My brother uses these and reckons they work well.
https://addictivesound.eu/en/acousti...oustic-panels/
My brother uses these and reckons they work well.
https://addictivesound.eu/en/acousti...oustic-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 how much!!! the profit margin on them must be huge coz the raw materials, foam and cloth are relatively inexpensive
As the late Colonel Sanders once said
"I'm too drunk to taste this chicken!!"
“Music has always been a matter of energy to me, a question of fuel. Sentimental people call it inspiration, but what they really mean is fuel. I have always needed fuel. I am a serious consumer. On some nights I still believe that a car with the gas needle on empty can run about fifty more miles if you have the right music very loud on the radio”
Hunter S Thompson
With a typical price of €90 for a single panel - they seem expensive to me. But then so do the GIK panels.
Barry
Location: Essex-Herts border
Posts: 141
I'm Matt.
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
Location: limerick
Posts: 223
I'm charles.
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.
Location: Dagenham Essex
Posts: 11,215
I'm Allen.
In my opinion they look like crap , I would not hang them up in my house even if they worked
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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.
Current Lash Up:
TEAC VRDS 701T > Sony TAE1000ESD > Krell KSA50S > JM Labs Focal Electra 926.
Location: limerick
Posts: 223
I'm charles.
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.