The Audio Expert, 2nd Edition

Chapter 21

Acoustic Treatment

Acoustic Treatment Overview

Many studio owners and audiophiles install thin acoustic foam all over their walls, mistakenly believing that is sufficient. After all, if you clap your hands in a room treated entirely with foam (or fiberglass or moving blankets), you won’t hear any reverb or echoes. But thin treatments do nothing to control low-frequency peaks, nulls, and ringing, and hand claps won’t reveal that. So you might hear an absence of echoes and wrongly conclude the acoustics in the room are good but miss that bass frequencies still bounce around untamed. Basement studios and rooms with brick or concrete walls are especially prone to this problem; the more rigid the walls, the more reflective they are at ...