They say this is for broadband absorption but wouldn't a piece that was two inches thich everywhere do a better job at accomplishing this?
You would have to lab test a large piece of Auralux foam against the absorption coeffecient for their sculpted panels. However, I doubt if you could get a piece of their foam in plain panels, I don't know for sure though. Have you checked their Products list? If they do, there probably is a published performance rating somewhere. Compare them. With sculpting, I beleive the intended point is addressing the "angle of incidence" and "edge effect" aspects of absorption material. At certain frequencies, there is a diffraction effect along perpendicular surfaces, which if I understand correctly, adds a certain amout of absorption value to a coeffiecnt. Whether or not it influences the actual absorption, which by way of testing before and after sculting is the only way to know for sure, I don't really know.
However, a well known acoustician suggested that sculpting did little, and implied that removal of material is simply reducing the depth of the foam which translates into the corresponding 1/4 wavelengths are absorbed. In other words, its bandwidth "performance". If a pyramid is 4" at the POINT, and 1/2" in the valleys, theoreticallly defining the frequency range of 1/4" wavelengths. Or its bandwidth...supposedly
If you look at a pyramid in that respect, only POINTS whcih are 4" thick. Not much square footage of POINTS
Actually, there is more material removed than is there
But their TESTED and published results are listed on their site. The absorption coeffecients speak for themself. Compare them with mineral wools and or rigid fiberglass. Then compare the price. I'm sure you will see why rigid fiberglass is recommended here by a lot of people!!
Compare absorption performance and see for yourself.
But there is one more thing involved here, which you can utilize if you understand it. Actual placement patterns can take advantage of known phenomena that increase the overall absorption in the room. This phenomena is well known, and is called the "edge effect". There is an ongoing discussion in regards to the actual cause of this absorption increase. There are various schools of thought. You can read about it here. Other schools of thought also exist on the subject. although I'm no expert. I ask a lot of questions myself though
http://www.realtraps.com/art_measure.htm
Another aspect of performance is placement across corners, or cutting a panel into diagonals, and stacking them into corners to increase low frequency absorption.. or basstrapping. The corners are where room modal resonaces terminate, and reflect and occilate. The depth of these corner absorbers work especially well when diagonal panels are stacked in "superchunk" form. Auralux was kind enough to sponser some various lab tests, with their corner products, stacked rigid fiberglass, Real Traps products and another type which I don't remember. These tests confimed what was already known by ears alone. That indeed, all these products performed well in corners, and results were posted on an acoustics web site. I don't have that link anymore though. Although, some were better than others, rigid fiberglass performed excellent as a lowfrequency "trap".
fitZ
