Archive for the ‘Bass Traps’ Category
For most remodeling jobs people think of local home supply stores for the materials they’ll need. Lumber, nails, sheet rock, paint, and most everything else can be picked up there with no problem. If the remodeling effort includes a home theater, media room, or den the list might include electronics that require a visit to a big box retailer or a specialty electronics shop. To make the home theater room correctly, however, there are also some harder to find components that will be needed. Acoustic insulation, wall panels and bass traps are not your typical building supplies, but they are just as important as the two by four studs if you want your home theater room to sound the way it should.
Unless you live in a major metropolitan area, you may have trouble finding these acoustic room treatments in your hometown, or even within a reasonable driving distance. Fortunately, they can be ordered over the web and delivered straight to your house. This allows you to compare prices and products among several dealers to make sure you are getting the best deal.
You’ll want to make sure that good materials are being used. Acoustic wall panels should be made of a rigid fiberglass such as Owens Corning 703 or Owens Corning 705. These panels are time-tested and provide lasting acoustic conditioning for your room. Properly placed within the room, they will help preserve vocal clarity, and the spatial properties of the surround sound components of your home theater by reducing reflections from the side and rear walls of the room.
Wall panels typically work best in the mid to upper frequency range, where the voices and high notes are found. To help keep the bass balanced with the rest of the audio, you may need to add bass traps to the room. Bass traps typically fit into the room corners and help prevent the usual corner loading that can add too much boost to your system’s bass. Too much bass in a small space can exacerbate standing waves. Standing waves occur when a very large bass sound wave is reflected or folded back upon itself by the walls or other solid surfaces in the room.
When this happens, the bass in a particular area of the room is either grossly overemphasized or badly attenuated due to the additive or subtractive nature of the doubled sound wave. The net result is that everyone in the room hears a different amount of bass and likely no one hears the correct amount. In practice, this generally has people fighting over the equalizer controls as each one tries to fix the bass where they are sitting.
Just because you can’t find these materials at your local hardware or building supply store doesn’t mean that your home theater remodeling effort can do without them. Look for a good online supplier of room acoustic treatments and make sure you finish off that home theater room the right way.