I wanted to document some of the progress I’ve made over the last few years in creating my listening space. I’d like your feedback, but also there may be an idea or two in here for some that are on a similar journey.
I have had lots of help from all of you as well, so I wanted to say thanks. Forum member Lonely Raven has always been an audio habit enabler for me as well as a room treatment evangelist, so we worked together on a lot of the room treatments.
First of all, the room is not large and generally would not be considered big enough to produce good sound. Its only 16.5 X 12.5. Its in my basement and which has cement floors covered by thin Berber carpet and no pad. The drop ceiling is only 7’8”. Yet, with some treatments, I am getting wonderful, detailed wrap around sound.
I did not invest a lot of money. Most of the diffusers I built or got fairly cheap. I also built the bass traps. I probably have less than $1200 invested in my room treatments. Are they furniture grade? Hardly. But it’s pretty much just me in my room so looks are not all that important.
Finding SpaceTo create the “room” I took a room that was an exercise room/office on one side of the basement and began taking the furniture out one piece at a time. Eventually I got the whole room emptied except a listening chair and a couple tables.
Sometime later, I felt I was losing too much sound out of the room because it has an open staircase to the right side. So I put up a wall of sorts made out of paper encased Styrofoam board stapled to a furring strip frame. It worked somewhat, but eventually I got some light pine 2X2s and thin ¼” drywall, and “temporarily” walled off the stairwell. I am not good at taping drywall, but I am hoping once I paint it, it won’t look as bad. It’s in two pieces so if I need to take it down, I can do so easily.
AbsorbersOriginally, I built a number of absorbers/bass traps. Raven turned me on to a place that sold Roxul in bulk. It was an industrial place but you could get a bale of it for less than $50 (IIRC). I got some furring strip and black burlap and went to town making absorbers and placed them at the first reflection points and elsewhere in the room. I also made upper corner bass traps for each corner in the room.
Basically, the corner traps are just triangles of Roxul stacked up on a triangle piece of plywood held in place by shelf brackets, then covered with a burlap covered frame held in place with industrial grade Velcro.
DiffusersWith 10 or so 4’X2’ absorbers in the room plus the bass traps, it sounded a little dead to me and I heard diffusers in Raven’s multi-media lair so I asked him to use QRDude to give me the specs for some 6” deep QRD diffusers. I would have liked to go deeper, but given my room size, I went with 6”. Rather than pitch the absorbers, I stacked them lengthwise in the back of the room on each side to serve as bass traps.
My first QRD diffuser was a smaller prototype QRD13 made out of MDF and some leftover subflooring material I had laying around. It turned out OK and seemed to have an effect so rather than pitching it, I just painted it black to hide my shoddy woodworking and set out to build some nice QRD13 diffusers out of Baltic birch.
Of all the diffusers I’ve made, these are the only ones that I am particularly proud of the way they came out. I still painted them black rather than try to stain them but the black paint came out pretty nice.
All the diffusers on my front wall are raised using inexpensive ~12” pine risers. I figured why have 25% of them covered by my equipment table?
After reading about fractal diffusers, I made one out of plywood and it was really, really, heavy. So I found some made out of Styrofoam on eBay. They guy selling them was just starting out, so he sold me this group of 5 for basically shipping cost and the promise to write a review.
I am not sure he is still in business, but I have seen similar diffusers on eBay. They are came primed in gray paint. I painted three of them black but got tired of painting so I left the other two gray and did this alternating pattern. Given they are lightweight, I was able to hang them on the back wall pretty easily. They really work to cut down on the reflected sound.
Also, on the back wall in addition to the bass traps and fractals are a couple more 2X2’ prototype QRD diffusers and a table where I keep some stuff such as basic tools and tubes for rolling. I picked up the use of Styrofoam for holding tubes from Steve after seeing it used in his shop. The little rack for holding input tubes in the middle of the table is actually an old dollhouse staircase. Underneath the table are my crates/boxes filled with vinyl from the 60s/70’s/80s.
Next, in an attempt to reduce the amount of time and expense it took to build a QRD diffuser, I decided to build a QRD7 diffuser using slat board from Menards.
The top and bottom are basically light density fiber board that had pre-cut grooves that you can fill with aluminum channels and then insert the diffuser fins. This ensures equal distance between fins and so long as cut the face wood for each channel correctly, they fit without gaps. With one goal being to reduce cost, I used really cheap plywood for the outside frame, fins and well faces. Again, they seemed to have an impact on the room so I slapped some black paint on them and kept them.
One thing about all these DIY wood diffusers, they are heavy. I wanted to try a QRD23 but that seemed like it would be expensive, take a long time and weigh a ton. So Raven and I researched the use of Styrofoam insulation as a means of reducing weight, ensuring consistent well width and limiting cost. We settled on 1” white insulation board from Home Depot. For these, you don’t have to cut the well faces, you simply glue the Styrofoam at the right depth in each well. I made a jig that I used to layer and glue the fins and Styrofoam one well at a time. Then, of course, I painted them black.
The fractals that I use in the back of the room come shipped as a block they were cut out of. One half of the block protects the back half which is the actual diffuser. So the front is an inverse.
We started playing around with them and found they had some diffusion properties. So rather than pitch them, I painted them and kept them in the room. Recently, I placed several of these inverse fractals on top of the other diffusers on each side of the room. I found they made a significant impact on the ambient sound in the room and helped to increase the wrap around nature of the soundstage. A pure fluke discovery, but they offer a significant improvement to the overall sound in the room.
Finally, Raven had a set of diffusers that he did not want to move to Colorado when he relocated so he loaned them to me. They were pretty beat up because they were a part of his mobile diffuser lab he would take to people’s houses so the could hear the effects of diffusion. Also, the one drawback to the Styrofoam diffusers is they are brittle and can break easily if you move them around. Anyway, glued the broken pieces back into place, repaired some of the fins with drywall compound and painted them to cover my surgery. I don’t recall the brand, but I think they are one of the best deals in diffusers out there.
My equipment “rack” if you can call it that is an inexpensive Ikea TV stand. I think it was less than $50. This is hardly a audiophile quality rack, but I wanted a low profile table that left open as much of the front of the room as possible for soundstage definition.
Across the top is my vintage Phillips 312 turntable that I bought when I was in college, the mighty 25th Anniversary Zen Amp, my Brooklyn+ DAC and Mac Mini. On the bottom (hidden) is a P5 Powerplant, the Crown XLS Amp I use to drive bass drivers/subs and the linear power supply for the Mac mini. I have built some plywood “isolation” platforms of sorts that rest on barely blown up kids bike tires. I used to also use DIY rollerballs for isolation, but they were a little unstable, so they are out of the system for now. On either end of the table are my subs I built using 15” Dayton reference drivers.
Behind the table are my cable risers I built. These weren’t built for audiophile reasons, they simply help keep the power cables organized. To make them, I just used a hole saw and cut several holes in a piece of MDF, cut it in half and glued them to a base.
My listening chair/footrest is also from Ikea. Relatively inexpensive, but pretty comfortable. What I also like about it is that the rear head cushion can be removed and a narrow head rest I developed can be used instead. I think this keeps the sound from being absorbed by the original cushion and facilitates more wrap around sound.
After hearing how good Steve’s room sounded with carpet, I borrowed a carpet from my daughter’s room. Eventually, I hope to get a much bigger (better looking) area rug with a pad.
I also have second beat up chair in the room which I position directly behind the listening chair when people come over so a second person can experience the soundstage in the “bobsled” position.
In total, I now have 28 diffuser panels in my room plus 6 bass traps. The result is a wide, tall and wrap around soundstage with good depth and pinpoint instrument placement. I have another system in my cottage with good components but no room treatments and it’s an enjoyable, but completely different listening experience. This is the best listening space of my life and I will be sad when I downsize and no longer have a dedicated room.
The room has can lights which I can dim. I also picked up some LED lights at Aldi for $14 which came with a remote I can use to change colors and dim them. Overall, it makes for a nice ambiance while listening.
Still lots i'd like to do, but I have a nice sounding room now for not a lot of $$.
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Palomino Room Project (Read 4299 times)
