How can I treat my room?

[steelphantom]

After posting a few pics of my "studio" here, I was informed that maybe some bass traps would be in order, among other things. If you look at the photos, you can see that the entire surface of the walls is covered in acoustic foam. The floor is cement and is carpeted. The ceiling is regular ceiling tile.

Here is a rough sketch of my room and what's in it.

As you can see, it's not exactly an ideally-shaped room. The desk must stay where it is, because it can't fit anywhere else. Unfortunately, I can't rip any of the existing foam down.

Would it help at all to put a bass trap in the upper-left corner behind the drums? If I could fit one behind the desk in that corner, would that help? Anything else I could do? Thanks!

[Ethan Winer]

Here's my standard reply - all rooms need:

* Broadband (not tuned) bass traps straddling as many corners as you can manage, including the wall-ceiling corners. More bass traps on the rear wall behind helps even further. You simply cannot have too much bass trapping. Real bass trapping, that is - thin foam and thin fiberglass don't work to a low enough frequency.

* Mid/high frequency absorption at the first reflection points on the side walls and ceiling.

* Some additional amount of mid/high absorption and/or diffusion on any large areas of bare parallel surfaces, such as opposing walls or the ceiling if the floor is reflective. Diffusion on the rear wall behind you is also useful in larger rooms.

For the complete story see my Acoustics FAQ.

There's a lot of additional non-sales technical information on my company's web site - articles, videos, test tones and other downloads, and much more.

--Ethan

[bpape]

Agreed. Especially with drums in the room, you'll need something pretty substantial in the corner behind the kit and also on the ceiling over the kit. What you have now is probably way over absorbed from 500Hz up and nothing below that.

Bryan