Hello Folks,

I have QS-8s for my side surrounds. I am wondering if putting up acoustic treatments panels will counter act their properties.

As long as you don't overdo the treatments, I think it should be OK. You're not trying to kill all reflections, just get some balance between reflection, diffusion and absorption (yes I had to look up the spelling of that last one ;)).

Whether you need acoustic treatment will largely depend on the other reflective surfaces in your room (i.e., do you have carpet or hardwood, windows and flat walls or irregular surfaces, drapes, furniture, etc.). The speakers will still spread sound out pretty great, but any acoustic treatment will, to some extent, "deaden" the sound. That might be good in some applications.

Remember - it's like taking aspirin when you have a headache - you don't take the whole bottle, just one or two. A little treatment to reduce echo-y, cold rooms is good. An anechoic chamber = no bueno.

So, yeah, what bridgman said.

What the Capn said

What jakewash said

what bridgman said

Who said what?

I have seen some people treat the rear of the room around their surrounds when they used standard bookshelves, but I really don't think you need this sort of treatment.

As others have posted, take baby steps with any treatments: a carpet if you don't have one to treat cieling/floor reflections, something on the rear wall if it is close and flat, diffusion on the side walls if they are flat.

Flat walls? Never seen them before what do they look like?

What properties are you trying to counteract from the QS8's?

I think he's trying to avoid counteracting them.

Sort of counter-counter-acting them, I guess.

Sorry warriorwolf, normally it takes longer for a thread to go off the rails. I was working in Korea with a large company on the design of a PC workstation they were building for us... a typical meeting would consist of 4 hours discussion in Korean, a couple of hours in Japanese, an hour or so in Chinese (Korean was phonetically similar to Mandarin but all the suppliers involved spoke Cantonese), many faxes to Japan (the phonetics were different but Koreans and Japanese shared a common-ish script), then someone would turn to me and say "No Problem" in English.

Think of this thread as something in a similar vein. "No Problem".

Actually Bridgman, Koran and Japanese have absolutely nothing in common. Although Korean (root words) have commonality with Chinese, about 600 years ago, a Korean king said "screw this...Chinese is too hard!" So he created a new language for Koreans (thank goodness for Koreans, the language is phonetic and easy to learn).

Hope you enjoyed your trip!

I find Korean and Chinese to sound similar. They are both like Greek to me

Agreed. I found the phonetic language a life-saver... made it much easier to get around with my relatively poor language skills. The fact that some travel-related words were borrowed from English and translated directly to phonetics didn't hurt either, eg Da-Xi (taxi) and Tsa-U-Na (sauna). My name didn't translate so well to phonetics though, ended up something like Bu-Li-Gi-Man

That said, my understanding was that the phonetics were used to represent the Mandarin pronounciation and that Chinese characters were still mixed in for cases where multiple words had the same pronunciation. All of the newspapers, for example, contained mostly Korean phonetic text but perhaps 10-15% of the words were represented by Chinese characters (for the cases where phonetics were not sufficient to uniquely identify a word).

The connection with Japanese is indirect, in the sense that it only exists as a consequence of some common characters used between Chinese and one of the Japanese writing variants. There is no direct connection between Korean and Japanese, just the fact that since Korean writing "escapes" to Chinese characters and that the same characters are used in one of the Japanese variants (with the same meanings, I'm told), that opens a possible communication path between "Koreans who know a lot of Chinese characters" and "Japanese who know the script variant that uses the same Chinese characters" and that path was heavily used by engineering folks at the time (mid-80s). Or something like that

I really loved my time in Korea.

Glad you enjoyed my motherland! Boy, haven't been there in 15+ years! You are right about Chinese being used as "proper noun" or for formal occasions. Most "older" Koreans know enough characters to probably get by in China (by writing the characters).

Now, if I could only get fast speed Internet connection like in Korea!