HCMarkus wrote: ↑Sun Oct 02, 2022 8:41 am
Welcome Back FM!
Congrats on the new space... have fun treating the interior! Interesting, isn't it, that the better isolation a room provides, the harder one has to work at treating it to sound good inside. My son used to live in an old house with very thin walls, almost cardboard, and the rooms sounded great for drums as there was no containment of low frequencies.
I've developed some techniques for panel construction over the years. My fave is to glue a quick frame out of drywall edge metal ("corner bead") in place around the panel (3 or 6 Lb/Cu Ft rigid glass of preferred thickness, 3M 77 Spray Adhesive to hl din placed temporarily) then wrap with Guilford FR701 also glued (on back only) with Spray Adhesive. For larger clouds, a great support frame is Suspended Ceiling Main Beams attached behind rigid glass with self-tapping screws and fender washers.
You always need to think about mounting
before fabric is wrapped!
Corner bead gives a clean edge and is super easy to cut to size using tin snips. I use 6 lb 1" material as facing for deeper traps containing low-density glass.
If you have unlimited money, you can buy everything. If you want to use only standard size panels, they are readily available, but still costly. But if you want/need to save money or have custom work, it is well worth self-building acoustic panels. The FR701 fabric has perfectly limited stretch and makes constructing nice looking panels fairly easy.
Attaching a couple of photos to give you an idea of before/after. Third pic shows a bass trap in process of construction.
Markus, thank you so much for those pics and info! It looks great. That will come very handy when the time comes.
I will talk to you before I start doing the treatment, if that's ok with you. Perhaps you can give me a few things to mind, gotchas, or things you "wish you knew" before getting started
I've been doing some reading about this, and here's my plan in broad strokes, according to what I've understood so far:
---- I'll be doing freq response sweep tests with the software that gives you graphics and info as a guide
---- The panels will be of mineral wool, 4.5 inches thick and very dense.
---- Except for the ceiling cloud, all the panels will be movable. I don't know exactly where they'll go, but I have a good general idea. Given that it is recommended to leave a space between the wall and the panel the size of whatever thickness the panel is, being able to move them will let me test this bit, as well as experimenting with different positions.
---- Since mineral wool may be toxic if not handled properly, I'm planning on wrapping the panels with 2 layers of very thin plastic (the kind movers use to quickly wrap stuff up). That will prevent fibers from flying around. To prevent very high frequencies from bouncing off the plastic, I'll also wrap them over with "under-carpet" (it's a gray fabric that goes underneath carpets and wooden floors. It's like 3 mm thick and fluffy, so 2 layers around the plastic will hopefully make up for it). Then this will go covered with some kind of nice fabric, to make it look nice. Supposedly, with that gap in between the wall and panels, they become as effective as if they were
twice the thickness!
---- At least half the room will have these panels, floor to ceiling, especially around the NRZ, all corners and the wall behind.
---- Once I get the waves interference, echoes and resonances under control, then I'll look into resonators, if needed.
What do you think?
That's it! What a rabbit hole this is! It's such a deep topic I wish I had the means to simply hire an expert and have him take care of it all! I'll do what I can following basic principles.
. It's not mentioned like that in the old sources; apparently, it was a fantasy created centuries later... You can even hear it bare and prominently in some Ars Antiqua pieces!
