01 January 2009

Apollo Studio Acoustics (Part 5)

Last week I did another set of measurements with my friend Hanz. There are a couple of things different in this measurement though. For starters in the first measurement we used only one speaker and now we used two. Also the carpet wasn't there yet in the first measurement we did. We still had to guess the listening and speakers positions a bit that will influence the measurements of course. Roughly we have been seeing the same peaks in the lower area's but we did see an even more nasty dip now between 60 and 70 Hertz. It looks like to dips very close to each other. We will have to figure out how to fix this. Of course the bass traps are still not in place. I hope that will help to solve this.

Here you also see another waterfall view of the measurements. Of course the same peaks and dips are there, but we have seen that in the higher areas the RT60 time is getting quite acceptable. That means that the real echoing in the room is quite gone. Even with a room that is still quite empty. The carpet on the floor in combination with the acoustic ceiling helped a lot in this. When everything is in place there will be much more dispersion of sound so I guess it will only get better.

Then later on in the week the bass traps arrived. 5 very big boxes with two of them in each box. The traps are 2 meters high and 60 by 60 centimeters wide. I moved them downstairs right away but I'm still figuring our how to fasten them. They won't stay in place by them selves. I saw that special glue/kit is sold by Auralex that should do the trick, but another thing is that they are standing on top of my cabling guiding system and I need to be able to open that so I'm figuring our how to solve that.

I managed to put two on top of each other in the corner like they should go. That leaves 40 centimeters since the ceiling is 2,4 meters high. So I'll have to find a way as well to cut the stuff to fit. It is quite soft material and I guess a sharp knife will do the trick, but since it is so big it will be difficult to keep it straight. I'm sure we will figure out a way to do this. Another thing we didn't account for is that there are some wall power sockets behind the traps now and also in the ceiling there are two for my active surround set that are just over the traps. Ah well another puzzle to solve :) I hope we can do another set of measurements soon with the traps in place to see how that worked out and see what else is necessary. I'll keep you posted as usual!

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