
That movement is then damped by the fiberglass or glasswool core, which turns it into heat. This is particularly useful since most of the time we put our bass traps in areas of high pressure but low sound velocity i. Where in the UK are you based? I spent 8 years in London before moving over to California. Can't say I miss the weather one little bit! We are not too far from London — we are near Winchester in Hampshire. I know what you mean about the weather — winter is just setting in here.
Time to wrap ourselves in fibreglass and stay warm!! We are building our own bass traps and acoustical panels at our church. We seem to have problems with low frequencies.
Our back wall is 50' wide with a cathedral acoustical tile ceiling. I'm wondering about placement for our bass traps? I know that the corners are a better place for them. But, that back wall is very big and flat. The distance from the stage to the back wall is roughly 45'. Do we also add bass traps in the field of that wall? Do I make all bass traps 6"? Have you done any acoustical measurements of your church? It might be worth doing some before building a lot of bass traps to understand what the issues are in your space.
Generally big rooms such as the one you describe don't have problematic issues in the low frequencies — the issues are more related to sounds taking a long time to decay in the lower midrange and midrange frequencies causing issues with speech intelligibility in particular. In answer to your question the best place for bass traps depends on exactly what room modes you are trying to address. But your proposed location on the back wall and thickness would seem like a good start. Hi great stuff here!
I was just wondering; i have a 16' wide 32' long with 12' ceilings that gradually slope up to about 13' in the back. Thx a bunch speakers are 3' out from wall Darin. Hi Darin — I wouldn't worry too much about the decision of whether to stack the bass traps or put them in the tri-corners.
It's hard to add too much bass absorption! I was planning to buy the Cumulus bass traps for a 7 X 7 Whisper Room. Asking some of my peers what their thoughts on this were, I got the following response:. I would think a traditional 24 x48 corner bass trap would be a lot more effective than those Cumulus ones simply because they're so much bigger… mass is what absorbs bass. According to the specs page, the Cumulus panels don't deal with anything below Hz… I wouldn't think they'd be much help in a Whisper Room.
I am not familiar with Whisper Rooms but from a quick google it appears they are for voiceover recording? In which case it's unlikely that you would need bass absorption below 80Hz, since that's as low a frequency as vocals go. And most of the energy is actually in the Hz to Hz range. So products like the Primacoustic Cumulus will be fine for your needs. Mass makes the difference for sound transmission but is not important for sound absorption e.
Remaining I have 6 foam acoustic bass traps…. I was thinking to double stack the Bass Traps in the two corners behind my speakers with 4 traps , 2 in each corner with 1 on top of the other… And have the remaining 2 traps for the the two corners behind me 1 in each corner.
I wanted to buy the Owens Corning rigid fiberglass as I heard it would work as long as it is 6' deep and a good amount off of the wall. How far should it be off the wall to really get those low frequencies below and such? And also, the fiberglass is very expensive. I have about a 10' by 12' cube room…Could you also recommend anything more affordable to treat the whole room? Whealy's Porous Absorber Calculator is the tool to use to examine at the effect of an airgap on low frequency absorption.
Incorporating some form of membrane into the absorber helps improve low frequency absorption significantly. Mass loaded vinyl, aluminum foil, kraft paper and cardboard are just some of the things that you can use as membranes. You may not know it but in addition to selling off the shelf products from Primacoustic and RPG we also create custom designs for people just like yourself who want to DIY.
Before any design is done, however, we need to analyze your room to identify the problematic areas and create a treatment strategy that works as a whole. See our acoustical diagnosis service for more information on this. Be careful not to treat the whole room with absorbers, otherwise you will have a very dead space, almost like an anechoic chamber! Would you place on in every corner or just the rear corners of the room?
The right number of bass traps is the right number needed to solve the acoustical issues in your room! The only way to know therefore is to measure your room acoustics using a package such as XTZ Room Analyzer II Pro to understand how flat your frequency response is and what issues exist in terms of slow decay of sound due to room resonances.
Target for a stereo system should be to keep Hz frequency response within a 10dB window. I have built ceiling to floor corner bass traps in my listening room and have a question. In the comments above you mentioned putting hard board over the fiberglass to increase low end.
Can you explain, when you say on top, this would be the front of the bass trap? Thanks so much. If you add a membrane then you increase bass absorption and also decrease mid and high frequency absorption.
These two things are generally both beneficial in terms of improving sound quality. The membrane can be many things, including thin sheets of wood, mass loaded vinyl, pond liner, cardboard, etc.
I life in an apartment building with wood floors and concrete separating my apartment from my neighbor who recently moved in below me. She can hear the bass when the stereo is turned up. Any advise would be greatly appreciated. Would love to enjoy my music at high volumes again.
Either you have to turn your stereo down, or roll off the bass using an EQ of some kind, or give your neighbor earplugs, or only listen when they are out. My room is an octagon shape and the ceiling is racked from each wall to a centre peak. The rack of the ceiling is about 45 degrees. Where do you put bass traps in this room? First step is to measure your room to figure out what the issues are.
Check out our article on Room Acoustic Measurements for more. Focus on the resonant peaks at the main listening area. Then find out which locations in the room have the highest sound pressures for the problem frequencies. For example if you measure the room and see peaks at 25Hz, 55Hz, 90Hz, generate a sine wave at each one of those frequencies and use a SPL meter to find the areas of highest SPL. Those are the locations where you want to add bass traps.
There is a window with blackout curtains exactly behind and on the right side wall from the setup. I have 6 zig zag foam bass traps 60x30x30 cm and 12 pyramid absorbers 60x60x5 cm. I tested the room by placing the foam bass traps and sound absorbers as following —. The high frequencies sounded crisp and clear but still with some echo. The problem lies with the mid and low frequencies. I can still hear the low end echo. You can clearly hear that the low frequencies are not absorbed properly.
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