View Full Version : New sound absorbing panels from IKEA...!
Has anyone else seen these, or better, tried them: https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/p/oddlaug-sound-absorbing-panel-grey-00427366/
Could be interesting! I may try some:cool:
Marco.
Filterlab
09-01-2021, 22:16
One of my clients has a few sets of these in their sales office. Not for audio purposes, but more as a divider. They do dampen sound there’s no doubt. Got to be worth a go for the cash.
Yeah, my thoughts exactly... Could be especially useful as a form of damping in modern/minimalist rooms, with lots of hard surfaces and reflections.
Marco.
Filterlab
09-01-2021, 22:49
They also look quite arty; and I guess you could arrange the panels around existing features in the room.
Jac Hawk
10-01-2021, 12:34
In my old job I’ve used sound absorbing materials, mostly foam squares or rectangles covered in cloth that have adhesive on the back, you basically stick em on your walls, they look great in a minimalist type space and surprised me how well they remove / absorb reflected sound and deaden the sound characteristics of a room, not seen these but will work on the same principle
One of my clients has a few sets of these in their sales office. Not for audio purposes, but more as a divider. They do dampen sound there’s no doubt. Got to be worth a go for the cash.
The WAF is high but not sure about the value for money. You only get 15 for £25 which means most of the 'suggested applications' in the accompanying pictures cost £500 to £1000 to implement.
Got to be a cheaper way than that. Getting some second hand bookcases cheap and filling them with books (which can be got for nothing) for example.
Yeah, probably best for smaller spaces, where also you want them to create an 'arty look'. £50 would do it my music room, where I'm thinking of trying them (on the wall above the sofa facing the speakers):)
Marco.
Yes, would be ideal for something like that and look good too.
Filterlab
10-01-2021, 14:32
Now I can't for the life of me remember the company from which I purchased the sound-deadening material that I used on the fronts of my Revel Performa M22s some years back, but it VERY effectively removed the first-order reflections from the baffles (although it's didn't look particularly wonderful).
https://i.ibb.co/BtsTyp6/DSC05918.jpg (https://ibb.co/kxcq47D)
https://i.ibb.co/6Jsbc0z/DSC05908.jpg (https://ibb.co/k6c0V2j)
There's no reason why any sound deadening material used in the room wouldn't improve performance.
Opposite my set up we hung a large tapestry on the wall the other day; immediately it reduced standing waves in the room and had an audibly positive effect. The same would apply here no doubt.
Those were from a small trader here on AoS, mate. Used to be active in the early days. Think he might've been based in the US:)
Marco.
Yes, would be ideal for something like that and look good too.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking. Not that I have any major issues in that respect, sonically, but it would be my first active foray into experimenting with 'room treatments'.
Marco.
Filterlab
10-01-2021, 17:04
Those were from a small trader here on AoS, mate. Used to be active in the early days. Think he might've been based in the US:)
Marco.
Oh, I just remembered. ‘Diffraction-be-gone”. I wonder what happened to them?
Ali Tait
10-01-2021, 17:12
We use panels from GIK when I help out Nick at shows, they really do help.
https://gikacoustics.co.uk/product-category/acoustic-panels-6/?gclid=Cj0KCQiA6Or_BRC_ARIsAPzuer9HAZkhW8bgtIH6RgL yduDqF5TKe_Js7QJDV-UUKzjIGnMHzSi3Iq4aAuSrEALw_wcB
Oh, I just remembered. ‘Diffraction-be-gone”. I wonder what happened to them?
Yeah, that was the one! Dunno what happened to them.... Very small business though, so doubt that was his only source of income.
Marco.
We use panels from GIK when I help out Nick at shows, they really do help.
https://gikacoustics.co.uk/product-category/acoustic-panels-6/?gclid=Cj0KCQiA6Or_BRC_ARIsAPzuer9HAZkhW8bgtIH6RgL yduDqF5TKe_Js7QJDV-UUKzjIGnMHzSi3Iq4aAuSrEALw_wcB
Cheers, mate. That's useful:thumbsup:
Marco.
We use panels from GIK when I help out Nick at shows, they really do help.
https://gikacoustics.co.uk/product-category/acoustic-panels-6/?gclid=Cj0KCQiA6Or_BRC_ARIsAPzuer9HAZkhW8bgtIH6RgL yduDqF5TKe_Js7QJDV-UUKzjIGnMHzSi3Iq4aAuSrEALw_wcBYup when I get to sorting out my play room I will buy a few with my photos on.
They are pricey, though, for what they are.
Jac Hawk
10-01-2021, 19:35
They are pricey, though, for what they are.
Thing is they do work, I used to use Artnovion which is sold in the uk via Audio Technica https://distribution.audio-technica.eu/en/artnovion/ none of this stuff is cheap but if you have issues that it can fix then it’s worth it I guess.
Much cheaper pro stuff on Studiospares if you don't care what it looks like. That's where I got mine although not put it up yet. Does the exact same thing.
Jac Hawk
12-01-2021, 12:36
Much cheaper pro stuff on Studiospares if you don't care what it looks like. That's where I got mine although not put it up yet. Does the exact same thing.
Unfortunately corporate clients don't like egg boxes stuck to the walls with marvin glue for some reason:scratch::eek::lol::lol:
Unfortunately corporate clients don't like egg boxes stuck to the walls with marvin glue for some reason:scratch::eek::lol::lol:
Maybe not but can't say it bothers me. Bit of extra insulation too, handy at this time of year. :D
ianlenco
12-01-2021, 14:26
My brother uses these and reckons they work well.
https://addictivesound.eu/en/acoustic-solution/hybrid-acoustic-panels/
Jac Hawk
12-01-2021, 15:09
My brother uses these and reckons they work well.
https://addictivesound.eu/en/acoustic-solution/hybrid-acoustic-panels/
They all seem to be variations on a theme, all have a sound absorbing foam with a cloth or thin wooden cover with holes and Macca's right they do retail for way more than you would expect, when i 1st saw them in the flesh so to speak it was a case of :eek::eek::eek::eek: how much!!! the profit margin on them must be huge coz the raw materials, foam and cloth are relatively inexpensive
Ali Tait
12-01-2021, 20:32
Yup when I get to sorting out my play room I will buy a few with my photos on.
They are pricey, though, for what they are.
I thought they were pretty reasonable, as these things go.
With a typical price of €90 for a single panel - they seem expensive to me. But then so do the GIK panels.
Manicatel
14-01-2021, 19:38
Another satisfied GIK customer here. A mix of absorption & diffusion panels in my small music room. The GIK panels are primarily used to get rid of flutter echo & also placed at the 1st & 2nd reflection points.
Yes, GIK aren’t the cheapest, but they are good quality, with a wide range of products to suit & helpful advice if required.
The only thing to be wary of is that they do tend to recommend over-treating rooms, which is good for them to sell stuff, but personally I find over treated rooms too dead, almost as if you’ve got a head cold.
I guess the IKEA panels will cut down on reverb/ echo etc but it would be useful to know their effective frequency range & how many you would need to do the trick. A haphazard “let’s just put a load of em where they look pretty” approach probably isn’t a great solution.
If you can handle the length of it, this will show you what you need to know to do it cheaply.
Suggest passively watching it whilst doing something else...
https://youtu.be/1d9WmjTJniI
Hey guys, sorry to report that those little things are and can only be narrow-band absorbers. They will absorb a limited range of frequencies, like carpets and drapes and can assist with the intelligibility of speech. This is of no real use for music where absorption is needed across the full spectrum and to do that broad-band absorbers and bass traps are needed to achieve the correct T60
It is often thought that wall to wall carpeting is great for acoustics but being thin, relative to the wavelength, and with no air gap below it, will absorb a narrow range of frequencies. With W2W carpeting, as there is so much of it, the decay time will be reduced to way below the required T60 while the bulk of sound is unaffected by the skinny carpet.
Drapes, dinky little bits of foam and egg crates all over everything will just ruin the sound.
The result is not conducive to quality sound. For this broad-band absorbers are needed and can be cheaply built. Strong early reflections cause smear and congestion and if room layout will allow then place absorbers at the first reflection points as a start.
There are plenty of online DIY absorbers to check out. Most are built from 100mm x 19mm timber to fit a standard size 600 x 1200 rockwool panel. 50mm thick rockwool placed at the front of the panel then leaves a 50mm space behind it when wall mounted. It is this spacing from the wall that extends its absorption spectrum.
I first roughly built 2 panels as described above and heard a rather large improvement but measurement showed I needed to target some lower frequencies. I jury rigged some more panels of rockwool on top of the experimental panels and spaced it further away from the walls. This helped with some peaks and nulls and gave me a smoother CSD plot working lower in frequency than before. The T60 was still too long but it was obvious that more of the same would bring me to my required 400ms. decay.
Small rooms require mostly absorption.
Large " " " dispersion.
Medium " " both.
Room acoustics, especially if DIY, is the most cost effective thing that can be done for any system, more so than any component upgrade. I had a friend with a system in a room that was 13ft x 14ft with some very expensive kit. No curtains, no carpet, not much of anything. The sound was thin, bright and sterile. He kept changing cartridges for more expensive ones and could not understand why his system always sounded much the same.
Audio Al
15-01-2021, 17:04
In my opinion they look like crap , I would not hang them up in my house even if they worked :spew:
Hey guys, sorry to report that those little things are and can only be narrow-band absorbers. They will absorb a limited range of frequencies, like carpets and drapes and can assist with the intelligibility of speech. This is of no real use for music where absorption is needed across the full spectrum and to do that broad-band absorbers and bass traps are needed to achieve the correct T60
It is often thought that wall to wall carpeting is great for acoustics but being thin, relative to the wavelength, and with no air gap below it, will absorb a narrow range of frequencies. With W2W carpeting, as there is so much of it, the decay time will be reduced to way below the required T60 while the bulk of sound is unaffected by the skinny carpet.
Drapes, dinky little bits of foam and egg crates all over everything will just ruin the sound.
The result is not conducive to quality sound. For this broad-band absorbers are needed and can be cheaply built. Strong early reflections cause smear and congestion and if room layout will allow then place absorbers at the first reflection points as a start.
There are plenty of online DIY absorbers to check out. Most are built from 100mm x 19mm timber to fit a standard size 600 x 1200 rockwool panel. 50mm thick rockwool placed at the front of the panel then leaves a 50mm space behind it when wall mounted. It is this spacing from the wall that extends its absorption spectrum.
I first roughly built 2 panels as described above and heard a rather large improvement but measurement showed I needed to target some lower frequencies. I jury rigged some more panels of rockwool on top of the experimental panels and spaced it further away from the walls. This helped with some peaks and nulls and gave me a smoother CSD plot working lower in frequency than before. The T60 was still too long but it was obvious that more of the same would bring me to my required 400ms. decay.
Small rooms require mostly absorption.
Large " " " dispersion.
Medium " " both.
Room acoustics, especially if DIY, is the most cost effective thing that can be done for any system, more so than any component upgrade. I had a friend with a system in a room that was 13ft x 14ft with some very expensive kit. No curtains, no carpet, not much of anything. The sound was thin, bright and sterile. He kept changing cartridges for more expensive ones and could not understand why his system always sounded much the same.
In the specific case of the wall behind the listening seat then really you only want to attenuate frequencies that will reflect off it, even a beach towel hung up there will be better than a blank wall. So I think these Ikea things will do a decent job there as well as having WAF. Just damping that one area, even if you do nothing else, will be worth it.
I think most of us have furniture and carpet in the room, I've found that's always better than an empty. hard floored space. But if the system sounds harsh and hard then it isn't the room and nothing you do to the room is going to change that. That's where I think the whole room-treatment thing gets oversold. It won't compensate for poor equipment.
Hey Martin, I may be wrong but it appears you have not been exposed to a before and after listen to a room properly treated. It's science, there are is a target response to achieve and when these conditions are met the transformation is amazing. No guesswork involved.
In the interests of keeping my post from getting overly long I purposely left out what transpired at my idiot mates place. I regularly bought fibreglass/rockwool panels from demolishers for myself and friends at about 20% of new price. I had picked up a truck full and due to an installation being postponed I asked my mate to store them for me.
I convinced him to buy the beer and allow me to place the panels where I thought they would help. I lay a bunch at the floor/wall corners and in 2 of the vertical wall/wall corners and some on little tables etc. for first reflection points. I can go into greater detail about what we heard first and then with the additions but suffice to say the sound was simply amazing.
Andy was almost beside himself trying this album then that and I noticed that his wife was quietly in tears because she loved it and was happy for her husband and I suppose because he could now finally get his system sorted instead of wasting huge sums on never ending 'upgrades'
He at that stage had replaced an Aragon 4004 with a beautiful Spread Spectrum Technologies pre/power combo. I can't remember his turntable. Speakers were changed from Appogee to Martin Logans to Magnepans. What was presented now was clean and had a soundstage and most importantly now, musical. If anything a little soft in the top end. This because he had made the mistake of trying to correct a room problem by choosing warm sounding cables.
Manicatel
16-01-2021, 10:09
Fully agree that room treatment is a very cost effective upgrade, far more so than trying to cure problems with different cabling etc.
When I moved my system from the family lounge into a small, but dedicated room, it sounded ropey. I tried different speakers, placements etc but the over-riding issue remained.
I started looking into basic room treatments. Having learnt what the room was giving was flutter echo, I started experimenting with cushions, duvets etc propped up against the wall & covering the wood flooring. Whilst it looked like I’d finally lost the plot & was building a diy padded cell, I could hear enough improvement to invest in some proper treatment. The result is that the flutter echo has gone, the imaging is now superb & far more controlled.
GIK do sell panels that are far more visually acceptable than the usual foam pads (agreed they’re not the cheapest though) as well as offering panels with bespoke artwork printed on them which might help with the WAF.
Hey Martin, I may be wrong but it appears you have not been exposed to a before and after listen to a room properly treated. It's science, there are is a target response to achieve and when these conditions are met the transformation is amazing. No guesswork involved.
In the interests of keeping my post from getting overly long I purposely left out what transpired at my idiot mates place. I regularly bought fibreglass/rockwool panels from demolishers for myself and friends at about 20% of new price. I had picked up a truck full and due to an installation being postponed I asked my mate to store them for me.
I convinced him to buy the beer and allow me to place the panels where I thought they would help. I lay a bunch at the floor/wall corners and in 2 of the vertical wall/wall corners and some on little tables etc. for first reflection points. I can go into greater detail about what we heard first and then with the additions but suffice to say the sound was simply amazing.
Andy was almost beside himself trying this album then that and I noticed that his wife was quietly in tears because she loved it and was happy for her husband and I suppose because he could now finally get his system sorted instead of wasting huge sums on never ending 'upgrades'
He at that stage had replaced an Aragon 4004 with a beautiful Spread Spectrum Technologies pre/power combo. I can't remember his turntable. Speakers were changed from Appogee to Martin Logans to Magnepans. What was presented now was clean and had a soundstage and most importantly now, musical. If anything a little soft in the top end. This because he had made the mistake of trying to correct a room problem by choosing warm sounding cables.
No, not experienced a before and after situation like that. But your mate's room must have been pretty empty if you were able to lay out panels so symmetrically. Also those panel speakers like Martin Logans have poor off-axis response so would probably benefit more than a well-designed conventional speaker with good off-axis performance. So the design of speaker and what that is doing is also a factor.
Mine is well-damped from carpets, rugs, two large padded settees and thick curtains. Lots of clutter. Never had any issues except when I got rid of a large plant from one corner and was getting some bounce from it. A large roll of loft insulation stuck in the corner solved that.
If the room has hard floors, no soft furnishing except one couch or chair, no clutter, blinds instead of curtains then you will have all sorts of issues. You see that sort of room a lot nowadays as it's the style of the times.
There is science behind it, of course there is, but even so experts don't always agree on the optimal solutions. For example damping first reflections can be beneficial or it can ruin soundstage. Too much treatment and the room will start sounding weird, as your moving towards an anechoic chamber. If speech sounds natural in the room then recorded music probably will too.
This is tending towards what is becoming a discussion on many forums; the degree to which we allow the listening room to impose its characteristics on a recording, which already has its own, and the results on a stereo image..
@Manicatel : nice post. I did as you mentioned in your last sentence. My wife chose some attractive art and had GIK print the fabric and post it to me rolled up in a sturdy cardboard tube.
For whatever reason, treating a room is low on the priority list or just completely ignored. The Royal Albert Hall had a big problem with the dome. People joked about the echo, saying: you can hear any piece twice at the RAH. After many attempts they resorted to dispersion by installing large 'upside down mushrooms.
My point being, all rooms need acoustic treatment and the smaller the room the more important it is. All it takes to tackle this scientifically is to download for FREE the very useful REW and buy, for about the same price as modest interconnect cable, a microphone. Online you can find, also free, programs that will identify the modal issues. So you let REW produce a waterfall plot of your room. This will show exactly where the peaks and nulls lie and also the amount of time the sound takes to decay.
How long should that decay be? Good question. Work out the volume of your room and find online a table that provides the correct T60 for that size room. T60 is the time it takes for the sound to decay by 60dB and for my room is about 400ms.
This is not expensive, provides a bigger 'upgrade' than any component swap and is great fun. When I first did this I found it to be quite exciting to watch the waterfall plot reveal that the peaks were being tamed and the nulls started filling in. Bass traps are needed to reach the lower frequencies and as I added them I noticed that what was previously a partial or complete null start reaching up to the mean amplitude.
For anybody reading this not familiar with peaks and nulls on a plot, a complete null is zero music. When this fills in from preventing bass waves from combining destructively you now get to hear parts of the music not previously heard. When preventing bass from combining constructively you tame the peaks which lead to one-note-bass. On my system I can hear all the detail of Ray Brown' double bass and its wonderful.
No amount of money thrown at bigger better amps and/or speakers can provide that music being cancelled in the nulls. It's gone and you ain't getting it back unless you address the cancellation problem. And no Sir, EQ can not bring it back. Partial nulls can be boosted a little but this will not help the power response. Some nulls will require maybe a 20dB boost but where will your power come from. A 12dB boost will need power doubled 4 times. So from 60 watts to 960 watts but of course there are not many domestic speakers that can handle 1Kw and even if they could would just cancel those particular frequencies with the same power!
Small scraps of foam, beach towels and bookcases just physically can't achieve this unfortunately.
The pic below shows a 6" deep wall mounted frame with 75mm insulation and a 75mm air space behind it. A free standing movable frame is great for tweaking its performance by varying the distance from the wall. If mounted overhead as a cloud and reasonably high ceilings are available a greater distance from the surface behind it is possible achieving absorption down to a lower frequency and results can be viewed on the CSD (cumulative Spectral display)/waterfall plots on REW. :yay:
In the far corner one of the bass traps can be seen. The grey coloured cover measures 900mm/35.5" across
https://i.imgur.com/MAbDjDw.jpg
Powered by vBulletin® Version 4.2.3 Copyright © 2026 vBulletin Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved.