There are a number of ways to look at this, and a lot depends on what you're trying to accomplish and how much effort you put into getting the most out of the store bought room tuning products. There's quite a few locations in a room where a given room tuning device won't work properly or will actually hurt the sound. It's not unusal for folks to give up too quickly on this or that product since it can take considerable experimentation to determine optimum locations. Some room tuning devices lend themselves to knocking off and audiophiles have attempted, with varying success, to knock off Shakti Holographs, Skyline diffusers, Bass Traps, Sonex foam, Acoustic Discs resonators, Room Tune Corner Tunes, Mpingo discs. Given the relatively low cost of many room tuning devices you have to ask yourself, is knocking them off really worth the expense and effort, esp. when you wind up with something that may not work nearly as well as the original product and that may have a tendency to look very homemade, you know, cardboard, egg cartons and such? Besides, can't a lot of "Pro" room tuning products be found on the used market? So, what's the point of going to the trouble of knocking them off?

Geoff Kait
Machina Dynamica
Advanced Audio Concepts

I've made many home made tuners of different types over the years , they work great . they may not work quite as well as the prebuilt ones , but the cost is very little . I friend purchased some expensive room tunes that now reside in his garage . I guess after a few years they were deemed socially unexceptable . There are pictures of my absorbers and system on A-gons site , under virtual systems , heading ( opinions please) same user name , system name is ( built in budget beater ) .

I made exactly one home brew echo buster. Before the birth of our triplets, I had a little room with a stereo and speakers and nothing else. The echo sucked! So I hung a rug on the back wall and that helped a bit. I looked into some devices to put in the corners but was too cheap to purchase any.

So I went to Home Depot and looked at the carpet pad they had and a guy there gave me a few feet. I cut 12 similar sized triangle, glued them into groups of three, then lightly tacked them in the corners. They really helped a lot!

Now I am sure they were not as lovely or even effacacious as something I would have purchased, but I am stll proud of my little audio project.

Trey

I use tapestries and Sonex if possible to get rid of slap echo from walls in general and to tame first relection nasality around a speaker if it is on or too near a wall. Both are cheap and look acceptable in various rooms.

Wall to wall carpet on the floor if usefull to tame the room echo and for the most part bare floors are to be avoided. Those are all my basic parameters when I look at a messed up room and most of them are pretty messed up unless they were designed as control rooms.

It is important to achieve room lock by moving box speakers around until you find their optimum launch position. Muddy sound can sometimes occur by a move of less than a quarter inch in the wrong direction! If the room is beset with echo it just makes your job of moving the speakers around that much harder as all that relection makes for a confused mess.

If you know going in that the room will have to remain fairly hoot-y and untamed because of the look of the architecture etc perhaps you need to consider line source speakers such as planars and electorstatic panels. These transmit energy to your ear without bouncing off walls and floors so they are a lot easier to get an acceptable sound in a bouncy location.

However planars and electrostatics usually only sound best when you are sitting in an exact "sweet spot," so some folks don't like them if they care to get up and walk around the room.

In general I find room damping and speaker moving will account for a greater quality improvement than doubling or tripling one's equipment budget. I am a big fan of bi-amping and tri-amping and the use of multiple drivers in separate boxes so as to allow for perfect in-phase launch points and superior frequency response and soundstaging. But even a simple shoebox size pair of mini monitors will benefit tremendously from taming the environment and moving the speakers around while listening for room lock.

Room lock is defined as that exact spot where vocalists voices suddenly sound palpable and solid and the bass response is deep and flat too. There are books on the subject of exact set-up and one excellent one is Jim Smith's. Some years ago Tascam (the recording folks) and Yamaha had fairly usefull room setup how-to books. A lot of usefull acoustic tuning information is floating around if you look for it. All tremendously valuable if you want to be intoxicated with your results even before you pour yourself a nice refreshing beverage...

Doctor Fine wrote:

I use tapestries and Sonex if possible to get rid of slap echo from walls in general and to tame first relection nasality around a speaker if it is on or too near a wall. Both are cheap and look acceptable in various rooms.

Wall to wall carpet on the floor if usefull to tame the room echo and for the most part bare floors are to be avoided. Those are all my basic parameters when I look at a messed up room and most of them are pretty messed up unless they were designed as control rooms.

It is important to achieve room lock by moving box speakers around until you find their optimum launch position. Muddy sound can sometimes occur by a move of less than a quarter inch in the wrong direction! If the room is beset with echo it just makes your job of moving the speakers around that much harder as all that relection makes for a confused mess.

If you know going in that the room will have to remain fairly hoot-y and untamed because of the look of the architecture etc perhaps you need to consider line source speakers such as planars and electorstatic panels. These transmit energy to your ear without bouncing off walls and floors so they are a lot easier to get an acceptable sound in a bouncy location.

However planars and electrostatics usually only sound best when you are sitting in an exact "sweet spot," so some folks don't like them if they care to get up and walk around the room.

In general I find room damping and speaker moving will account for a greater quality improvement than doubling or tripling one's equipment budget. I am a big fan of bi-amping and tri-amping and the use of multiple drivers in separate boxes so as to allow for perfect in-phase launch points and superior frequency response and soundstaging. But even a simple shoebox size pair of mini monitors will benefit tremendously from taming the environment and moving the speakers around while listening for room lock.

Room lock is defined as that exact spot where vocalists voices suddenly sound palpable and solid and the bass response is deep and flat too. There are books on the subject of exact set-up and one excellent one is Jim Smith's. Some years ago Tascam (the recording folks) and Yamaha had fairly usefull room setup how-to books. A lot of usefull acoustic tuning information is floating around if you look for it. All tremendously valuable if you want to be intoxicated with your results even before you pour yourself a nice refreshing beverage...

I find myslef disagreeing with the idea that electrostatic speakers do not bounce energy off the walls. On the contrary, they are excellent at bouncing energy off the rear walls; that is why Quad used to recommend horsehair mats be positioned behind their electrostatic panels. But I agree with you on side walls.

On the touchy subject of Sonex, my Pet Peeve No. 5. They seem like such a good idea, too, but even a little bit in a room does something very unwelcome to the sound IMHO. I can only imagine how abominable the sound must be in those recording control rooms you see with Sonex covering the entire surface of the walls. I can live with slap echo, I canna abide Sonex.

Cheers,

Geoff Kait
Machina Dynamica
Advanced Audio Concepts