Tweakers' Asylum Tweaks for systems, rooms and Do It Yourself (DIY) help. FAQ.

---

[ Follow Ups ] [ Post Followup ] Thread: [ Display  All  Email ] [ Tweakers' Asylum ]

---

[ Alert Moderator ]

---

Probably not…

Posted by David Aiken (A) on April 28, 2007 at 23:44:41

In Reply to: sound absorbing posted by robertopisa on April 27, 2007 at 15:16:17:

If there was, everyone would be using it. The reason acoustic treatments tend to be thick is that thick is more effective than thin. Thick has problems like appearance, and fitting it in to some rooms and the like so if there was an effective thin material, manufacturers would be offering commercial products utilising it, even if they came at a price premium.

Vibration damping materials like the ones HumanMedia suggested aren't intended for acoustic use, and the thin foam panels he suggested are intended to work in the small, enclosed space of a computer cabinet with reflective metal walls which they damp. Sound will tend to be reflected inside the cabinet because of the metal walls and the reflective path is short because of cabinet size. As a result the sound gets reflected many times and meets a thin sheet of foam each time, but many reflections means that the sound passes through that thin sheet of foam twice on each reflection (in and back out) and does it many times. That effectively adds to the equivalent of a much thicker foam layer. In a larger space like a room with a much longer reflection path, thin foam will only be effective at the highest frequencies and that isn't too helpful. You really want absorption over a much wider bandwidth for the best results.

Even your 2 cm panels are relatively thin and you would get better results with thicker panels than that.

I realise that this isn't what you want to hear but unfortunately it's the way things are. You can try the foam computer case damping panels HumanMedia suggests, or something similar, and you will get some absorption but if all of the absorption you are getting is at the highest frequencies, and that is going to tend to be the case, you are likely to end up with a room that sounds dead because it's lost the highest portion of the reflected sound but the bass and midrange reflections are totally untouched. The ideal is uniform absorption across the whole audible bandwidth and while no material gives that, getting absorption over as wide a bandwidth as possible does yield noticeably better results. Unfortunately you need thickness to get effective absorption at mid-range frequencies and below.

David Aiken

This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:

Schiit Audio

---

[ Top of Page ] [ Contact Us ] [ Support/Wish List ] [ Copyright © 2024, Audio Asylum, all rights reserved ]

---

[ General ] [ Speakers ] [ Tubes ] [ Vinyl ] [ Digital ] [ Hi-Rez ] [ Video Asylum ] [ Cables ] [ Tweaks/DIY ] [ Music ] [ Films ]

---