New HT and Room Treatment

[Bob_99]

Bryan,

As a person who has built HTs and understands acoustics, is there a difference of building the treatment into the wall and ceiling covered by cloth versus having the treatment on the outside of the wall? Specifically the wall/ceiling corners and the front wall/wall corners versus something like superchunks or regular 4" panels.

Thank you.

Bob

[Anthony]

Bob (edit -- coffee hadn't kicked in yet ),
For absorption, I would imagine not. It is very common to have absorbers put inbetween ceiling joists and covered with a speaker panel (cloth). The only area that it would definitely not help is with diffusion, as the walls would still be "quasi" flat and parallel. You probably would still need some irregular objects on the walls to help break that up (I like bookcases and DVD racks myself). The biggest problem I see is that you won't be able to get any one panel larger than 16" wide, and all the cavities would be the same width -- maybe a resonance (even though you're absorbing a lot in there)?

Hopefully Ethan or bpape will see this and chime in -- they know a lot more than me, that's for sure.

Good luck.

[bpape]

Hi Bob.

Either can happen effectively. The trick is to keep the isolation. If you have the space for instance to build mini 'closets' into the corners of the room and fill them so they look flush, that's great.

Bryan

[Bob_99]

Thank you both for the very quick answers. I was redoing our living room and almost decided to tear out the walls and ceilings but I guess that I'll stay with what I have and save the wife a heart attack. I was also wondering why people who build the rooms from scratch don't do more in wall treatment but now I know.

Thanks again and have a good day.

Bob