acoustic treatment question

[mbuono]

I'm trying to improve my performance area. It is my basement and is concrete. The area to work with is 24x14. Our plan was to put up real walls with sheetrock and than place sound absorbing foam/sound diffusors all over the walls. We then figured that the walls may be a waste of time if i'm just going to be covering a good amount of the area with absorbers and diffusers. I have 2 basic questions


1) Will the sheetrock wall instead of concrete help any acoustical problems I may have?

2) How much of the wall should I cover with absorbers?



any other suggestions are welcome too

[brich2929]

Ethan Winer is agood one to ask about this one!

[Innovations]

Originally Posted by mbuono

I'm trying to improve my performance area. It is my basement and is concrete. The area to work with is 24x14. Our plan was to put up real walls with sheetrock and than place sound absorbing foam/sound diffusors all over the walls. We then figured that the walls may be a waste of time if i'm just going to be covering a good amount of the area with absorbers and diffusers. I have 2 basic questions


1) Will the sheetrock wall instead of concrete help any acoustical problems I may have?

2) How much of the wall should I cover with absorbers?



any other suggestions are welcome too

Well, it depends on the problem that you are trying to solve. If your problem is reverberation then it can be handled with wall treatments to a fair extent. Making double walls is mostly done to improve isolation, the ability for you to not hear what is going on outside and vice-versa. The other reason to build out a wall is to change the room geometry, particularly to turn parallel walls into non-parallel walls.

[Ethan Winer]

MB,

> Will the sheetrock wall instead of concrete help any acoustical problems I may have? <

Not enough to be worth the bother. As Innovations said, that's mainly to improve isolation.

> How much of the wall should I cover with absorbers? <

For most rooms, covering about 30% of all surfaces (combined, including the floor and ceiling) is about right. For the complete story see the Acoustics FAQ, second in the list on my Articles page:

www.ethanwiner.com/articles.html

--Ethan