Well according to these three different sources, the acoustic absorption of wood is MUCH larger than concrete and actually quite significant.

http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/accoustic-sound-absorption-d_68.html

http://www.sae.edu/reference_material/pages/Coefficient%20Chart.htm

http://www.acousticalsurfaces.com/acoustic_IOI/101_13.htm

Acoustic coefficients from three to like ten times greater than concrete, depending on the frequency. Wooden floors (on beams, not concrete) are something like 15 times more absorbent than concrete at 125 Hz. Charts like these are very useful, especially the last two which show how the absorption varies change with frequency. The first will just be an average, or maybe just at 1 kHz so not super useful. Looking at those charts, I imagine wood would actually be great as it'll absorb a bit of lows, but still reflect plenty of highs. This should help to bring the room closer to neutral more easily.

I like the idea of an all wooden room with bass traps behind walls and in corners but highly reflective. Then simple hooks on walls which let you hang higher frequency absorption panels when you require a dead sound. This will let you easily turn a single room studio from a mixing room into a drum room in an instant!

And get a big couch for a cheap bass trap ;)

bitflipper


Yeh, horse-hair is hard to come by these days! 

Some of you guys have cats. You could just start collecting cat fur and glue that to the walls.

I have two moving furs in my studio - they are attached to my two alive cats, will that help? 

mattplaysguitar


Well according to these three different sources, the acoustic absorption of wood is MUCH larger than concrete and actually quite significant.

http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/accoustic-sound-absorption-d_68.html

http://www.sae.edu/reference_material/pages/Coefficient%20Chart.htm

http://www.acousticalsurfaces.com/acoustic_IOI/101_13.htm

Acoustic coefficients from three to like ten times greater than concrete, depending on the frequency. Wooden floors (on beams, not concrete) are something like 15 times more absorbent than concrete at 125 Hz. 

Something deep inside (intuition?) told that's the case, wood is absorbing more then concrete since it's way more dense. That would  go along anyway with my actual experience in both types of rooms where in wooden rooms I have never echoed.   

have two moving furs in my studio - they are attached to my two alive cats, will that help?

If you add enough cats you should be able to avoid acoustical treatments altogether. Getting the bass cats to sit in the corners might be a challenge, though.

bitflipper

Getting the bass cats to sit in the corners might be a challenge, though. 

super glue comes to mind...

Perhaps I should re-read this thread before writing, maybe these have been pointed out before (at least some of it), but something that popped into my mind:

["Concrete room has a huge echo, but my previous room with wood panels did not"
 "The wood is the only significant thing that is different from the previous room, which was a similar size, with a similar sized window, similar carpet, same furniture, same gear, etc."] 

What was behind the wood panels? A wooden wall frame stuffed with insulating wool? If you put 1/4 inch wood panels on concrete you get very, very minimal acoustic improvement. Wood materials differ from eachother so much, that you need to take in consideration the whole structure, not only the surface.

["Wooden floors indistinguishable from stone floors"]
The wooden floor panels, real or "synthetic" are made as hard as possible. Almost no panelling you put on walls can be compared to the ones made for floors. A 1 inch thick, plain plank floor on a rumble isolating plastic carpet differs A LOT from a regular wooden floor panel.

Most wall panellings are so thin and/or have so much seams that are even thinner, that they need the rock wool or something behind them to be acoustically well absorbing. As mentioned: The whole structure counts, not only the mere surface.

I used to play with friends in an old, very solidly built, wooden house where all the insulation, ceiling, walls, base, was sawdust, and all wood straight from the saw-mill and painted. No stone, no hardened surfaces... The whole house acted like an instrument that wanted us to sound good.

bitflipper

If you add enough cats you should be able to avoid acoustical treatments altogether. Getting the bass cats to sit in the corners might be a challenge, though.

Russ Berger, whom I consider to be one of the top studio designers, is a big proponent of cats for acoustical treatment. At the risk of offending the squeamish, he prefers dead cats - something about Schroedinger?
 
Here's the deal with studio construction, which many folks have hinted at... the control room is a system, and must be treated as such. Almost any construction approach can work. The best approach for any given setting depends on what's already there.
 
As an example, my last space was in the basement of a townhouse. I had a dirt backed concrete block wall at one end, and concrete block walls, with neighbors basements on the other side of each, on the sides. This worked really well because the space that I was building into was already pretty close to symmetrical. And block walls are a nice place to start.
 
A friend of mine copied my design, but missed one tiny detail - his was an end unit, and so one of his block walls had the great outdoors on the other side. It was really pretty remarkable, it made a huge difference.
 
In my current place, which I have not built out yet, I have two perpindicular block walls, so I need to turn the control room 45 degrees so that at least those two walls will be the same.
 
Building the new walls will depend, somewhat, on what's already there. I've become a big fan of metal studs, but they won't work every time. If you can get them to work you can skip resiliant channel, which is a big plus in terms of time and cash.
 
And then there is the wall treatment - bare block can work, so can sheetrock, and so too can wood. It depends a lot on what you wan the space to sound like. And it isn't just the decay time, it's where, in the specturm, the absorption lies.
 
Some of that is personal taste... I like sheetrock for my control room spaces, and wood for recording spaces.  And then you have to deal with the rest of the treatment - some arrangement of diffusion and absorption, and maybe even some reflection.
 
A topic for a much lengthier topic<G>!
Getting back to the question... wood is perfectly acceptable for a wall treatment in a recording or critical listening space. You do have to be aware of how it differs from other materials.

 "I used to play with friends in an old, very solidly built, wooden house where all the insulation, ceiling, walls, base, was sawdust, and all wood straight from the saw-mill and painted. No stone, no hardened surfaces... The whole house acted like an instrument that wanted us to sound good. "

 Probably great for playing Kalle. It would be termite heaven around here and have "eat me" all over it....probably not a problem in Finland :)
 
  We spend a lot of money on reverb and plate plug ins to sound like something with a sweet echo when it can be built into some rooms. Wood walls are common things in some of the sweetest drum rooms/recording  there are. I believe the Beatles recorded in such a space. Certain woods in certain configurations have  desired qualities in world renowned studios. The catch for the home recordist is usually a combination of small spaces and hard surfaces with little or no absorption or reflection. Like Newtons observation of the falling apple and like gravity the predictibility of frequency behaviour is certain. No absorption of bass in a small space and you get mud and resonant frequencies. The higher freqs. are easier to tame. The volumes in the space play a part.

 If you are looking for a neutral space I'm not sure such a place exists. Even good spaces need eq. from my limited observations. Theres a project, we could copy Abbey Road studios lol...someone somewhere probably has.

i thought we were talking about paneling here.
my bad.

batsbrew


i thought we were talking about paneling here.
my bad.

we were talking about paneling but with solid, real wood planks not paper like.


As for now mt plan for wooden studio stands although have to remember vibration
and adding some dead or alive cats in corners.