I’ve read Stephen king, doesn’t mean they’re true. What we are missing here is detail and purpose. Those acoustic curtains appear to be drapes with heavy linings, primarily with prettiness the selling feature. They don’t even seem to offer specs?
if you go to well known and respected studios, and I’ll use abbey road, air lyndhurst and strawberry studios Manchester as examples of studios where well known music has been recorded and I have physically been in them, as examples. They are very different to just stand in. Air is like a nice clean small chapel. If you close your eyes you know it’s large and has lots of surfaces. Abbey Rd is biggish but sounds like a well controlled gymnasium where you can hear the reflections and yet it’s nice to be in as it’s somehow smaller than it really is? Strawberry, the original Strawberry was horrible. So much treatment to fix the boxy space that all the life was sucked out. No point clapping your hands, the room hoovered the reflections up. It was a long time ago, and I was very young but I remember everyone waiting for somebody to call a break so everyone could go outside for some real air.
what I’m trying to say is we are applying specs intended for business noise control and keeping adjoining homes isolated to music. If we have very frequency specific issues, then it’s not the stuffing of a trap we should talk about at all, but the type of trap, and if we actually need to remove this energy or disperse it somewhere else? Removal is not our only tool, but we talk as if it is, like builders. We have 90 degree corners causing a problem, so fill in the corner with a 45 degree panel and change the room sound drastically. it probably means another ‘problem’ appears somewhere else, but we are not doing it as a business, it’s for many a hobby. Science dictates things that often cost a fortune to do and sometimes still sound horrible. The uk magazine sound on sound have been doing home studio fixes for years, and a duvet on a couple of boom stands is a usual quick test solution because they can move it around an test what their ears suggest. Once the cure is solid, then they source proper product, but often the spaces are living rooms or bedrooms and they simply suggest leaving the stands in a cupboard and getting them out when needed as the real acoustic treatment takes up valuable living space. Those aesthetically designed ‘acoustic curtains‘ might actually be enough. I’ve read the books, and in the best, like rod gervaise’s there is an undercurrent of don’t go too far and diminishing returns warnings. You want to remove what spoils your work. If you have a huge accidental resonance at 63Hz that makes a piano or bass seem to have one crazy note, that needs sorting. If the result is a gentle rise and fall you can live with that happily. If you have a huge sponge at 2.5K that will hurt voices, so find it and fix it. Too much absorption to get a flatter line is tiring to play in and depressing. It messes with your head. At the end of my studio there are some flutters from the close parallel walls and I play keys in that bit and pure sounds appear kind of phasey? Both faces doing the reflecting now have those 50mm 300x300 foam tiles on. Above 5k or so they’ve got rid of that phased reflective sound. They allow the bass to bounce unrestricted but that isnt annoying.
I have failed to interpret specs in any musical way. They’re good clues, but nothing has ever predicted the sound of any of my studios in more than a rough way. I simply don’t understand folk who spend their money before using their ears.