Acoustic pinboards

[ricecrispies]

As part of the acoustic treatment of my very reverberant live-work space (brick walls and ceiling, concrete floor) I need to install some acoustic pinboards. I am well aware that I will also need plenty of bass traps to dampen the lower frequencies. But that is something I will need to deal with another day. I need pinboards much more urgently. And since I need to install pinboards anyway on a patch of wall where I might otherwise have installed dedicated acoustic treatment, I need to think about their acoustic properties.

The pinboards that have caught my attention are Legamaster Board-It. They are marketed as being an acoustic treatment. On the other hand, they are very expensive, and I can find no information (i.e. numbers) anywhere about their precise acoustic properties.

So my questions here are:

1. Is there anything special about Legamaster Board-It pinboards, acoustically speaking, or will any old pinboard (including perhaps just a sheet of something or other purchased from a DIY store) have a similar acoustic dampening effect?
2. Is that acoustic dampening effect enough to make a significant difference in the frequency range for which it is intended?
3. If there is indeed something special about Legamaster acoustic pinboards, are there cheaper alternatives available (I'm looking for stuff available in Europe, but if you have recommendations that may be useful for other people reading this thread in the future who may live elsewhere, they would be great too).

I should probably clarify that I am not looking to create the perfect mixing environment, which I don't think is possible in this space without making it hard to live in and do my other work in. I will use headphones and software for that. I just need a big improvement on what I have now.

I should also add that, if I buy a sheet of something from the DIY store, it will need to be strong enough not to crack under the use that a pinboard normally gets even without a flat wall behind it to support it properly. This is because I live in an old factory with raw brick walls that are not at all flat.

 

[mjbphotos]

I had never heard that name (pinboards) before, so googled it. Those are office dividers. If you have free access to them, fine, use them, but don't waste your money trying to treat your mix/tracking room with them.
You can build your own traps, or buy them. 2" thick is usually fine for side wall and ceiling traps, 4" or more for corners - compressed fiberglass or rockwool.

 

[rob aylestone]

Totally agree - those are not really even worth calling 'acoustic' - just what we Brits call insulation board, or fibre board. The most useful ones are simple - a timber frame, stuffed as mjb says, with rockwool, covered in pretty open weave fabric. These can sag after a period, so a common trick is chicken wire stapled over the rockwool to the frame and then cover that. Cross pieces for the feet and they can stand against walls, or divide people off. performance seems to kick in 400Hz and above and by 10K, they're pretty dead. 2" rockwool is easy - but 4" and deeper timber is still light enough to hang off a couple of screws in your brickwork. It's surprising how they actually do help - the only snag of course is the bass is still rattling around - especially near corners.