Does anyone here have experience with acousticfields.com or with true pressure traps?

[MarkusBarkus]

...for me, the quantum marketing speak was off-putting. Of course, the proof would be in the listening...but then there were the reports of breakage in transit, so for me, it wasn't worth the experiment; however, in spirit, I agree that experimentation would be interesting, and perhaps unexpectedly helpful.

It reads like you have had a net-positive experience with the ZR panels, which is good to know.

 

[Cellcbern]

...for me, the quantum marketing speak was off-putting. Of course, the proof would be in the listening...but then there were the reports of breakage in transit, so for me, it wasn't worth the experiment; however, in spirit, I agree that experimentation would be interesting, and perhaps unexpectedly helpful.

It reads like you have had a net-positive experience with the um. ZR panels, which is good to know.

I had a net revelatory experience with the ZR panels, which addressed my bass issues along with everything else, as I reported extensively on this forum. However there is no reason in a large room why you couldn't combine them with conventional treatments, including the Acoustic Fields carbon bass traps. The report of breakage in transit was mine based on my first shipment. They were easy to repair and they changed their packing materials/methods so I had no probems with subsequent shipments.

 

[wil]

I had a net revelatory experience with the ZR panels, which addressed my bass issues along with everything else, as I reported extensively on this forum. However there is no reason in a large room why you couldn't combine them with conventional treatments, including the Acoustic Fields carbon bass traps.

I was also curious about the ZR panels, but I was told they need to be very close to the speakers, which would not work for me as I like my speakers about 10 feet out from the front wall.

 

[Cellcbern]

I was also curious about the ZR panels, but I was told they need to be very close to the speakers, which would not work for me as I like my speakers about 10 feet out from the front wall.

Think about what you are saying. The way your speakers "work for you" now with conventional (or no) room treatments would not work with the ZR panels because they are designed to work optimally with the speakers right up against them. My speakers sound much better right up against the ZR panels than they did three feet out into the room from the RPG's, and I hear no downside. I verified this by trying my speakers at varying distances from the ZR panels. You pull speakers out into the room to manage reflections off of the wall behind them. The ZR panels eliminate these reflections when the speakers are very close to them so there is no longer any reason or benefit to pulling the the speakers 10 feet or even 10 inches out into the room.

 

[gleeds]

I had a net revelatory experience with the ZR panels, which addressed my bass issues along with everything else, as I reported extensively on this forum. However there is no reason in a large room why you couldn't combine them with conventional treatments, including the Acoustic Fields carbon bass traps. The report of breakage in transit was mine based on my first shipment. They were easy to repair and they changed their packing materials/methods so I had no probems with subsequent shipments.

Hello all. I used ZR panels in my audio showroom a few years back. Better packaging or not, the panels will chip if you look at them cross-eyed and must be handled with extreme care. They are manufactured from MDF, and those sharp edges get very thin, especially in the corners where much of the breakage occurs. Otherwise, they are architecturally beautiful and quite an effective product. Bear in mind you should consult with Hansen about your application. The height of the panels in relation to your tweeters is especially important.

They are indeed designed for loudspeaker placement near the wall, as the product was primarily designed for use in the recording studio environment. Frankly, I find the near-wall aspect of their design very compelling!

PS The absorber panels shown are also from ZR.

 

[wil]

Think about what you are saying. The way your speakers "work for you" now with conventional (or no) room treatments would not work with the ZR panels because they are designed to work optimally with the speakers right up against them. My speakers sound much better right up against the ZR panels than they did three feet out into the room from the RPG's, and I hear no downside. I verified this by trying my speakers at varying distances from the ZR panels. You pull speakers out into the room to manage reflections off of the wall behind them. The ZR panels eliminate these reflections when the speakers are very close to them so there is no longer any reason or benefit to pulling the the speakers 10 feet or even 10 inches out into the room.

I know exactly what I’m saying. For multiple reasons, they would not be good idea in my room. Glad they work for you!

 

[Crossram]

Sorry for going dark but have been doing some research in the background as time allows.

I contacted GIK acoustic, filled out their form, and below is the initial response I received:
—————————————————————————————————————————————————
Part 1:

Construction:

The “first thing” you’re thinking about when you can build a room from scratch is whether or not you are going to acoustically isolate the space. Before you even consider if you are going to do this, there’s a very important factor that should be considered that most people do not think about:

The more isolation you build into the walls, ceiling and floor of your room, the worse your room is going to sound inside. This may seem counter intuitive, but as the walls of an enclosure become more inert and air tight, the more sound pressure build up you will get inside. This means drastically higher peaks and nulls internally than if you had built more “lossy” or flimsy boundaries. You should only build an isolated room if you require that acoustic separation for the room to be usable, because you are exponentially increasing the end cost; not just in the isolation itself, but also by making more and more bass traps more and more necessary to get to a similar response as you would get with normal walls.

Of course sometimes acoustic isolation is necessary. When this is the case, you REALLY need to be working with an architectural acoustician. What’s critical here is that MOST isolation principles that you find online that seem simple enough to execute are isolation principles that will only impact frequencies related to the human voice. Most contractors will be familiar with rockwool and some might even know about green glue or resilient channel or ‘x type’ dry wall. But most contractors have only built residential and office based isolation systems where the clients objective was speech privacy. In theaters we need to consider the reality that we’re working with frequencies that are much lower and much louder. The basic isolation principles that work for a doctor’s office will utterly fail for a music room. GIK cannot advise on isolation. There’s simply too much that can go wrong that we can’t see not being on site.



You don’t want to fall victim to the “cleaver room shape” ideas. You can’t minimize bass resonance by drywalling angled corners. You’re only loosing valuable space you could allocate for bass traps. This misunderstanding of room acoustics stems from people looking at the shape they see inside a room that probably has two shells. An outer isolation shell that provides your sound proofing is almost always a rectangle. But then internally a second “treatment shell” can look like the room has canted walls and angled corners, but this is a treatment façade. At least it is when it’s done correctly.



A room that is, or can be 10’x17’x23’, is just over 3900 cu.ft. If this is going to be a room that is “a chair and a pair of speakers” this is a LOT of volume. I usually aim for 2500cu.ft. But if it needs to be a rec room/bar/record storage…. I could see going this big. Discussing how you want the room to perform should be an early conversation point.



Mainly, and more specifically, you want to look at a few points:



Left right symmetry in a room is very favorable. Avoid nooks and dog legs. Keep it rectangle. Keep doors ~2’ from corners. Keep the walls and ceiling between you and your speakers clear of windows doors and obstacles at all if possible. This will later be defined as “zone two”. Zone three is where “stuff” is cool. Records, pool tables. Keep zone one and two dedicated to a chair and speakers. More on this:



I’m going to first start talking more generally in terms of the “zones” of the room, how to define them and what should go in them. Specifics will follow.



Zone one is the area behind your speakers. Zone one consists basically of the wall you look at and the corners of that area bother vertical and along the floor and ceiling (horizontal). In a bigger room it can also be some amount of the side walls and ceiling in cases where your speakers are away from the wall.



Zone two is the area between you and your speakers. This is the walls and ceiling that are in front of you, but not behind your speakers. (and more horizontal corners)



Zone three is everything that is behind your ears in the room. Ceiling, corners and most critically the far back wall that the speakers point at.



Put simply and generically:




Blue is zone one (front wall)

Red is zone two

Green is zone three (back wall)

Part 2 to follow in next post

 

[Crossram]

Part 2 of GIK response:

Generalities:



The best panel is the thickest panel. Always. There is never a scenario where acoustically something thinner (working on narrow high reflective frequencies only) is the right choice; acoustically. When full range audio (more than just a human voice) is in play, you want Every. Single. Panel. (ideally) to be helping towards contribution of a more linear low frequency response. This sounds like a sales tactic. I assure you it is not. Now…. Is a thin panel necessary in some cases? Sure. Budget. Space. Acoustics are not the only thing that is important. But in a pro designed room, the entirety of walls and ceiling are bass traps. Many of them 3’ thick or more. The walls are the bass traps. How you would face or “skin” (Flexrange) the bass traps depends on what zone of the room they fall in, and in a more finessed way that is complicated to explain fully: “what overall level of decay time are you trying to achieve”, keeping in mind that we want to (regardless of wetter or drier) decay equally from 20hz to 20khz. It is very easy to get 20Khz to decay quickly. Too easy. The converse of this is that it is massively difficult to get 20Hz to decay quickly. This makes the application of what would be defined as a “really dry” room pragmatically difficult to achieve in domestic sized rooms because you do not have to real estate to get really dry bass. As a result you have to treat the higher frequencies with some level of finesse so that you don’t over dry them. This is where diffusion comes in, this is where range limiting comes in and this is why the three zones and how you look at them acoustically is so important, specifically in these domestically sized rooms.



This last paragraph is everything. It’s worth reading a few times.



Prioritization:



Corners will get you the most bang for your buck on bass traps In or near vertical and horizontal corners, you want to put the bass traps that are sized right from your room. Meaning that you want bass traps that can (ideally) work as low as the lowest frequency that will resonate in your room based on its size. 60-70% of your budget can easily end up in corners. How you range limit, leave full range or scatter plate the options of corner bass traps will become more clear later in these steps of prioritization.



You want to cover the direct reflection points between your speakers and ears; and this falls entirely into the ‘zone two camp’. Using the mirror trick will help you find the specific targets of zone two that are most critical but keep in mind that you lean in, kick back, stand up… ideally you are doing the mirror trick from every spot you are going to be judging the speakers critically. It is not wrong to entirely cover zone two with panels, but this can be problematic budgetarily and remember we want them to be as thick as possible. Zone two panels, in a critically neutral roll should be full range absorptive. No scattering. No limiting. Same would go for the ceiling corners if you have the budget to address them. End user roles where enjoyment is prioritized over transparency will often diffuse zone two. This is not wrong, but it is not as transparent.



The rear wall (back of zone three) is your next order of prioritization. This is the surface that ‘turns everything around’. The rest of zone three is really only important if acoustically critical things happen behind you in the room. But if it is “you and a pair of speakers” the rear wall is highly important. The rest of zone three is the lowest of priorities even under what’s to follow. As far as this rear wall goes, if you can cover a lot of it, you should do so with diffusive faced bass traps. If you can only cover a little of it because you have windows and doors or other obstacles, you will lean more and more on pure absorption. Rule of thumb: if you’re going to be covering 30% or higher of the rear wall it should be diffusive. If it’s going to be less than that, and this includes the corners, than I would deploy full range bass traps.



This brings us to the front wall of zone one. Behind and around your speakers. Only after those first three points have been addressed do you look to affect the front wall. Bass traps (as always) go here. While the sound that leaves a conventional speaker that is ~150Hz and up, those regions of audio are directional. But lower frequencies, regardless of the presence of location of a port on your speaker, leave the cabinet in a sphere. This is important: what you do on the front wall has everything to do with what you are able to do on the back wall. Think of it this way: If the REAR wall is entirely diffused, and it’s turned the directional speaker sound around and done so with 100% diffusion…. In this scenario your front wall’s reflectivity is a non-issue. Now, we would certainly love to have bass traps on it, we want those everywhere…. But we would want them to be range limited versions in the scenario where we get a high degree of REAR wall coverage of treatment. The reason here is that we are trying to treat the reflective range of frequencies with nuance, and have it decay at a rate that is similar with low frequency decay in the room. If the sound has already been adequately diffuse on the first bounce, there is no reason to further rob it’s energy on this second lap. It will have decayed on its own having just travelled and turned around. Now, in a version of a room where zone 3’s back wall can NOT be covered, in this case zone one’s wall should be covered with more full range and or diffusive traps, so that we can adequately address the relationship of these two surfaces that send sound back and forth in the room reflectively speaking. To reiterate and nutshell this: zone three’s back wall determines everything. If I add the sq.ft. of the front and back walls together I like to have ideally diffused half of the total. 30% is passable, especially if the reason I cannot do more is because there’s texture already on the walls (shelves and non-entirely flat things). If the reason I cannot do more is because of glass, I’d ideally be getting closer to that 50% diffusion of the total of the sum spread on the two surfaces. Any remainders as budget and space allows would be devoted to range limited bass traps in zone one.



If you follow this protocol, you will have a very balanced room. The more coverage of each of these zones by order of priority, the better. The caveat here is that more coverage should never come at the compromise of panel thickness.

Part 3 to follow in next post

 

[Crossram]

Part 3 of GIK response:

Soffit bass trap will be the best sized devices for your corners. Size matters across the board with acoustic panels. The bigger and thicker they are, the lower they will work. The more you get the low end in your room right, the better your translation will be. Nothing we have reaches lower than soffits at 40Hz in a standalone version. However…. Size counting and all, when you stack soffits, or say run them very long along a wall/ceiling corner, that coupled sizing of more than one soffit is acoustically larger and as such: the sum is greater than the parts (lower still then 40Hz). There’s no such thing as too much here. Full vertical corners if you can, one in two corners if we need to, and ultimately fully tracing the room as the ideal.



244 bass traps are the best sized zone 2 panels. Here again complete coverage of the walls and ceiling of zone 2 is ideal, but at a minimum ensuring you cover the mirror reflection point of every front stage speaker for every listening position that will be deemed critical.



6A Alphas are the first choice of panels that go behind you in the room. As a reminder the rear wall itself being most critical.



Front wall:



The wall you face as you listen is the least important wall to treat in this entire process…. Especially if your room affords you a good deal of REAR wall coverage. But when there’s budget left in the kitty at this point, you’d want to start bass trapping the speaker wall. Range limited versions of monster bass traps are the ideal.



***Sound blocks are a new level of professional range in the GIK line that quite literally are the best thing we have for any wall or ceiling surface, or freestanding gobo application. At 10” thick this gives us the ability to have surface treatment that’s effective below 50Hz. How and where panels this thick can fit is of course a case by case situation relevant to real estate and budget.



These are the “gloves off” recommendations for the room usage and dimensions.



Soffits can become tri traps, and 244s can become 242s, and 6” diffusion can turn into 4” diffusion,, and all of this will to varying degrees result in some amount of lack of accuracy in lower frequencies. But it will of course get significantly more affordable too.

 

[Crossram]

i realize that the three posts above contain a lot of information. I broke it down below into 9 points that I think are the main thrust of their recommendation:

1) “The more isolation you build into the walls, ceiling and floor of your room, the worse your room is going to sound inside.”

2) “You don’t want to fall victim to the “cleaver room shape” ideas. You can’t minimize bass resonance by drywalling angled corners.”

3) “A room that is, or can be 10’x17’x23’, is just over 3900 cu.ft. If this is going to be a room that is “a chair and a pair of speakers” this is a LOT of volume. I usually aim for 2500cu.ft.”

4) “The best panel is the thickest panel. Always…There is never a scenario where acoustically something thinner (working on narrow high reflective frequencies only) is the right choice; acoustically. When full range audio (more than just a human voice) is in play, you want Every. Single. Panel. (ideally) to be helping towards contribution of a more linear low frequency response.

5) “Corners will get you the most bang for your buck on bass traps In or near vertical and horizontal corners, you want to put the bass traps that are sized right from your room. Meaning that you want bass traps that can (ideally) work as low as the lowest frequency that will resonate in your room based on its size.”

6) “It is not wrong to entirely cover zone two with panels…Zone two panels, in a critically neutral roll should be full range absorptive. No scattering. No limiting. Same would go for the ceiling corners if you have the budget to address them. End user roles where enjoyment is prioritized over transparency will often diffuse zone two. This is not wrong, but it is not as transparent.”

7) “ But if it is “you and a pair of speakers” the rear wall is highly important…As far as this rear wall goes, if you can cover a lot of it, you should do so with diffusive faced bass traps…if you’re going to be covering 30% or higher of the rear wall it should be diffusive.”

8) “Only after those first three points have been addressed do you look to affect the front wall. Bass traps (as always) go here...what you do on the front wall has everything to do with what you are able to do on the back wall. Think of it this way: If the REAR wall is entirely diffused, and it’s turned the directional speaker sound around and done so with 100% diffusion…In this scenario your front wall’s reflectivity is a non-issue. Now, we would certainly love to have bass traps on it, we want those everywhere…. But we would want them to be range limited versions in the scenario where we get a high degree of REAR wall coverage of treatment.”

9) “To reiterate and nutshell this: zone three’s back wall determines everything. If I add the sq.ft. of the front and back walls together I like to have ideally diffused half of the total. 30% is passable…”

I would welcome feedback on these 9 points.

 

[Cellcbern]

i realize that the three posts above contain a lot of information. I broke it down below into 9 points that I think are the main thrust of their recommendation:

1) “The more isolation you build into the walls, ceiling and floor of your room, the worse your room is going to sound inside.”

2) “You don’t want to fall victim to the “cleaver room shape” ideas. You can’t minimize bass resonance by dry walling angled corners.”

3) “A room that is, or can be 10’x17’x23’, is just over 3900 cu.ft. If this is going to be a room that is “a chair and a pair of speakers” this is a LOT of volume. I usually aim for 2500cu.ft.”

4) “The best panel is the thickest panel. Always…There is never a scenario where acoustically something thinner (working on narrow high reflective frequencies only) is the right choice; acoustically. When full range audio (more than just a human voice) is in play, you want Every. Single. Panel. (ideally) to be helping towards contribution of a more linear low frequency response.

5) “Corners will get you the most bang for your buck on bass traps In or near vertical and horizontal corners, you want to put the bass traps that are sized right from your room. Meaning that you want bass traps that can (ideally) work as low as the lowest frequency that will resonate in your room based on its size.”

6) “It is not wrong to entirely cover zone two with panels…Zone two panels, in a critically neutral roll should be full range absorptive. No scattering. No limiting. Same would go for the ceiling corners if you have the budget to address them. End user roles where enjoyment is prioritized over transparency will often diffuse zone two. This is not wrong, but it is not as transparent.”

7) “ But if it is “you and a pair of speakers” the rear wall is highly important…As far as this rear wall goes, if you can cover a lot of it, you should do so with diffusive faced bass traps…if you’re going to be covering 30% or higher of the rear wall it should be diffusive.”

8) “Only after those first three points have been addressed do you look to affect the front wall. Bass traps (as always) go here...what you do on the front wall has everything to do with what you are able to do on the back wall. Think of it this way: If the REAR wall is entirely diffused, and it’s turned the directional speaker sound around and done so with 100% diffusion…In this scenario your front wall’s reflectivity is a non-issue. Now, we would certainly love to have bass traps on it, we want those everywhere…. But we would want them to be range limited versions in the scenario where we get a high degree of REAR wall coverage of treatment.”

9) “To reiterate and nutshell this: zone three’s back wall determines everything. If I add the sq.ft. of the front and back walls together I like to have ideally diffused half of the total. 30% is passable…”

I would welcome feedback on these 9 points.

Note that #4 above ignores the recent option of the thin (.75" to 1.25") DHDI ZR Acoustics panels which are not frequency specific but treat the entire spectrum including (all but the lowest?) bass frequencies. These thin panels gave me clear, articulate bass with no room mode issues without bass traps.

Note also that the folks at Acoustic Fields would disagree with #5 above - they don't believe that the corners are the best place for bass traps:

Where to Place Bass Traps – Acoustic Fields

Where to place bass traps requires a few steps back into the cause of low-frequency issues. There is so much misinformation out there that the advice

www.acousticfields.com

Excerpt: "....How can treating the corners treat the issues caused by the entire wall surface. How can the small percentage of treatment surface area represented by the corners be held responsible for the axial mode the whole wall surface is causing throughout the whole room? The truth is they can not. This is another myth perpetuated by the industry on the ignorant. There is also another psychological component to this corner madness. People usually have nothing in the corners of their rooms so psychologically its easy to say yes to a product where you have space for. Just take it out of the box and place it in the corners of your room where you have nothing else.....".

 

[pjwd]

Hi crossman .. your doing a deep dive there !
My tuppence worth
1. Rigid high density walls keep sound out and sound in .. this will give you the best result but is more effort as you have to deal with long reverb times on low fr ... isolation via multiple skins and cavities will give low ambient noise level but a very unpredictable range of absorbtion in lf ... the single best acoustic outcome is a low ambient level .. you just hear more stuff
2. Agree .. not worth the effort
3. Not correct .. the second best outcome is a large room... you delay all the first reflections longer and improve clarity
4. Maybe .. but I suspect that is a part of particular design strategy .. not a universal solution
5. Agree but corner traps need to be effective at lf .. ideally they increase efficiency as the go lower starting at say 250 hz or lower... the smaller the room the more traps ( assuming good isolation) .. 4 corners of the room and the soffits if possible .. these are to reduce reverb times
6. Diffusion or absorbtion at first reflection points usuallymess with phase or frequency range.. I believe the best option is to redirect the reflections away from listner .. absorption to calm down the room can be incorporated as long as it is all away from listner
The idea is you create a gap of at least 10ms between direct and reflected sound and the reverberant field should correlate with direct sound as much as possible
7. Rear wall should be treated as a first reflection point
8. Front wall should be treated as a first reflection point

My approach would be in this order
- Isolate room
- Add bass traps until bass sounds clean
- Treat first reflection points
- Then add general absorbtion out of first reflection areas if necessary to tame the room .. it may not be needed
I would avoid anything that reduces room size such as the Foley cells
Cheers
Phil

 

[Crossram]

Thank you for your responses Cellcbern and pjwd. Your points are well taken. i still need to do a deep dive re: DHDI ZR Acoustics.

I have no plans to reduce my planned room size of 17’x23’x10’. I spent a good amount of time playing with the amroc Room Mode Calculator and those dimensions seem to yield a good result since my ceiling height is limited to 10’.

All of the various recommendations from the “industry experts” are so contradictory and of course based on selling their products. I am still in the assessment mode, taking everything in and trying to apply common sense to what is asserted by each.

The things I like about the GIK recommendations:

1) it makes sense to me that the more isolated, rigid, and airtight the room‘s construction, the more excessive sound pressure there is to overcome via acoustic treatment. Since isolation of the sound from the rest of the house and outside is not important to me (my listening room will be the only finished room in the large basement and the walls are cinder block and mostly underground), I think just using solid construction techniques (2”X6” framing, single panel drywall screwed to the studs to avoid vibration “buzzing“, etc) will be sufficient and allow my budget to be focused on more beneficial aspects of sound improvement. The exception would be to put some effort and money into the construction and treatment of the ceiling to eliminate sound transmission upwardly to (and kill footfall noise from) the main floor upstairs.

2) since I will be mounting a large projector screen on the front wall, I like the idea of utilizing corners for trapping and, more so, focusing acoustical treatment for controlling front-to-back axial modes and reflections on the rear wall.

All that being said, I learned from my last listening room treatment efforts that it is easy to over do it with broadband absorption so am very skeptical toward their claim that the goal is to incorporate as much “bass trapping” as possible in a two channel listening room.

 

[pjwd]

Thank you for your responses Cellcbern and pjwd. Your points are well taken. i still need to do a deep dive re: DHDI ZR Acoustics.

I have no plans to reduce my planned room size of 17’x23’x10’. I spent a good amount of time playing with the amroc Room Mode Calculator and those dimensions seem to yield a good result since my ceiling height is limited to 10’.

All of the various recommendations from the “industry experts” are so contradictory and of course based on selling their products. I am still in the assessment mode, taking everything in and trying to apply common sense to what is asserted by each.

The things I like about the GIK recommendations:

1) it makes sense to me that the more isolated, rigid, and airtight the room‘s construction, the more excessive sound pressure there is to overcome via acoustic treatment. Since isolation of the sound from the rest of the house and outside is not important to me (my listening room will be the only finished room in the large basement and the walls are cinder block and mostly underground), I think just using solid construction techniques (2”X6” framing, single panel drywall screwed to the studs to avoid vibration “buzzing“, etc) will be sufficient and allow my budget to be focused on more beneficial aspects of sound improvement. The exception would be to put some effort and money into the construction and treatment of the ceiling to eliminate sound transmission upwardly to (and kill footfall noise from) the main floor upstairs.

2) since I will be mounting a large projector screen on the front wall, I like the idea of utilizing corners for trapping and, more so, focusing acoustical treatment for controlling front-to-back axial modes and reflections on the rear wall.

All that being said, I learned from my last listening room treatment efforts that it is easy to over do it with broadband absorption so am very skeptical toward their claim that the goal is to incorporate as much “bass trapping” as possible in a two channel listening room.

Interesting .. to give an idea where I am coming from this is the room in my holiday place.
Block walls were blasted to expose the aggregate .. ceiling baffles hung to reduce ceiling reflections .. angled wall panels in the listening plane to reflect sound upwards.. 1200mm high bass traps in the corner.. screen is mounted on 150 mm deep frame filled with medium density polywool
Fairly miminmilast treatment but room is
a "listening laboratry" as described by an acoustic engineer buddy ..calm but not dead
Maybe $1K worth of treatment
With your ceiling use battens with resilient mounts and do at least 2 layers ( I use fire rated sheets as they are dense but cheaper than sound rated) and fill cavity with as much fluff as you can
Cheers
Phil

 

[Crossram]

I like what you have done there Phil and your advice re: the ceiling. What did blasting the walls to expose the aggregate do for you? Also, I notice you have a bare concrete or epoxied (?) floor. Did your ceiling treatment address the first reflections from the floor?

 

[HughP3]

Fyi , more room measurements have been posted to the room build thread.

 

[pjwd]

Fyi , more room measurements have been posted to the room build thread.

Saw that Hugh .. amazingly flat down low .. you might expect a little too much lf absorbtion from plots but sounds like that is not the case st all

I am sure the room is a delight

 

[pjwd]

I like what you have done there Phil and your advice re: the ceiling. What did blasting the walls to expose the aggregate do for you? Also, I notice you have a bare concrete or epoxied (?) floor. Did your ceiling treatment address the first reflections from the floor?

Blasting was just a way to make cheap blockwork look a bit nicer .. scrubs up OK with lighting but not for everyone .. sort of like polishing concrete floor and exposing aggregate
The theory on floor reflections is our brains are used to resolving the smear from delayed reflection as there has been always the ground in our evolution .. that being said if its removed our brain is doing less processing and is more relaxed but you would need a recessed pocket in floor to do anything meaningfull .. anyhoo thats one theory
That amroc site has amray trace which is a great tool for looking at first reflections .. its pretty clunky but free !
In your case if you can get cinder blocks respectable you could use your 6x2" studs or nicer timber to create reflector zones on wall and dispense with sheeting .. and your room is not reduced ..
Endless options