I finally woke up!! Hung up curtains + bought materials for acoustic treatment!!

[Mitch Lowen]

Many experts on here (+ my homeboy) have finally achieved the seemingly impossible:

waking me up. Seriously - I've been acting like a sleeping idiot for years.

After asking ignorant questions like 'Should I keep my BM5's or buy new KRK RP6's??' while my room is an acoustic hell and talking about changing my room I finally had it with myself this saturdaymorning and thought: f-ck it - ACTION!

I measured my room, my monitors and height of ears in ideal listening position.

So far I did the following:

1) I hung up curtains with my brother in front of the wall that I face when mixing. Believe it or not.. my super mom actually had bags with perfect curtains laying in our storage room!!! All I did was bought the rails, plugs and screws!!!

2) I centered my table + mixer 100% in the middle of the curtain

At the local 'Home Depot' I bought the following

3) I bought eight acoustic foam panels for the sidewalls. Size: 100 cm long x 80 cm height x +/- 8 cm thick

4) I had twelve 25l x 25w x 2,4h CM (1 inch = +/- 3cm) pieces of wood (MDF) custom cut to build 29cm tall speaker stands. 6 pieces of wood per stand.

5) I bought very fine (less air!) sand to fill up the speakersstands.

6) I bought 4 new tablefeet for the board with all the equipment. This so I could center the table. The table + board used to be attached. Now I can use them seperately.

7) I bought a gang of screws

8) I bought doublesided tape for the acoustic foam

Tonight I'm going to do the following:

- Build the speaker stands
- Attach the feet to the board
- Hang up the acoustic foam on the sidewalls
- Remove big closet from backwall
- Put couch opposite of monitors

Question:

I wanna hang the acoustic foam on the sidewalls to stop the early reflections. I'm not going to cover the entire wall. I want to hang foam so that my ear is in the middle of it (as far as height) just like the middle of my monitors'll be on middle of my ear height. That will live 40cm above my ear and 40 cm below my ear of acoustic foam on each side of the wall (across the entire sidewalls) (minus the door that's on the left wallside totally opposite of the monitors).

Is what I want to do (hang up acoustic foam like this with doublesided tape) what I have to do OR should I put like isolation material between the wall and the acoustic foam?

I have a million more questions since I have to build bass traps for the backwall (that'll have a couch against it tonight) but more on that later.

Pictures will be put in this thread (or a new one) tonight!

PICTURES of my OLD situation.

FLY's studio 1There's a curtain hanging in front of the entire window-wall now.

FLY's studio 2The table + mixer are both 100% in the middle of the curtain now.

FLY's studio 3This closet will be taken out the room tonight. It will be replaced by a couch which will be in the exact middle of the wall (opposite the monitors!)

I'm excited about the thought of being able to hear my mixes as they REALLY are. And taking action vs. asking ignorant questions feels 100.000 better. My girl even went along to help buy materials and luckily my brother's a how-to-hang-up-curtains expert!!!

Aight. I'd love to get an answer on the question I asked and all general comments are more than welcome.

[Mitch Lowen]

Since we all make music.. this thread is important to all of us especially those who are trying to up they studio.. y'all talk about everythang but leave this thread alone.. I'm waiting for Tony Belmont to holla.. I know he got mad info..

And yes.. me and Napalm built 2 identical, massive speakerstands. They are the height I needed.. they look rugged but stylish.. I'm happy as sh*t. Finally.

[babyface_finsta]

Good stuff... Keep the updates coming... let us know how much you've spent on material, time, and effort...

Slap some paint on the wall... throw in some lighting and a rug on the those nice hard wood floors... A comfortable inspirational environment will bring out the best in you... get your interior decorating on...

Turn that House into a Home (studio-wise)... I know this is a Before Picture... very institutionalized looking and kinda drab... I just think your work environment should be an extension of your presonality...

Your off to a good start (big budget or not)...

[Arka]

Congratulations on your enlightenment! The importance of room acoustics simply cannot be stressed enough.

There are some things you should do a bit differently though... Instead of putting up panels the whole length of the wall you should just spot treat the direct reflection points on the side walls, one 80x100 panel on each wall should be enough. Mount 2 panels in the ceiling forming a 100x160 cm area centered above a spot between the monitors and your mix position. If the back wall of the room is closer than 3 m from the mix position you might wanna treat the back wall with a few or all of the remaining panels as well.

Read Ethan Winers great article on control room treatment to get some more in-depth info on this: http://www.realtraps.com/art_monitor.htm

In fact, read all the acoustics articles on the realtraps site. They are not in any way specific to using realtraps products.

If you wanna take things to the next level, I suggest you get some isover or rockwool rigid fiberglass/mineral wool panels and make corner bass traps slanting the corners behind the monitors if you got room for it. Those corners are the spots that by far is gonna see the most low freq build-up in the room. Building traps for the rear corners are also a good idea. 60 cm wide panels should be enough to make an impact on this size of room but if you can go wider, even better. The panels will only work for bass trapping if they are made of rigid fibreglass or mineral wool like at least 35kg/m3 for fiberglass or 70 kg/m3 for mineral wool. 10 cm thick panels are pretty optimal.

Bass traps for the rear corners would be a good idea too if you can spare the room.

Oh, and by the way, blankets are not gonna do much good for your room acoustics, they just reduce hi freq reflections, leaving the mids and lo´s bouncing about, and thats gonna skew your room´s frequency response. What you want is more or less uniform absorbtion across the whole frequency spectrum.

Hope thats not too much to swallow at once...

peace /Arka