Sometimes, it’s just damn cathartic to openly vent. When you’ve spent 5 years flogging a dead horse there comes a point where you just have to down tools, quit and start over. That’s how I feel at the moment with my various acoustic room treatment adventures. So in this article, I’ll talk about my experience with GIK room treatments, my attempts to flatten bass response in a nightmare room, DIY room treatments using Owens Corning filler and insulation products from Home Depot, and my journey on the slow train to madness.

I can’t imagine there being anything usable to the general audiophile community to come from this article, other than one snippet, that I’ll lay out right here and now – You can fix frequency response humps with GIK acoustic panels. 

So let’s get started out, choo choo.

My current listening room is a PITA and it’s been a trial to get it to where it is. First off, it’s square, 18×18′ with a 9.5′ ceiling height. Secondly, it’s completely asymmetrical. There are 3 doors, all in non-symmetrical locations, all the windows are off-center on the walls, and there’s a 6′ wide opening into another room that’s also off-center on the wall. To try to artificially create the effect of a larger acoustic space (the opening into the other room), I point my speakers towards the opened doors and I sit with my back to the opened doors, so technically, I don’t have a close wall directly behind me. Here’s a sketch.

I haven’t marked all doors and windows on the sketch, but you can see the asymmetricality of the room just by looking at where I sit in relation to the large opening behind me. I’m off-center, as can be confirmed by my better half. Incidentally, if you’re an acoustician or even just an internet troll, (you’re all just ones and zeros to me) I’d love to hear from you in the comments below.

Here’s a couple photos:

View from listening chair – Main Room

View from speakers, looking towards chair

Chair looking towards alcove and equipment rack

View of chair and opening into music room 2

Standing in doorway looking into music room 2

Max wondering WTF?

Okay, well hopefully you can understand from the above why my life has been such a misery. On top of it, I’ve had a terrible bass problem in the room. You can’t hear the low bass, despite using full-range speakers and augmenting with a pair of REL Carbon Special subs (which hardly do anything).

There’s a nasty bump between 80-100hz that I’ve measured using REW software and have heard with numerous speakers I’ve used in the room. I can remove it and flatten the bass response using Room Perfect software from Lyngdorf, so I know it’s there and I know it’s treatable. But as much as I like the Lyngdorf TDAi 2170 for room correction functions, I don’t like the fact that everything gets pushed through a digital conversion.

So I’ve been tinkering with acoustic panels, trying, primarily, to remove the hump and improve bass response. Oh…I’ve also gone down the “Swarm” subwoofer arrangement path, using four subs and a miniDSP 2×4 to try and improve things. It was OK but I could never get rid of the hump!

I started a few years back, actually in 2019, with about 6 homemade 2×4 panels, two of which were 10″ thick, the others 2″, all using the Owens Corning acoustic stuff. I don’t know if they made a blind bit of difference to the bass, but they removed a little slap-echo and I don’t think anyone was harmed.

DIY acoustic panels with Owens Corning – these are the bass traps for corner placement.

Bass trap under construction

They sagged a little

Back in early 2019 when I built the panels – I still had the old Tyler speakers

The Brodnax VA marching band came out when I finished building the panels

A snake on the music room window

Max

I watched a few of those Paul McGowen (PS Audio) vids on YouTube and he seemed to like the QRD panels on the back wall. So I bought 7 of those from a local fellow and added three behind the speakers and three in the second music room, that’s off the main room.

These things are 6′ tall and 2’wide and weigh around 100 lbs each. They’re designed for different frequencies, some are about a foot deep, others about 10″ or so. They made no difference that I could hear. The whole concept of placing these behind a sealed speaker (my ProAcs are ported, but through the bottom of the speaker, not the rear), makes zero sense. McGowan does it with his FR speakers and claims the QRDs help. I call it baloney. They did help a bit when I had dipoles, and that makes more sense, scattering the rear wave to minimize cancelation off the front wall. I can’t put these panels elsewhere in the room, so I leave them behind the speakers and they look like I mean business.

QRD acoustic panels – quadratic diffusers

QRD acoustic panels – also in the other smaller room

I also added about 6 of those pretty-looking square panels with the nice CNC cutout shapes and with foam behind the front panels. I forget what they’re called. GIK sells them, I bought mine from a fellow in eastern Europe, and I forget where exactly. They did nothing that I could hear.

Okay, so 5 years in, $1000’s spent, not to mention hundreds of hours of my time, which is extremely expensive, and I’ve removed some slap echo from the room but bugger all else.

A few months back I started a dialog with GIK acoustics. Did I mention that I’ve spent $1000’s on this project to date? I went back and forth for a while with James at GIK, and he was patient, polite, and helpful. Here’s a clip from the email conversation, there’s more useful information in this, his response to my whining, than anywhere else in this article, so be sure to read it. I think there’s a bit of a ‘stock response’ about this email, but that’s fine. I’m sure I’m not the only numpty they have to deal with, and it’s probably the same answer for everyone. I’ve left some of James’s links intact if you want to follow them:

Thanks for your patience while I look this over. 

In most listening spaces, the biggest challenge is usually getting enough panels into the room given the aesthetic and/or budget limitations we’re working with. Much of acoustics performance is about coverage area, or the total square footage of all panels relative to room size. So to maximize performance, the first priority is to get as many panels into the room as we can tolerate. And if good bass response is a goal we’ll want to make each panel as thick as we can. There’s not a ton of available space in this room with all the furniture etc, so seeing what we can do space-wise will be essential. 

The main question of your treatment strategy will be, how important is great deep bass response, and how much space & aesthetic tolerance is there for thick panels in the room to deliver it? When space and budget permit, our largest devices like Soffit Bass Traps and Sound Blocks deliver the best performance, but these are at least 10″ thick and take up a lot of physical space in the room. 

If that’s too much we can use stackable Turbo Traps and 6″ thick mounted panels instead (like Monster Bass Traps or Alpha 6As), and it still helps quite a lot even under 80Hz. Or if space/aesthetics are at a premium but we still want to improve the bass as much as we can, then using smaller stackable corner devices (like Tri Traps or Corner Alphas), and 4″ panels on the wall and ceiling (244s, Alpha 4As, B4s) is still enough to give some obvious improvement in the bass response (mostly in the top half of the bass range). Or we can stick to thinner, 2″ devices for the lowest-profile install, but we’ll have to let go of bass performance gains. 

For placement, we can put up panels randomly in the room and it will help a lot if we have enough of them. But if we can place at least some of them strategically we can get even better results. I’d focus on treating early reflection points, maximizing the bass trapping strategy within the spatial, aesthetic, or budget limitations we’re working with, and maintaining a natural and neutral midrange and treble balance. These are the most important strategies for any small room. 

Reflection points are essential to treat to clean up the stereo imaging and enhance the depth & detail of the soundstage. Reflections reaching your ears very shortly after the direct sound can generally create harshness and inaccuracies in what you are hearing. These reflection points are located along your side walls and ceiling and are easiest to locate using the mirror trick. You’ve got the sofa on one side, and the equipment rack on the toher — perhaps treatments mounted above the furniture is the best compromise? Treat these reflection points with the thickest FlexRange (full range) absorbers you can.244s are a common choice and give a great balance between performance and thickness (and affordability).Monstersare thicker and therefore better, and242s are thinner for places where desired (such as to preserve maximum ceiling height). 

Bass builds up at any boundary such as a wall, a floor, or a ceiling. Corners are efficient because they are the ends of 2 or 3 boundaries. This listening test can help you identify the bass hotspots in your room, which are often corners. Placing bass traps in as many hotspots as possible will improve low end decay times, frequency response, and Imaging. To understand how bass traps work, I recommend checking out our video on bass traps. The more coverage area you have with all the bass traps in the room working together, the better your results will be. Here we can use both stackable corner bass traps, as well as thick panel traps. 

There are other strategies we can talk about, but I’d focus on the above to get started to make the most cost-effective improvement within budget. The result of these strategies will be a much more accurate room, with a flatter bass response that has less resonances, as well as a vivid and detailed image/soundstage. It will be a pleasure to listen in, with much greater clarity, punch, and dimensionality. 

For a great baseline to maximize performance with the first $1k or so of budget, it’s hard to beat getting as many 244s as possible to get started. 244s are so versatile they can be used in just about any role, and are easy to repurpose as you upgrade over time.  12 244s, which comes to $1188.00 plus shipping. You can adjust the quantities and colors in the cart. 

With the additional budget, we can consider the following upgrades for even better results:

• Bass trapping. You can use thicker devices (Soffit or Monster Bass Traps) for even better performance under 100-150Hz. Or, for similar performance to 244s but better aesthetics, you can consider Tri Traps. These take up the least corner space, and are easily stackable with no installation. Or you can consider Corner Alphas for diffusion performance, or Corner Impressions for the aesthetically-designed plates.
• Hybrid absorber/diffusor panels. I’d stick with thick absorbers at reflection points for most accurate performance, but you can consider hybrid devices pretty much everywhere else in the room. I’d start in the rear of the room, where the main speakers fire directly into them, and work your way forward as budget permits. Alpha 6As are my preferred choice for the rear wall, or you can use 6″ Impressions if you prefer their aesthetics. Alphas & Impressions are almost exactly the same, the only difference is in the pattern cut into the front plates. In the Alpha series, diffusion performance is prioritized, as they have the necessary mathematical sequences to optimize diffusion. In the Impression series, visual aesthetic is prioritized. They can be used more or less interchangeably.
• Aesthetic upgrades like Art Panels.

This plan will be extremely cost-effective, but there are many treatment options available in all budgets. If you’d like to use different products (such as Alpha or Impression Panels with the external plates), or if we need to aim for a different target budget let me know and we can adapt the strategy. When you’re ready to order, you can do so online, or if you prefer send me your shipping/contact info and color preferences and I’ll send an invoice. 

Also: Everything is built to order, which is an essential part of our business model to be able to offer such a wide variety of products and color options. This means your order will NOT ship immediately. Exact lead times depend simply on how many orders are ahead of yours in the queue. Delays are generally far less problematic than during pandemic lockdown, but there remain occasional supply chain delays unfortunately.

Let me know how I can help.

Thanks again

JWL

So about a month ago, I dropped $1000+ on 8 panels from GIK Acoustics. The panels are scattered around the room because I’ve no way to place them in any symmetrical way. As you can see from the photos below, it’s an impossible task trying to make these things work in any kind of visual aesthetic way. They look terrible, at this point, my room is a mess and I need a couple of stiff shots of bourbon just to go in there. It also sounds acoustically dead, since adding the GIKs.

But guess what….that nasty 100 hz hump is all but gone. I’ve also been able to remove the plugs from the down-firing ports in my ProAc D40R speakers. With the GIK panels, I’m able to pump more bass energy into the room without it overwhelming the room and upsetting the tonal balance. So my full-range speakers can operate full-range, as intended.  And, I think my system sounds better than it ever has, I’m sure more by luck than any form of strategic planning. I feel that the soundstage has expanded out into the room, yet it’s lost none of the depth perspective – so overall it is deeper and more layered.

I think at some point I’ll just remove everything and start over. It really is a hotchpotch of panels and treatments and I’d like to start over at some point, perhaps remove the couch, move the equipment rack, and try to establish more symmetry and order.

But for now, I’ll live with the eyesore nature of these things and just try to enjoy the music late at night with the lights out.

GIK Acoustic panels

GIK Acoustic panels

GIK Acoustic panels

GIK Acoustic panels

So my take on acoustic panels is that they work. But they’re a complete PITA, especially if your room is an odd shape. Hopefully one day an electronic device will be offered that solves room acoustic issues without leaving behind an unwanted sonic signature elsewhere.

Until that day.

CAH May 2024

CAH Owner/Editor

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