So I been doing a lot of reading on flooring for my basement studio and so far the consensus is carpet is a no no. But if a thin carpet was glued down to the concrete would it really make that much of a difference and absorb the high frequencies? Would it not just bounce off the mass of the concrete?
I'm thinking like a indoor/outdoor or commercial type carpet with no pad.
Other option is painting the concrete and dropping down area rugs but not looking forward to paint the floor.
The room is 24x13 with a bumped out closet in one corner.
There's no acoustic treatment and walls and ceiling are Sheetrock. Ceiling height is a little less than 8'.
The "no acoustic treatment" part is going to bite you anyway.
You can use area reflective parts also -- I've been to plenty of rooms that have 4x8 pieces of laminate on thin plywood (watch your step, but it works).
But either way -- You're going to need relatively obscene amounts of broadband trapping to make the room even mildly usable no matter what the floor surface might be. Sure, the carpeting is going to temper the high frequencies to some extent -- But 95% of the problematic energy in that space (almost any space for that matter) is going to be in the bottom octaves.
Hey thanks for the input man. I'm going to eventually get into the acoustic treatments of the room. I'm just trying to get it usable at this point. The space was two rooms and I took down the partition wall to make one room. Some of the walls are still bare studs at this point. One room was wood paneling and other room was Sheetrock. I was going to sheet rock the walls that were paneling to match the rest of the walls. Perhaps I could work some acoustic treatment into the walls that are open.
I was looking to do a room in a room construction to the whole space but that's just way outta my reach at the moment so I'm looking to get it comfortable and sounding good. I also have a toddler and trying to keep it somewhat safe for him when he's in there with me so that's where the carpet comes in.
