Room Treatment For "Small Rooms" - Part One

Steve Gutenberg says we should try room treatments. John Darko has those GiK boards all over the place. I'm starting to feel I'm not responding to the memo.

Except...

Acoustic treatment for studios is a real thing: studios need all the soundproofing their owner can afford, and a lot of plain old echo-deadening in the recording space. Performers don't like heavily damped studio acoustics, which is why some of them prefer to plug into the board and hear each other over headphones. Then they can perform together in a room that looks as if it was designed for humans.

Audio design for a concert-hall is a real thing. Soundproofing from outside noise, getting a decent quality of sound in all the seats, tuning it to be lively or dry, depending on the taste of the resident orchestra, or the kind of music that it will be played in it, all this is serious stuff. Consult someone with an acoustics degree. Something similar might be said for the listening rooms of millionaires, who can afford to have chunks of their houses re-built or re-furbished.

I can't, and I assume you can't either. I have a rectangular room that's 14L x 10w x 7.7H in feet, just over 1,000 cu ft. In the trade this is called a small room. The Master Handbook of Acoustics(*) dismisses any room of less that 1,500 cu ft as a lost cause. Others define "small" as anything smaller than a classroom.

Watch a few room treatment You Tube videos and you will wonder how on earth you are able to hear anything, let alone identify it as Miles Davis' Sketches of Spain. What with diffusion, room modes, reflections off the floor, the ceiling, the side walls, the back corners, runaway bass that needs to be trapped... it's a wonder you can hear the tuba.

Except...

Once the speakers and listening position are set up right...

...and you've got some carpet on that varnished pine floor...

...and you've accepted, like me, the inevitability of hauling the couch from the back of the room so that my head was the third point of a (nearly) equilateral triangle with the speakers (**)

...you can indeed hear the tuba. And everything else. And no obvious echoes or reflections.

How does this happen?

Read on.

(*) That's what it's called, and you get 10,000 Audiophile Points for reading it.

(**) Which is where speaker manufacturers say to sit. If you don't do this, and put your speakers at different heights and distances from the walls, and have books below them, then the orchestra may well wind up in the upper-right-hand corner of your room. So a friend told me, anyway.