Hi all, I'm looking to give some acoustic treatment to my recording room in my new place. Its a bit of an odd room both in layout and materials but hopefully someone here can help me out. My main issue with the room is bad flutter echo, there are lots of hard, bare surfaces and thin carpet with no soft furnishings to help out.

I've got a pretty limited budget £150-£200 so I was looking at getting a basic kit from here: (the £158 one)

http://www.advancedacoustics-uk.com/Problem_Solved/Acoustic_Starter_Kits.h tml

This would give me 4 bass traps and plenty of tiles to hopefully tame the flutter echo with and possibly adjust the balance of the room. Anyways here's the room, I'll add an actual photo too if it going to be of use?

Can anyone suggest a better kit/idea than the one I propose?



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http://www.williammorrismusic.com

Before I did anything else, I'd rotate the desk 90 degrees clockwise so it was firing down the long axis of the room.

As for that kit, I wouldn't buy any foam wedges. I don't think they'll give you very good bang for your buck (or indeed scarcely any measurable effect at all) in reducing your bass mode problems. With your budget, I'd spend 100 pounds on foam tiles and the other 100 pounds on some rigid rockwool to knock together my own bass traps.

I'd put most of those foam tiles at the left, right, and ceiling mirror points.

Now for the oddness of the room: With your desk in its new position, all that glass in the back might just let out some bass energy and help solve some bass unevenness problems. (It sure isn't helping so close to your left ear at the moment.)

With your desk in its new position, you'll likely have a bit of an echo coming back at you from the 60cm bit of wall behind your right shoulder. So, at a minimum, I'd deploy a bit more foam tile there at head height. Alternatively, that corner (as well as the two front left and right corners) would make a good place for a floor-to-ceiling 45-degree bass trap made out of rockwool.

As for that little 1m square bit in the lower LH corner, I'd try hanging a duvet in front of it to damp down the HF reflections in there, running the remaining width of the duvet over the glass window (the one that would be behind your head with the desk in the new position).

Do you need a machine room? That little corner looks like it might make a great place to stash a noisy computer, if you could get some long enough keyboard/mouse/monitor cables or some wireless solution.

You could also get more serious about bass trapping back there but I'm not 100% sure how I'd approach that. Here's hoping someone more knowledgeable than I comes along...

hope this helps a bit!
ryan

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http://ryanmead.net

Hi Ryan cheers for such a great post, I've thought about rotating the desk but I'm not sure it would allow all my other things to fit into the room properly the way I'd like them laid out, I might give it another try though as it would allow me to have the bass traps without the window getting in the way.

Am I to understand then that there is a big difference in the rock wool bass traps that straddle a corner and using foam bass traps? Is this due to having space in behind the rockwool ones? I checked out this helpful video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyYUpkpL0gw

Seems easy enough and can be done fairly cheap too, some people seem to use an MDF backing on it as well, is this a big factor?

I'v put a picture of my room up just to try and make things easier, my monitors are spread wide which make the reflection points a bit further out too.

Another issue I have is that the door is a sliding door and therefore changes the acoustic quite a bit when closed as it leaves that 60cm inlet a lot more open.



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http://www.williammorrismusic.com

It might be worth making some audio plots of the rooms performance. Have a look through some of the previous posts here about treating a room, there are recommendations for software that does this for you. And that will give you a clearer idea of the problems you need to solve.

With that much glass it's possible that you don't have too many problems with the bottom end, bass frequencies tend to pass through glass rather than being reflected back into the room. But mid and high frequencies will be bounced right back into the room.

I like the idea of moving the desk to the R/H side wall and firing in that direction. And as a budget option, how about placing a curtain rail the full width of the room from the door to the opposite wall. Get some cheap, heavy, lined curtains from a charity shop to curtain off the glass area. And finally make a couple of DIY rockwool traps for the mirror points on either side of the desk. And with some creative shopping that should come in well under your budget.

But with money so tight, you don't want to guess and buy the wrong thing. Get some audio plots and make sure you know what the problems really are before spending.

Andy

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When the going gets weird, the Weird turn Pro.

Cheers Andy, I've tried moving some stuff around to have the desk on the right hand wall but I think I'm going to need to keep it where it is due to the sliding door and the other things I have in the room.

I'm hoping as there is only 30cm of difference in the length of the room that not shooting down the longest section will be as much of an issue. I don't believe my problems lie with bass, it's more the flutter echo and HF reflections that come across in my recordings so my main aim is to tackle them.

What do you think to having the desk as is with your curtain idea, then two floor to ceiling rockwool bass traps either side of the desk, some panels at the 1st reflection point on the right and then some directly behind on the back wall too?

I'll try and do some room analysis tomorrow, anyone have any recommendations for software? I can't seem to find anything in the forums.

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http://www.williammorrismusic.com

Turning by 90 degrees gives you solid walls each side to mount treatment and control reflections.

You could do it the other way, but it might be difficult to get such a good stereo image. But no harm trying it, as long as you can put up a suitable panel on the side with the glass.

Maybe mounting one of the screens on a wall mount above the other two side by side might help gain some real estate. Display space is good, but you don't want to compromise the positioning of your audio monitors in the process. That might be enough to help you fit things into the room on the other wall.

Andy

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When the going gets weird, the Weird turn Pro.