damping a small home studio room on a budget

Joe Misra

I recently moved to a new house and finally have a room to myself aside from my bedroom to set up a little studio, and of course its a very old house and a very small cubic room (roughly 9x9x7h feet), so it makes my brand new 5.1 monitoring setup sound completely muddy and practically unusable.

I've looked into getting various Auralex Studiofoam products and other sorts of bass traps, but they all seem fairly expensive and I won't be able to drop any money into professional solutions like that for at least a few months since the move itself was fairly expensive, in the meantime I'm trying to figure out some way of quieting the room down with some cheap temporary solution or maybe even things I have around the house, just enough that I can start working again... Does anyone have any ideas?

elektro80 · Posted: Tue Aug 30, 2005 12:07 pm Post subject:

I´ll get back to you ASAP.

Joe Misra · Posted: Tue Aug 30, 2005 12:09 pm Post subject:

Cool, thanks elektro80 Smile

Joe Misra · Posted: Wed Aug 31, 2005 2:10 pm Post subject:

Actually, I am just going to bite the bullet and order some Auralex stuff now, my fiancee is getting annoyed with me playing with pillows and curtains Very Happy

Macaba · Joined: Jul 13, 2005 Posts: 160 Location: UK

http://www.teresaudio.com/haven/traps/traps.html

Any use to you?

Joe Misra · Posted: Wed Aug 31, 2005 3:31 pm Post subject:

elektro80 · Posted: Wed Aug 31, 2005 3:34 pm Post subject:

Have you seen this: http://www.gikacoustics.com

I have been building similar stuff and it works great. I have used Auralex and similar stuff before but most of that stuff is simply absorbant in the mid and highs .. which often actually kills too much.. and the bass traps aren´t really that good either. You might end up reintroducing reflectant surfaces in order to get the "audio" back. It is also possible to build your own diffusers.

In most cases room treatment s about making the room acoustically bigger than it is and at the same time get rid of echoes, phase outs and stuff like that. Throwing lotsa expensive foam at the problem won´t always make the room truly better. I don´t mean that foam is bad, it can be very nice to have som of that around and tune with it.

Anyways, the "gik" ideas are sound. I haven´t used any of the gik products, but their products are close what I have been building myself.

Joe Misra · Posted: Wed Aug 31, 2005 3:46 pm Post subject:

paul e. · Posted: Wed Aug 31, 2005 7:31 pm Post subject:

do you want to ' dampen' [i.e. deal with errant frequencies] the sound, or actually 'isolate' the sound..or maybe both ?

you mentioned you want to 'quiet the room down', and so it sounds like you may want isolation more than dampening

Joe Misra · Posted: Wed Aug 31, 2005 8:15 pm Post subject:

paul e. · Posted: Wed Aug 31, 2005 9:13 pm Post subject:

ah ok..it's just that i wondered if maybe your fiancee was hinting to you she would like it isolated Very Happy

Joe Misra · Posted: Thu Sep 01, 2005 6:16 am Post subject:

elektro80 · Posted: Thu Sep 01, 2005 6:51 am Post subject:

I think I have convinced my wife I need an organ. She can play with it too

elektro80 · Posted: Thu Sep 01, 2005 6:53 am Post subject:

Uh.. I am talking about

organ = harmonium
of course.

Rolling Eyes

Joe Misra · Posted: Thu Sep 01, 2005 8:49 am Post subject:

myfipie · Joined: Sep 02, 2005 Posts: 1 Location: Atlanta

Hey Everyone,

Glenn here from GIK Acoustics. Please let me know if you have any questions at all about our product. It is great to see people really starting to think about acoustics for there room.
You may email me at the company website or just type away.

Glenn