Foam squares instead of acoustic tiles?

ORIGINAL: jsykes

Greetings forum members.

I have a humble DAW in a spare room in my home. I am trying to work on improving the acoustics.

My question is will square pieces of flat foam (about 2" thick) work in place of acoustic tiles for treating the walls?

I have unlimited access to the foam squares via my job in the shipping industry.

Does the material need to be ridged like acoustic tiles or just on the wall?

Also, will bubble wrap mounted to the walls do anything?

I appreciate the advice, as I can acquire these materials for little or no cost.

Is this an acceptable solution for a novice/part timer, or just a waste of time?

Thanks.

Jeff

Wrong kind of foam, Jeff. Sorry, man!

Check www.auralex.com for information about acoustic foam, but www.realtraps.com and www.ethanwiner.com are both even better.

Owens-Corning 703 or 705 is better than foam anyway... but you have to fabric to cover it.

Corey

Owens-Corning 703 or 705 is better than foam

+10!
And it's a LOT cheaper than the Auralex stuff!

It's usually not stocked at your local home improvement store, but they will order it for you. Or you can go to the yellow pages and call an insulation company, which is how I got mine.

705 is heavier (which is better) than 703, but either will work OK. Either type can be purchased with or without paper backing. If you get the stuff with paper, remove the paper from one side and have the paper side face the room. This will let it reflect some high frequencies. But if you have a small room, the non-paper stuff is better, IMO.

703 and 705 come in various thicknesses, from 1" to 6". It doesn't really matter which one you get, you just double them up until you get the desired thickness. You'll want 4" to 6" for corner traps, 3" or 4" for walls, 2" or 3" for ceiling clouds. Don't attach them directly to the wall -- space them out from the wall at least the same distance as the thickness of the fiberglass.

What I did was build free-standing gobos (just frames made out of 1x4s), two feet wide and six feet tall. This avoided having to permanently mount them (my wife vetoed the numerous holes in the wall that would be necessary for that) plus it allows me to reposition them for different situations. Five of them are used to form a vocal booth. Two more are situated behind the mix position. Two more hang from the ceiling.

And to answer the question "is this a waste of time?" -- no, it's not. It's probably the single most important thing you can do to improve the quality of your product, and the cheapest to boot.

I'd also recommend taking some measurements of your room so that you can identify where the problems are and see the improvement after installing treatments. Get Ethan Winer's 1Hz-step SONAR project. And while you're on Ethan's website, read all the good info he's provided there.

One Auralex product I do heartily recommend are MoPads, dense foam wedges that go under your speakers to decouple them from your desk. Forty bucks seems a lot for what looks like a chunk of packing foam, but they really do work well.

One last bit of advice, in the vein of cheap/free improvements you can make: improperly-placed monitors can cause a lot of acoustical anomalies. Make sure your monitors are at least 6" out from the wall (more if you can manage it), and that they are 3 feet or more from the nearest corner, and they are equidistant from their respective flanking walls.

ORIGINAL: johnsjam
I guess all those egg crates on my college band's rehearsal space were for naught! ;-)

Nah... they were GREAT for reducing the fire safety rating of your space!



Corey

Don't forget about cotton fiber insulation. Slightly less expensive than 703 but performs more like 705. The only drawback is it isn't rigid and would need to be in a frame of some sort.

Thanks for all the input. I'm researching all the options you have brought up and will move ahead. I appreciate the responses.

Jeff

Donny: That's worth a lot. Thanks. I have learned lots from you in the various forums, and I spent some time last year watching your band's reunion concert. Thanks for the reply.

Also, I am working on treating the rear of the room with a couch and a couple of bookshelves, which I've read help with the opposite of the wall treatments. I'm sorry for being an amatauer, but I can't remember which is which (diffusion/absorption). I'm reading about it this week and hope to have it memorized soon.

Jeff

Corey:

Thanks for the tip. From the looks of your website, I ought to just use your studio!

ORIGINAL: jsykes
Corey:

Thanks for the tip. From the looks of your website, I ought to just use your studio!

Thanks for the compliment, jsykes! It's not bad. Sadly, those pictures are very out of date. It's actually MUCH nicer in there now! lol

Corey

Here is an other inexpensive absortion trick you can try if you have a few carppentry skills. It involves having some rubber roofing material, basic bat insulation, 1"x 4", and some 1/4" or 3/8 ths plywood. Make up a simple frame out of the 1" x 4". I like making a 3' x 5' or so...back the frame on one side with the 1/4 " plywood, staple the bat insulation to the plywood....vapor side down so that the insulation is exposed. Then lay the rubber roofing material over the frame and staple it along the top and one side of the frame. Then vary the tension as you staple the remaining sides of the material to the frame. It provides a non uniform dampening which will help absorb low frequencies in a wider bandwidth, as well as a general mid and high frequency absorbtion. Then maybe cover the rubber with low cost cotton or even a sheet to dress it up. Hang it or just lean it up against the wall and leave it mobile. Pretty inexpensive if you can get the rubber roofing material sourced cheaply... sometimes a roofing company or general carpenter will have scraps left over after a job that they will just throw away.

http://www.atsacoustics.com/item--ATS-Acoustic-Panel-24x24x4--1007.html

They don't look 'that' bad - for someone who knows how to compare with the 703/705 stuff - how does this rate??

It's quite rigid, but you need something to mount it with. Buy some of the DIY bags from Ready or the other places listed above and put it into those.

On the window, if you are doing this to keep out noise, that will be a waste. You need other things for that. This stuff absorbs bass frequencies and it'll it obviously be quieter than just a bare window, but it won't stop the noise by any means. Something more solid would be necessary for that.

It's a low volume business, so the price is going to be higher. But if you want something that's going to keep them packaged up neatly and keep them from shedding fiberglass all over the place, but not prevent them from doing their job, you need something like that. Just putting the stuff on the wall is non-optimal. You wan it out from the wall a few inches so that it absorbs going in and coming out. So you need something that contains them fully and provides enough stability to keep them mounted out there.

As I understand it, directly behind the speakers isn't much of a worry. Very little sound gets there. The corners on either side are important, but if you don't have enough to hit all of the really important points plus the windows, I'd skip the windows first. The important points are the wall corners, the wall/ceiling corners between the speakers and the listening position, and all the points of first reflection (side walls and ceiling) between the speakers and listening position, and the rear wall where the sound hits and reflects back to you.

There's plenty of good info here:

http://www.realtraps.com/placing_mt.htm

I have my rear wall corners (well, actually I guess in most discussions they are considered the front wall, since you are facing that way, i.e. behind the speakers), so that they cover my listening position and downwards. The sub is on the floor and is in the rear corner firing forward, so I wanted good coverage down lower. They aren't all the way on the floor since then they wouldn't be high enough to get up over my head a bit as seated in the mixing chair.

In such a worst-case cube, you need to concentrate on corner traps. If you can, put 4-6" of 703 in each corner, floor to ceiling. If that's not possible because of windows, doors, or furniture, at least cover the top corners where walls meet the ceiling. And train yourself to mix at very low volume.