Most home or project studios are located in smallish rectangular rooms, creating a real challenge in creating a relatively accurate listening space. Parallel walls reinforce and nullify harmonic frequencies, creating peaks and dips in the frequency response, particularly between 50 and 250Hz. A common mistake is the overuse of thin acoustic panels (50mm and less), which provide virtually no absorption of frequencies below 200Hz. This is not a balanced acoustic treatment, and makes recording and mixing music a nightmare.
Every small room requires bass trapping, but how much? There are many different bass traps on the market, the most common being semi rigid fibreglass traps, membrane traps and acoustic foam traps. Which is best? In reality, all well designed traps are effective. The real question is, how much trapping do you need?
Much of my work is acoustically measuring recording and listening rooms. Many of these rooms already have well regarded (and expensive) bass trapping in place, but still exhibit a very lumpy frequency response.
The problem is, there simply isn’t enough bass trapping in place to overcome the acoustic characteristics of the room. It’s often a matter of experimenting with as much bass trapping as practical and measuring the impact it has. In some cases, it’s just not possible to get a room within plus or minus 15 db, due to the dimensions and construction of the room.
A good place for bass trapping in small rooms is the ceiling. The RAM400-1000 traps are ideal for this application, as they can be easily installed with a staple gun.
The reality with bass trapping is that it’s often a case of experimentation, and small rooms generally require a substantial amount of trapping.