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Acoustics..Bad Echo In Room

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Already In Use

Jan 3, 2010
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4
#1
I have an issue that those in the know probably can help with. Not exactly music related but it is "live sound" room related.

My community has a room about 40 x 24 probably 10 ft high ceilings that they put tile in when they refurbished the floor. Now we have horrific acoustics, boomy echo, which makes hearing very difficult.

The idea came about via the singer I play with to stick 2 foot square carper tile around the room on the walls at the ceiling making a border. We would be adding 128 sq feet of carpet on the walls.

Will this work OK? Is it even possible to make a guess? The singer says it will. We cant do carpet on the floor due to the fact that dancers rehearse in this room.

Welcoming any thoughts, opinions etc. This fix is pretty cheap...less than 200 bucks with us doing the labor. Thanks.
 
#3
A couple of us went over today and added 3 couch like chairs in the corners. What a difference. Problem not completely solved but progress made. It was decided to go slow with the carpet tiles instead of doing the entire room at once. I guess this will be a myth busters type of endeavor.
 
#4
Yeah, don't over-do any carpeting or foam, just use sparse non-reflectives on paralell walls and perhaps a couple throw rugs here and there and you will probably find the room sounds better than before the remodel. Some refective surface is good.
 
#6
Exactly, opposite walls, paralell walls, same thing. The sound waves bounce back and forth and cause a myriad of problems. Whatever you put up, use it sparsely and attach it temporarily. This way you can experiment, add more, use less, etc.
 
#7
Parallel walls are opposite walls so, yes. The sound bounces between them and that's what you're hearing. With non-parallel walls the sound bounces at an angle giving it somewhere to go. Think back to playing with bouncy balls as a kid.
 
#9
Yes, parallel walls are your enemy : ) You get "standing waves", which is that boingy sound you hear when you clap your hands. The waves keep bouncing back and forth in place because the walls are parallel, and collide unpleasantly with cancellations and resonances rather than simply too much liveness. The answer is to break the ability of those sound reflections to keep reflecting, just like you've done. Throw in cushy furniture, pillows, etc. One thing that's really effective is to hang soft slats on the ceiling with a slight angle, so the up/down waves can be lessened without doing too much to make the floor unsuitable for walking on : ) You can use sheets of cardboard with thin fabric covering, and just tack one end to the ceiling and the other end dipped a few inches, using anything as a kind of spacer against the ceiling on that end.

That's why when you're in a room that has been acoustically designed there are seemingly random angles and sculpturish aspects of the room. And why the most beautiful rectangular living room nothing but the piano in it sounds so horrible. It's not so much that it's lively, it's that it's an ugly liveliness (even though it looks gorgeous).


If you ever hang out with audio engineers they're really annoying, because every time you walk into a new room they clap their hands a few times and then go "Hmmm" : ) But it's handy. If the claps sound reverberant but pleasantly so it means one thing. If they sound harsh and clangy it means another. Super dead rooms, like 70's style studios, are never fun to play in, but rooms like the kind you are faced with nearly always benefit from lots of objects in the room to cut the waves down, because it's a super live and it'll never get THAT dead.

Sounds like you're on the right track : ) The first thing people think of is treating the walls, but really without throwing stuff in the middle of the room and randomly all over the place, like you've started doing, it won't do nearly enough.
 

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