Room Treatment For "Small Rooms" - Part Three

Welcome to the "small rooms" owners' club.

Once again, pro sound treatment methods (bass traps, reflectors, absorbers and soundproofing) are essential for studios and can be useful for "larger rooms". No-one is saying otherwise.

But one-metre deep bass traps are not feasible in a small room. Nor is six-inch absorption padding all round the walls. Isn't the room small enough already? Nor are serious soundproofing measures, which also require thick lumps of absorbent materials. And have you noticed that the rooms in treatment videos belong to people who don't read, have no art or decoration, and store their CD's and records in another room? No wonder they need absorbers and diffusers. Real rooms have bookcases, shelving, pictures on the wall, and other stuff. Some of that helps. What else can we do?

If you are following the user manual for your speakers, you will be sitting about two-three metres from them. No matter what size your room is. Or what the speakers are. (Have you seen how close people sit to those Wilson towers?)

Contrary to some commentators' sniffy remarks, thick pile carpets and loose hanging curtains a distance from the wall do work: see this table of absorption coefficients. Curtains and carpets are pretty much third for absorption after foams and fibres, and then people.

Am I sure I'm not rationalising my unwillingness to spring for a dozen GiK acoustics panels for £700 or so, plus all that drilling and hanging? Well, that's why I write things like this: to make sure I've got my facts in a row. And I think I have.

There wouldn't be home hi-fi if the first thing you were told by your dealer was "we couldn't sell you any of this with a clear conscience until you've had your listening room re-built by an expert, otherwise you'll just come back and complain it sounds terrible". It has to be pretty good out of the box in nearly all circumstances.

We small-roomers are left with the simple things, which are more about the overall sound of the room than specific flaws.

Rugs for wooden floors

Curtains to the full width of the room so that the corners as well as the windows are covered

Shelves with books, record collections, even storage (as long as it's not a wall of boxes), for dispersion and absorption. Just don't line everything up neatly or you'll lose the dispersive effect

Symmetry: equal spacing between left and right speakers to their near walls, same distance from the front wall, both at ear height; books or records (aka 'damping') to the right wall means books or records ('damping') to the left wall in the same place.

All that work for that conclusion? Hey, I saved a lot of money on those acoustic panels.

So I'm upgrading the carpets and doing something about the (long story) curtains on the windows. The front wall is going to be a curtain with folds hanging from a tension bar. That will do for now. In time I may change the furniture around and get some more natural damping.