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For the first time, I have a dedicated room for HT and Gaming and I have finally finished the acoustic treatment of the room. To create this space of 3.4 x 4.9 x 2.5 meter, I had to move the laundry, toilet and bathroom and knock some walls down. Yes…….. the missus really, really loves me.

 

I had a look at soundproofing the room but decided to not go through with that idea, because the room was rather smallish to begin with and the build a bit complicated, with all the different walls and joist intersecting with each other and with the rest of the house. The room has a double brick outer wall with an air gap in between it,  as the front and the right wall. The front wall also has a window in it behind the AT screen. The left wall is a solid double brick internal wall. The ceiling has a couple of 200mm exposed roof joist with some timber on top, 100mm insulation and a flat sheet metal roof. The back wall is newly constructed and is made out of 17mm plywood with 10mm gyprock on top, on both sides, with insulation in between. And the floor is a solid concrete slab.

 

This room is rather solid and therefor rather challenging regarding bass issues. All treatment is DIY, and the total material cost for acoustic treatment is around $1100 AUD.

The screen wall is a timber frame held up by corner (bass trapping) towers, resting on top of the floor boards, and locked into place by screwing it into the roof joists. It is sitting 550mm from the front wall and is basically functioning as one giant bass absorption trap with 50mm Autex High Density insulation. The wall around the screen has been finished with 6mm MDF sheets with a RPG binary pattern as a finish, and to bring some reflections back into the room. The area behind the AT screen is fully covered in insulation, except for the center speaker. The coverage of unexposed absorption of the front wall is roughly 60%.  This improved clarity and sound stage a lot. It also helped with decay rates in the bass frequency. Enough to improve bass clarity, but not enough to even out the decay rate over the full LF frequency range.

 

The bulk heads around the ceiling have been added on later and consist out of 10mm gyprock with more insulation behind them. The rest of the ceiling has been covered in a binary slat pattern that is hung from the 200mm exposed roof joist, and the space between the roof joist has been filled with more insulation again. The coverage of unexposed absorption on the ceiling is roughly 38% I found that this improved stage depth the most.

The back of the room has been treated with panels made from the same 6mm MDF binary pattern and Autex insulation and have been mounted at various distances from the wall, 50-100-150mm. I had the mount one on a hinge as it was covering the door. I found this to be a big improvement in clarity and precision of tracking in sound effects.

 

Thanks to clever placement of subwoofers and listen position I have been able to create a LF response for subs and full range front speakers,  without any nulls and only need to cut off peaks to receive a flat SPL response. The frequency response of the decay times is less than flat due to the rooms solid build, but doesn’t kick in for the first 20ms, which isn’t too bad.

 

All in all I am quite happy with the outcome, but isn’t my best work regarding finish, as I have favored speed instead of a quality finish.

 

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Edited by Primare Knob
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Floor rug?
No thanks?

Don't really need one as clarity is as good as it is, and decay times are short enough.

As a general rule you can treat opposite areas/walls with 25% absorbtion per area/wall or go 50% on one area/wall, without taking the live out of a room. Considering the sofa on the floor and the ceiling coverage I think I am pretty close to that.
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  • 2 weeks later...

I am using a bit of an unconventional setup, as I was being fed up with the devaluation of AV gear and it's SQ performance.

I am using a HT/Gaming PC with a Pro Audio multichannel AD/DA converter straight into a couple of 2 channel power amps. I found that by ditching the AV Pre Pro I could get the 2-8 channel SQ I was after in a multichannel setup.

It is not the most family friendly setup, and I miss out on Dolby Atmos or DTS-X as that isn't supported for the PC, but I don't really miss the extra channels at this point either, but whatever the future holds, I can easily upgrade the DA converter and add more channels, or add a cheap video card with the latest HDMI specs when needed.

All DSP and volume control is done at the source in the digital domain. The PC is setup for quiet performance with water cooling and passive/active components that only activate under high load, which is during gaming.

All movies (400+) are stored on a local media server as uncompressed full BD rips.

I am still planning to build a set of 15" subwoofers to replace the 12" that I use now.

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  • 2 weeks later...
Guest Peter the Greek

Room looks great! good outcome with the ceiling ?

 

Nice to see another hard floor without the need for a rug or carpet. So much better in my opinion. Presumably you get a bit of screen reflection though?

Edited by Peter the Greek
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Now thats a HT room I would love to replicate! Without doubt up there as one of the best I've seen in Australia over the journey, congrats on the planning and execution, not a hair out of place by the looks.

 

Form and function nailed and the contrasting finishes looks superb!

 

Shame about the sub cables though, bet that does your head in!

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Now thats a HT room I would love to replicate! Without doubt up there as one of the best I've seen in Australia over the journey, congrats on the planning and execution, not a hair out of place by the looks.
 
Form and function nailed and the contrasting finishes looks superb!
 
Shame about the sub cables though, bet that does your head in!
Thanks.

I am still planning on building new subs, that are externally powered by an amp. I should be able to run the speaker cable through some channels on top of the skirts, and with a bit of paint it should be fine.

If I can manage to deal with a 60Hz null by building some traps, I could hide the subs behind the soffit wall, which would be ideal.
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Looks great, happy watching. 

Where did you get the binary mdf from. Looks the goods

 

I got it from Bunnings........., MDF, Drill, Paint, etc.[emoji12] 

The panels are DIY and based upon the RPG binary pattern. If you google it, you will find some examples. Gearslutz has a lot of info as well.

 

https://www.google.com/search?q=rpg+binary+pattern&client=firefox-b-m&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi-rem6qLPkAhW58HMBHaYoBWgQ_AUIBigB&biw=360&bih=560

 

 

They are very good in controlling reflections and decay time.

 

They start to be effective around 800Hz, and are fully effective from 1kHz and upwards.

 

There are different variations on the market like the wavewood (slats), and the artisan panels.

 

 

 

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1 hour ago, Primare Knob said:

I got it from Bunnings........., MDF, Drill, Paint, etc.emoji12.png 

The panels are DIY and based upon the RPG binary pattern. If you google it, you will find some examples. Gearslutz has a lot of info as well.

 

https://www.google.com/search?q=rpg+binary+pattern&client=firefox-b-m&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi-rem6qLPkAhW58HMBHaYoBWgQ_AUIBigB&biw=360&bih=560

 

 

They are very good in controlling reflections and decay time.

 

They start to be effective around 800Hz, and are fully effective from 1kHz and upwards.

 

There are different variations on the market like the wavewood (slats), and the artisan panels.

 

 

 

Great effort that’s a lot of holes to drill, thought a CNC router would have been used.

 

again looks awesome! ??

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Great effort that’s a lot of holes to drill, thought a CNC router would have been used.

 

again looks awesome! [emoji1360]

I don't have the setup for that and looked into using a hand held router, but I don't think that they are meant for drilling, and it can be a bit harder to find center looking from above.

 

CNC would have given a nicer cut out and a cleaner pattern, but if you need to pay an external party, there is a big chance, it will work out the same as buying the panels in store. I never got a quote back for them, but I got a quote for the ceiling strips, which came down to $1100, for cutting and supply.

 

As I favoured speed, I drilled up to 8 X 6mdf panels with a hand drill, but doing this by hand will never guarantee a straight angle. This is fine for the first 2 panels, up to 4 is still fine, but more than 4 and you will start to clearly see the offset created by a non straight drill angle.

 

You could make a guide panel, but it would need to be 25mm thick or more, and made out of hard wood, and pre drilled with straight angles, and then you're back where you started.

 

The good thing is, that there are so many holes that you don't notice the offset to much, but by paying a bit of attention you can definitely pick them out.

 

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1 minute ago, Primare Knob said:

I don't have the setup for that and looked into using a hand held router, but I don't think that they are meant for drilling, and it can be a bit harder to find center looking from above.

CNC would have given a nicer cut out and a cleaner pattern, but if you need to pay an external party, there is a big chance, it will work out the same as buying the panels in store. I never got a quote back for them, but I got a quote for the ceiling strips, which came down to $1100, for cutting and supply.

As I favoured speed, I drilled up to 8 X 6mdf panels with a hand drill, but doing this by hand will never guarantee a straight angle. This is fine for the first 2 panels, up to 4 is still fine, but more than 4 and you will start to clearly see the offset created by a non straight drill angle.

You could make a guide panel, but it would need to be 25mm thick or more, and made out of hard wood, and pre drilled with straight angles, and then you're back where you started.

The good thing is, that there are so many holes that you don't notice the offset to much, but by paying a bit of attention and you can definitely pick them out.

Great going and agree outsourcing the CNC router work may have defeated the purpose unless you know a guy.

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Looks great!! can you expand a bit more on whats behind the front wall or a picture before you added diffuser panels. I read your description 3 times and am still not clear on it:blush:

The red lines are a timber frame that is resting on the floor, and locked into place by screwing into the skirting boards, and the ceiling timber joist.

 

The empty spaces are filled up with a high density black polymer insulation sheets (50mm thick), which is stiff enough to keep itself up by just squeezing it in.

 

They are then covered with 6mm MDF panel sheets with the RPG dot pattern, screwed into the timber frame.

 

I did something similar to the ceiling, I jammed sheets of insulation, inbetween the ceiling timber joists, and covered it with slats, that I pre made into 8 panels to make life easier.sketch-1567505827122.jpeg.6d859a5ef6fde12897879e7c39888314.jpegsketch-1567505818933.jpeg.476b5ebe9dde8df16aa6a923be33de2f.jpegtapatalk_1567504025143.jpeg.f2d5434dfc4ea2364cc69641cc94211f.jpegtapatalk_1567504019341.jpeg.c8dd0d117ef75e12c1db3d08465e400e.jpeg

 

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