Room Treatment: An Overview

Sometimes you have no choice but to work with what you have when it comes to choosing your studio space. It may be small, too reflective, or noisy. Well, there’s still hope! In this article we’ll be going into what you can do with the space you have to get the best sounding room you can by using acoustic treatment.

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The most useful type of acoustic treatment for home studios is absorption. It’s going to do what it sounds like it would; absorb sound! Since the room you have probably doesn’t have the best sounding reflections, you’ll want to dampen it as much as possible.

This may be the only type of treatment you need! Just make sure you buy or make proper treatment; egg cartons don’t count (yes, this is a thing for some reason haha). You’ll need some thick material that the sound can enter and be absorbed; the more mass the better.

There’s some DIY videos out there that can help you build your own panels, and they’ll work just fine! Just make sure they’re made of safe material to breathe. If you don’t want to go through the hassle, there’s some companies like GIK Acoustics and Primacoustic that sell the panels; be aware though, they can definitely put a hole in your wallet!

The First Question

The first question you’ll have when you get them is, “Where do I put these things?”. This is actually pretty important, so you don’t want to just put them up without any thought. If you were here for the post about room size, you at least know about first reflections. If you haven’t checked it out, please do!

The first place you’ll want to put your treatment is at the first reflection points of your speakers to your ears. These points are where the sound will reflect off the wall and hit your ears, with the least amount of distance possible, and our ears are tuned especially well to hear these. They give us a lot of information about the environment and how big it is just relying on sound!

To really clear up what’s coming out of your speakers, you can put an absorption panel where the sound has the shortest distance to travel from the speaker, to wall, to your ears. Finding this spot is tricky, so you’ll probably need a hand. And a mirror.

This may sound odd, but let me explain 😂

Light travels in a straight line. Your eyes happen to be next to your ears, relatively speaking. If you can see your speaker through the mirror along the wall, that means you can see a straight line from your eyes, to the mirror, and then to the speaker.

If you can see the speaker, that means you’ve found the reflection point that allows light to travel the shortest distance from the speaker, to the wall, to you. There’s math behind it, but you can just trust me on it (if you want to see it I guess I can write it out if you’re into that sort of thing? Nerd! That’s okay, I am too, a pretty big one 😂).

Sound will travel the same way as light, so if you sit in your normal listening position and have a friend move a mirror along horizontally at the same height as the middle of the speaker, and you can see the speaker, you’ve found your first panel location! You can mark it and do the same thing for the other side.

All About That Bass

Now that you’ve treated the spot that can muddy up the sound the most, it’s time to look at the next big thing: treating the low end.

Bass tends to build up in corners. If you play some music and walk to the corner, you’ll notice huge volume boosts in the bass. However, it’s not very tight; it rings quite a bit. These are the spots you’ll want to treat next!

For these spots, you’ll need something called a bass trap; like a panel you used for the first reflections, these are bigger panels designed to absorb more bass frequencies.

All you have to do is set them up at an angle to get rid of that corner, and you’re done! Suddenly everything should sound a lot tighter and less muddy!

The Most Overlooked Spot

Remember that your ceiling and floor are most likely parallel to each other! This will cause some problems with ringing. To fix this, you could put a big rug under you if you have a hard floor. That will dampen the reflections that keep reflecting closest to you; not to be confused with first reflections!

This is just where the sound will keep bouncing back and forth the most, closest to you. The other option to treat this is putting a “cloud” above you; a hanging bass trap!

This can be a hassle to put up and leaves holes on your ceiling, so I’d start with a rug/carpet on the floor first. If it’s really a problem, this is always an option!

You can always add more to deaden the sound to your liking; just be careful from going too far because the room will sound “suffocated”, but make sure you do enough to where there’s nothing weird ringing and everything is nice, tight, and clear!

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Hope you now have a direction to go with your acoustic treatment! Every room is different so some locations may be more important to treat than others compared to other rooms. Just try to be smart with it! :)

Show me your home studios in the comments! Those are always fun to look at and nerd out over :)

Cheers!

-Michael