Hi people,

I live alone so I have the luxury of being able to do whatever I want with my living room and I've turned it into a studio where I am basically playing and producing techno. The room is not huge but it has pretty high ceilings (565 length, 300 width and 310 height in cms) and definitely has noticeable problems around 110-130 hz. Now, I work all day and I dont want to build my own basstraps because I am not very "handyman inclined" but I'm also not rich so I would like to know what's a good number of basstraps to get myself started and notice some difference. I was looking at the GiK Tri Trap Bass Traps and was thinking on maybe starting with the corners behind my speakers, but that's around 550 EUR of an investment for me not to notice a difference. Does it make sense to buy 4 basstraps or should I just use Sonarworks and save until I have enough to buy more?

Thanks for your help.

That is a difficult question to answer. Use the GIK feature where they analyze your room and tell you what you need. If you asked, they would certainly be able to tell you what to do first and how much of a difference it might make. Some yahoo out in America (like me) could give you advice, but only a few Gearspace posters have any real expertise. For example, if Avare gives you advice, listen carefully.

What are the noticeable problems?

Have you measured your space with something like REW?

Your ceiling and side walls are almost the same size so you can already expect strong modal peaks and deep nulls.

You need to cover 100% of the rear wall with broadband absorption in order to get kinda halfway to a netrual sounding room; treating just the corners won't do a thing. Later on you could do the side walls and ceiling. It's all prohibitively expensive unless you learn to make your own.

The ready-made acoustic products available online might be fine if you were building a home theater or a home listening room, but they're nowhere near good enough if you want to mix and master music (unless you're in a room with light-weight drywall construction that lets all the bass right through).

Ehhhh.... don't know if i agree with the part quoted in bold.

First of all depending on how far your back wall is from the listening position, broadband absorption may not be necessary and if far enough can be treated in better ways to minimize over absorption between 1khz-8khz.

Now the caveat is if your backwall is close to the listening position (if you setup your monitoring on the length walls instead of the width), then yes broadband absorption will be needed, but this is not usually the case.

Secondly, the modes terminate in the corners. Also from corner to opposite corner its the longest dimension in your space. So yes treating the corners in some way is necessary and because you can hit 3 modes at the top and bottom of the corners (where 3 walls meet) its beneficial/bang for your buck as well.

But treating the entire surface may be necessary as well, especially if you are dealing with SBIR/non resonant reflections. Also when dealing with drywall structures, the strongest reflections are between joints (wall to wall, wall to ceiling, wall to floor) which are the densest structures (they have to be to hold up the walls) and can be somewhat calculated (for the drywall itself, because it flexes, the level and phase of the reflections are more difficult to predict which is why the SBIR calculators are usually wrong).

So around the monitors (front wall, side walls, ceiling and floor) when treating for SBIR (that's affecting the frequency response), treating the corners correctly actually makes a difference. But if you treat the entire surface, obviously the corners will be treated as well.

By the way, if your walls are made of dense materials, then the treatment approach changes, based on the criteria you choose.

The point to all this "stuff" is that you have to have a treatment plan that you are shooting for and not just do things randomly based on your specific space.