A Guide On Where To Find Acoustic Panel Materials

I posted this about 4 years ago (has it been that long already?) but the question keeps popping up so here it is again. Where do you find ridged fiberglass (like Owens Corning 703) so you can build your own acoustic panels?

Most of the excellent acoustic materials won't be found at your local Home Depot, unfortunately, so you have to search a little. Here's an excerpt from The Studio Builder's Handbook that covers what material is available and where to find it.

Owens Corning 703 compressed Fiberglass

"Acoustic panels can be made from a few different materials, some more effective than others. The difference in materials is not only the amount of absorption, but the absorption ability at different frequencies.

Owens Corning 703
As said in the previous chapters of the book, the standard for acoustic panels is Owens Corning 703, which you won’t normally find at Home Depot (see the graphic on the left).

Instead, look for a local supplier of “Industrial Insulation,” or an HVAC supplier, who should normally carry it. When asking for it at a specialty supplier, sometimes it’s called “industrial furnace insulation board.”

You can also find it online at a number of places including readyacoustics.com and gikacoustics.com among others.

703 costs approximately $12 a panel (sometimes more and sometimes less, depending on where you buy it) and comes in packs of six. Knauf ECOSE, Johns Manville, Roxul Safe and Sound, and Certainteed are the same kind of ridged fiberglass, and can be even cheaper than their Owens Corning equivalent. Just be sure that the thickness and density is the same. Try buyinsulationproducts.com.

Handling fiberglass can irritate your skin, eyes and respiratory tract, and the dust particles are so small that they can get trapped in the lungs and become carcinogenic in some people. That’s why it’s important to always wear gloves and a mask when handling it.

Rockwool acoustic material

Mineral Wool
Mineral wool is another mineral fiber insulation product that works as a 703 or R 13 alternative.

It’s a lot less expensive than 703, and even has better absorption characteristics, but it can be a little harder to work with because it’s not as rigid.

Try Rockwool RWA45, RW3 or the ridged Rockboard 60, which costs about $35 for a package of 6 panels (see the figure on the left).

You may find Rockwool or mineral fiber at your local lumber supplier, or try online at atsacoustics.com, among other places.

Mineral wool is easily handled and does not cause any irritation to the skin, eyes or respiratory system like fiberglass does.

Ultratouch denim insulation

Ultratouch Cotton
Yet another alternative is Ultratouch cotton, which you might be able to find at Lowes or Home Depot. It’s about the same cost as rockwool and works almost as well, yet has none of the irritant properties of fiberglass.

You can also use it in place of R 13 or R 19 in your walls. It can also be found at sensiblesolutions.com online. What's interesting about this material is that it's basically recycled denim blue jeans.




Frames

Acoustic Panel Frame

Frames for acoustic panels can be made using 2 inch by 2 inch wood and then covering them with cloth to give them a very pleasant appearance (see the graphic on the left). This doesn’t have to be an expensive wood (pine will work), as it can be stained, covered with a wood trim or just covered with fabric.

The wood trim can be standard wall molding that can be purchased quite easily at any hardware store or big-box discount hardware store. Typically hardwood molding can be very expensive and run from $8 to $40 and up per linear foot, but try high quality pine molding, which is both affordable and looks fantastic once it’s lacquered.

You can rent a pneumatic air hammer at your local tool and building supply company for not much money on a daily rental. If you use this nail gun with very small one inch finish nails to attach the trim to the wall panels, you’ll have a very nice look on your finished work.

Fabric
Covering acoustic panels is pretty easy in that all you need is a material that easily passes audio. This can be almost anything from burlap (probably the cheapest) to even speaker grill cloth.

The best way to test it is to blow into it, and if you feel your breath coming through the other side, it should work.

Maybe the most expensive covering is by Guilford of Maine, but it has the advantages of being acoustically transparent and flame retardant as well as being available in a wide variety of colors. You can find it online at soundaway.com, acousticalsolutions.com, noisecontrolproducts.com, as well as many others.

All that being said, cloth is available in many thicknesses and densities and there should be lots of local outlets in your area where you can purchase it at a discount. Sometimes it works better if you have thinner cloth that’s wrapped several times for a few more layers.

Try doing a test panel first to see how the cloth will work for you. You may find it best to use the thinner more affordable cloth even though you probably will have to take the extra time to attach multiple layers."

To read additional excerpts from The Studio Builders Handbook and my other books, check out the excerpts section on my website.

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Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this blog at no cost to you (just click here).

The 3 Building Blocks Of Acoustic Treatment

While soundproofing the space where you have your recording gear set up can be an expensive and time consuming proposition, treating the acoustics of your room luckily can be quite the opposite. Believe it or not, it’s not that expensive and can be done in only a matter of hours if you have all the building blocks on hand.

So what are these building blocks? Here's an excerpt from my Studio Builder's Handbook (written with Dennis Moody) that explains just what they are.

"Acoustic treatment for your room is built around three main components: acoustic panels, bass traps, and diffusers. Let’s take a brief look at each.

Acoustic Panels
Acoustic panels are the major way that reflections are kept from bouncing around the room. If your walls are hard (meaning there’s no absorption), these reflections are going to cause certain frequencies to cancel themselves out as they bounce around, causing those unwelcome dips and peaks in the room response as well as an uneven reverb decay time.

You can think of an acoustic panel as a very large picture frame that has sound absorbing material inside instead of a picture. Although you could permanently attach the sound absorbing material to the wall (like most commercial studios do), using a sound panel allows you to move it as needed and even take it with you if you move.

Acoustic panels are easy and inexpensive to make (check out this video on my YouTube channel for information how), but they’re also available pre-made from a variety of companies like Ready Acoustics, GIK Acoustics, RealTraps.com, ATS Acoustics, MSR, AV Room Service and many more.

Bass Traps
Most control rooms use what’s known as a “bass trap” to control at least some of the low frequency energy in the room. In most rooms, the main problem at low frequencies is due to one or more deep nulls or peaks in the range anywhere from 40 to 200Hz. Bass traps reduce the depth of the nulls and attenuate the boomy sounding peaks, and the overall response of the room is flatter as a result. Even though your brain intuitively thinks that you lose low end by attenuating it, the room will actually sound tighter and more predictable, with less change in the response when you move away from the sweet spot.

Bass traps work best in corners because bass tends to collect there, but they can also work well spaced off the front and rear walls. Since bass is omnidirectional, the traps don’t have to be paired or symmetrically placed, although believe it or not, the smaller the room the more you will need. The most effective ones extend from floor to ceiling. If that can’t happen, the next most effective method is to just treat the 8 individual corners of the room.

As with acoustic panels, pre-made bass traps are made by a number of manufacturers like the ones mentioned above.

Diffusers
A diffusor scatters sound to reduce the direct reflections from the speakers back to the listener. There are two types of diffusers; 2D and 3D. A 2D diffuser (as seen on the left) scatters the reflections in the same single plane that they were received, while a 3D diffusor scatters it in random directions at random times. If made well, the 3D diffuser is better at scattering the reflections, but more difficult to build so it’s more expensive.

While diffusers can be used anywhere in the room that doesn’t already have an acoustic panel, a common strategy that’s used by many large commercial studios is to use a diffusor on the rear wall. Doing this is controversial, as there are as many designers who believe that the rear wall should be non-reflective as there are that believe it should be diffuse.

In small rooms where the rear wall is closer than six feet from the listening position, you're likely to have more success trying to absorb the sound with deep traps than you are diffusing it. A bookshelf filled with books is a great natural diffusor (and adds some absorption as well), but shelves randomly filled with objects, or small angle wood blocks can work too. Companies like RPG, Real Traps and MSR also make both off-the-shelf and custom diffusors as well.

With any of these acoustic components, you don't need to spend a fortune to achieve tangible results. That said, it isn't easy to predict in advance just how much of an improvement there will be for any given approach (even for the pros studio designers), so some experimentation is required."

You can find out a lot more about how to build a home studio effectively and inexpensively by consulting The Studio Builder’s Handbook. You can also read some excerpts from this and my other books on excerpt part of my website.

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Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this blog at no cost to you (just click here).

The 3 Components Of Acoustic Treatment

While soundproofing the space where you have your recording gear set up can be an expensive and time consuming proposition, treating the acoustics of your room luckily can be quite the opposite. Believe it or not, it’s not that expensive and can be done in only a matter of hours if you have all the building blocks on hand.

So what are the building blocks? Acoustic treatment for your room is built around three main components: acoustic panels, bass traps, and diffusers. Let’s take a brief look at each.

Acoustic Panels
Acoustic panels are the major way that reflections are kept from bouncing around the room. If your walls are hard (meaning there’s no absorption), these reflections are going to cause certain frequencies to cancel themselves out as they bounce around, causing those unwelcome dips and peaks in the room response as well as an uneven reverb decay time.

You can think of an acoustic panel as a very large picture frame that has sound absorbing material inside instead of a picture. Although you could permanently attach the sound absorbing material to the wall (like most commercial studios do), using a sound panel allows you to move it as needed and even take it with you if you move.

Acoustic panels are easy and inexpensive to make (check out this video on my YouTube channel for information how), but they’re also available pre-made from a variety of companies like Ready Acoustics, GIK Acoustics, RealTraps.com, ATS Acoustics, MSR, AV Room Service and many more.

Bass Traps
Most control rooms use what’s known as a “bass trap” to control at least some of the low frequency energy in the room. In most rooms, the main problem at low frequencies is due to one or more deep nulls or peaks in the range anywhere from 40 to 200Hz. Bass traps reduce the depth of the nulls and attenuate the boomy sounding peaks, and the overall response of the room is flatter as a result. Even though your brain intuitively thinks that you lose low end by attenuating it, the room will actually sound tighter and more predictable, with less change in the response when you move away from the sweet spot.

Bass traps work best in corners because bass tends to collect there, but they can also work well spaced off the front and rear walls. Since bass is omnidirectional, the traps don’t have to be paired or symmetrically placed, although believe it or not, the smaller the room the more you will need. The most effective ones extend from floor to ceiling. If that can’t happen, the next most effective method is to just treat the 8 individual corners of the room.

As with acoustic panels, pre-made bass traps are made by a number of manufacturers like the ones mentioned above.

Diffusers
A diffusor scatters sound to reduce the direct reflections from the speakers back to the listener. There are two types of diffusers; 2D and 3D. A 2D diffuser (as seen on the left) scatters the reflections in the same single plane that they were received, while a 3D diffusor scatters it in random directions at random times. If made well, the 3D diffuser is better at scattering the reflections, but more difficult to build so it’s more expensive.

While diffusers can be used anywhere in the room that doesn’t already have an acoustic panel, a common strategy that’s used by many large commercial studios is to use a diffusor on the rear wall. Doing this is controversial, as there are as many designers who believe that the rear wall should be non-reflective as there are that believe it should be diffuse.

In small rooms where the rear wall is closer than six feet from the listening position, you're likely to have more success trying to absorb the sound with deep traps than you are diffusing it. A bookshelf filled with books is a great natural diffusor (and adds some absorption as well), but shelves randomly filled with objects, or small angle wood blocks can work too. Companies like RPG, Real Traps and MSR also make both off-the-shelf and custom diffusors as well.

With any of these acoustic components, you don't need to spend a fortune to achieve tangible results. That said, it isn't easy to predict in advance just how much of an improvement there will be for any given approach (even for the pros studio designers), so some experimentation is required.

You can find out a lot more about how to build a home studio effectively and inexpensively by consulting The Studio Builder’s Handbook, which I wrote with Dennis Moody. You can also read some excerpts from the book on my website.

----------------------------------

Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Don't forget to check out my Music 3.0 blog for tips and tricks on navigating social media and the new music business.

How To Make Acoustic Panels

Yesterday's post on how to improve the sound of your room received such a great response that I thought we'd continue on the subject today. In that post, I wrote about how you could substantially improve the sound of any room by building a reflection free zone (RFZ) around your listening position. This is most easily done by using acoustic panels, and today we'll show you just how to build one.

This is an excerpt from the DVD that accompanies The Studio Builder's Handbook (co-written with my buddy, engineer Dennis Moody). There are actually a few variations on how to build these panels, but you'll just see the basic one here.

To read excerpts from the book, go to the The Studio Builder's Handbook page on my website.

----------------------------------

Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Don't forget to check out my Music 3.0 blog for tips and tricks on navigating the music business.