Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler My speakers arrived but...

There are TubeTraps that absorb down to 25 Hz (those being 2' (.6 m) in diameter. But they start out expensive, and quickly approach insanity. So it pays to only get them as large as needed. Also to be truly effective, they need to go from floor to ceiling in all the corners of the room.

So Dean, you forgot to build the triangle: Small, efficient at low frequencies, inexpensive. Pick two.

From my reading, no personal experience mind you, everything except the literature from the acoustic treatment makers indicates the bass 200Hz and lower is better handled with EQ than room treatments in most cases do to the size of the traps needed and the difficulty in targeting the offending frequencies only. Though I have considered using them my options are limited.

The three corners in my actual room are doorways, front door, arcadia door and bedroom door. Traps would block these. In the adjoining dinning room and kitchen one corner is the door to the garage another is partly blocked by kitchen cabinets leaving one out of 6 corners that is “trappable.”

I have inquired a couple places including here about the effectiveness of putting traps along the horizontal corners, wall ceiling interface, but got nothing very informative in response.

I would love to try some bass traps if I could get any feedback on whether using them horizontally would be worth the effort since traps should help the whole room and not just the sweet spot. However, I’d hate to put the money and effort into doing it just to find out that like dual subwoofers it doesn’t work in my situation. Luckily thanks to Sean I got off cheap on that one. And Thanks to Charles I know that EQ does work at least for the sweet spot.

Any advice or recommendations on traps is welcome understanding that for 5 of the 6 vertical corners traps would block doorways.

I've also been wondering about using bass traps horizontally.

If you have traps, vertically in each of the four corners of the room, you'll be absorbing pressure waves forming the modes for the length and width of the room, but not height.

If you can play traps around the entire perimeter of the wall to ceiling interface you'll be trapping height, width, and depth. Albeit, the width and depth with half the efficiency of the floor to ceiling corner traps.

If you can also do the corner where the walls meet the floor (maybe not everywhere, but 50% or more), you'll be getting all three major modes better than you can with just the traditional corners.

Triangles made from 2'x4' rock wool, cut in half and than diagonally would work really well in this application. You'd just need a lot of it, though the cost wouldn't even start to approach that of the manufactured TubeTraps.

I read this at first... Long day here at work