Room treatment

[Fran]

I always find it useful to run a test tone at say 50hz, 500hz and 2khz continuous as I walk around the room. Do this at low and then much higher volume. Immediately you hear the nodes and often with a bit of placement you can avoid issues. If I were you, I would do this before you put any furniture in the room, then you can cumulatively hear the change as you go. I know I have been in several situations where the sound is much improved if the listening chair was moved 4 inches one way or another (never mind the speakers). Plenty of free signal generators for phone apps now, and you don't need anything better than a phone app and your ears.

Doing this is much quicker than learning REW etc, and can yield really good and quick results.

Hopefully I've contributed something!

[hudo]

Some initial measurements. No room treatment, just sofa, hifi shelf, rug.
Frequency response actually looks quite good, better than i expected! Thought those speakers are really rolled off, but actually they're not, it was the old room that was very mids heavy. There's peak +15db at 42hz which is a room mode (room is 5.2x4.1m, 42 hz is 8.1m, so its that 4.1m length thats resonating), but solved it temporarely with narrow EQ in Roon, works nicely, until i find a better solution (tuned bass trap/absorber?).
Room feels echoy, but per RT60 average decay is aroubd 600ms, which should be ok for normal listening living rooms (not studios), except that long ringing at 42hz of course. So not sure if i am reading rt60 wrong? Same decay numbers are also in the waterfall.

[Fran]

Really interesting hudo. I really must give that a go sometime.

Is that 42hz node at one particular spot in the room - can you move it out of the listening position by moving your speakers or chair for example?

[Sloop John B]

I really found Thierry at Home Audio Fidelity changed my soundscape in a very meaningful way. He did say my room didn’t need major adjustments but the impact of his filters has been huge for me.

I outlined my experiences on the Naim forum

https://community.naimaudio.com/t/home ... ters/13989

.sjb

[hudo]

Really interesting hudo. I really must give that a go sometime.

Is that 42hz node at one particular spot in the room - can you move it out of the listening position by moving your speakers or chair for example?

I tried moving mic around (took 6 measurements around listening position) but bass response didn't change that much. Didn't try to measure different speaker positions, but i can hear that room mode if i move it a bit forward or backward. Since speakers are now against the longer wall, i suspect that rotating the whole room 90 degrees would have meaningful impact on room modes, but thats unfortunately not possible (TV position...). Will experiment some more and report back here when i get new graphs...

[hudo]

I really found Thierry at Home Audio Fidelity changed my soundscape in a very meaningful way. He did say my room didn’t need major adjustments but the impact of his filters has been huge for me.

I outlined my experiences on the Naim forum

https://community.naimaudio.com/t/home ... ters/13989

.sjb

Just started reading the long thread, already looks very interesting! Thanks for sharing, will give it a proper read!

[Sloop John B]

@hudo where did your room treatment quest lead to in the end?

.sjb

[HiFiFan]

I too had good results with GIK also. A mix of corner traps, absorption and diffusion. You can actually make a lot of this yourself if you are anyway handy. I did this when I found I needed more than I had bought. Absorption is super easy but there are also lots of designs for diffusers online, though they can be time consuming.

IMG_7002.jpg (237.61 KiB) Viewed 251 times

I made the panel in the back (2 of them) and 4 additional corner traps to augment what I bought from GIK

[Sloop John B]

I too had good results with GIK also. A mix of corner traps, absorption and diffusion. You can actually make a lot of this yourself if you are anyway handy. I did this when I found I needed more than I had bought. Absorption is super easy but there are also lots of designs for diffusers online, though they can be time consuming.

IMG_7002.jpg

I made the panel in the back (2 of them) and 4 additional corner traps to augment what I bought from GIK

Can you go through the process? As in how did you know what you needed and why did you need more than you thought? Positioning etc.?

The room really is the elephant in the room!

.sjb

[HiFiFan]

It was quite some time ago when I did this. I started with some general advise from GIK which I partially adopted. I had also found various online advise from Cardas and others. The room was 21 x 22 feet so almost square. I looked at the biggest issues flutter echo and bass boom. I started with the corner treatment, found an improved either using a single corner trap per corner or 2 (floor to ceiling) on 2 corners. I can’t remember which. With that I later decided to go floor to ceiling on all 4 corners.

Then it was mainly treating the first and second reflection points. Easily found using a mirror and walking the walls. It was really just trial and error after then swapping reflection/light diffusers vs full absorption for the 2nd and back reflection points until I was happy.

I had 3 rugs - felt these were important too.

Sorry can’t remember much more.

I’ll probably have to do this all again now with the new house.