Do I need bass traps?

[alex2000261]

I’m getting my first monitors tomorrow. Upon inspecting my room and planning my monitor placement, it has suddenly dawned on me that I may have some sort of natural bass traps, however I’m not sure if they are likely to function as such. This comes from having solid oak beams (about 8 inches thick) in every corner, the full height of the room, and even some running across the roof. Is there any chance these might provide some kind of bass trap effect?

[Benedict]

The general answer for the average user - who isn't Abbey Road: No.

Bass Traps can be needed for sure and if you have an infinite budget to have someone who REALLY knows how to treat a room then go for it. But in the real world, it is easy to do more damage than good by making a room tha sound weird. Better to have a live room that you know than a weird one that you don't (as you assume it is not a problem seeing you think you subjugated it).

Work across one end of the room instead of speaking down its length as this will help you offset any symmetry. A couch or two to divide the space should be about all you need.

[Funkybot's Evil Twin]

Solid oak beams? They're going to reflect sound, not absorb it. Sounds like lots of right angles too, which bass frequencies love to sit in creating all kinds of nodes. You also don't mention your room dimensions. The smaller the room, the lower the ceilings, the bigger the problems. After I bought my own house, I went from having my gear in a decent sized square bedroom, to a much smaller spare bedroom with lots of weird right angles and a low ceiling. The difference was night and day with my (otherwise the same) setup. Lots of big peaks and nulls in the smaller room and bass trapping was necessary (on top of broadband absorption). In fact, I still want to treat the ceiling above the listening position but the low ceilings make that difficult.

But we're putting the cart before the horse. There are lots of little things you should try to do first...

1. Place your monitors/desk where the long wall is behind the listening position. You don't want the monitors reflecting off a rear wall that's too close.

2. Place the listening position about 30% off the front wall.

3. Create an equilateral triangle with your monitors and listening position, with tweeters at ear height.

4. Try to decouple your monitors from your desk, either via things like mopads or monitor stands.

5. Now experiment with moving things around slightly (a few inches at a time) to find where things sound best.

After you've done the basics, see where your room is. How do things sound in the listening position? Do you have wide peaks and valleys in the frequency response as you move around the room? How do commercial mixes sound? Anything too bassy? How is clarity? Stereo image?

Over time, you'll probably find that your room would benefit from some treatment. Usually, some broadband absorbers placed on walls will offer the best bang for the buck and improve just about every room. How many you'd need will vary based on room size but there are formulas to help calculate this. But if you have issues in the room below 100hz, you may want bass trapping.

You can reach out to a company like GIK and get their advice, and even if you're not ready to spend money yet, do a free consultation just to see what they're recommending and why. They'll ask about your room size, photos, how you use the room, problems, etc. Good to get a professional opinion IMO. They helped improve my tiny room dramatically.

The other thing I didn't mention yet is using something like Sonarworks Reference to compensate for your room. The best thing would be to treat your room first, but after your room sounds pretty good, Reference can help with some of the smaller corrections. Reference is also great for showing your exactly how bad you're problem is and where.

[Funkybot's Evil Twin]

Last thing: don't worry about trying to go and spend a grand on treatment all at once or anything. I think for most people this is an iterative process. Get some monitors, get them sounding good in the room, then over time, improve the room.

[ramseysounds]

Any room will benefit from bass traps as well as correct monitor placement and listening position. Solid beams will reflect not absorb.

[recursive one]

If you have a mic you may download free Room Eq Wizard and measure your room response.

I also think solid wood must reflect sound rather than absorb it, moreover chances are it will ring at some frequencies and cause some bad resonances. Brroadband bass traps are typically made of fibers or porous materials like rockwool (preferable) or foam (passable).

If you are at the begining of your learning process room treatment is vital. I sorted mine not so long ago and I now realize how many mixing errors I used to make, basically I now learn how to mix from the ground up. So the earlier you sort this the faster your progress will be.

If you are not afraid of some DIY I can recommend this article
https://www.masteringmastering.co.uk/ch ... ixing.html
Basically I followed what was described there and it turned to be a night and day difference.

[AnX]

hang some rugs on the walls

[Funkybot's Evil Twin]

hang some rugs on the walls

Rugs or moving blankets will only help with damping the highest frequencies. They're just not thick and dense enough to do anything about most of the audible spectrum. Broadband acoustic panels are generally around 4 inches thick of dense insulation (like Owens Corning 703 rockwool). No rug is going to perform the same way.

The other thing no one has mentioned is building panels. You can buy some 703, some lumber, and some burlap and build your own panels on the cheap. For less than $70 USD you can get enough 703 for three 4" panels.

https://www.acoustimac.com/oc7032/

...Now add wood for the frame from your local hardware/lumber shop, you can order fabric by the yard, then just need some heavy duty wire hangers or z-clips to hang them (after building them of course). You can probably build 3 panels for $100. If you're handy, that'd be the most cost-effective way to treat a room. If you think about how much monitors cost, buying or building acoustic panels is the next best thing you can do for your room/monitoring setup.

[AnX]

we used to use mattresses as a vocal booth, prob good enough for bass traps too

[dark water]

Further to the suggestions above, I'm tempted to say that unless your room is around 6000m cubed or larger (and preferably not square shaped with a low ceiling), then any bass traps you buy/make really aren't going to do what you want them to do in the sub 100hz region as you won't have the physical space in the room to put up effective sub 100hz bass traps (I'm choosing this frequency as a reasonable bass / sub bass cutoff figure).

Also, the materials (and hype) of some bass traps sold on the market leave a lot to be desired: think of the length of soundwave of, say, 80hz and then imagine a thinnish foam bass trap trying to treat that!

To be brutal, you will have to accept that, unless you have a large room, attempts to trap sub 100hz soundwaves will be very problematic.
Do what you can with acoustic treatment but accept that it's really just the mid / high frequencies you can tackle in a room smaller than about 6000 - 8000m cubed.
It is a compromise sadly for most of us. Some good tips for overall acoustic treatment / production environment support are given by others above.

[Benedict]

Further to the suggestions above, I'm tempted to say that unless your room is around 6000m cubed or larger (and preferably not square shaped with a low ceiling), then any bass traps you buy/make really aren't going to do what you want them to do in the sub 100hz region as you won't have the physical space in the room to put up effective sub 100hz bass traps (I'm choosing this frequency as a reasonable bass / sub bass cutoff figure).

Also, the materials (and hype) of some bass traps sold on the market leave a lot to be desired: think of the length of soundwave of, say, 80hz and then imagine a thinnish foam bass trap trying to treat that!

To be brutal, you will have to accept that, unless you have a large room, attempts to trap sub 100hz soundwaves will be very problematic.
Do what you can with acoustic treatment but accept that it's really just the mid / high frequencies you can tackle in a room smaller than about 6000 - 8000m cubed.
It is a compromise sadly for most of us. Some good tips for overall acoustic treatment / production environment support are given by others above.

This is correct and why I say that generally, it is best not to mess with your room. That includes hanging funny green-smelling Persian carpets, doonas, or egg cartons from all the walls & ceiling. These things tend to make for an odd-sounding room which is in no way representative of the sort of room people listen to music in (and no that is not an excuse to mix in buds or headphones).

[herodotus]

Whatever you decide, you should know that bass traps don't have to cost thousands of dollars. Ethan Winer has some plans on this page:
https://ethanwiner.com/basstrap.html
that cost about 50$ per unit depending on where you get your supplies.

Personally, I think that the only rooms that don't need treatment are large asymmetrical spaces with ceilings that are at least 12 feet high. Most rooms will benefit greatly from judiciously applied treatments.

[herodotus]

Another useful page is here

[Funkybot's Evil Twin]

Any type of thin Auralex-style foam, rugs, eggshell stuff isn't the type of treatment I'm talking about. I'll agree with Benedict that they'll just make a room sound weird. Let's take that stuff entirely off the table.

When I say "Broadband absorbers" I'm talking about something like these:
https://www.gikacoustics.com/product/gi ... tic-panel/

4" of rockwool in a panel. They're highly effective for middle and high frequencies. That stuff is important too because you're still dealing with reflections off the walls in small rooms, and that's going to create peaks and valleys in the frequency response of the listening position. In a larger room, where the walls are further away, it's less of an issue. In a small room, these reflections are going to be really problematic and mess with not only the frequency response but also the stereo imaging. Hence why broadband treatment is so effective.

That type of broadband absorber is what I was talking about being able to easily do on the cheap via a DIY build, and would improve just about any room/monitoring situation. Place some on the wall behind the rear of your monitors, at the first reflection point then behind your listening position and just about any room would be noticeably improved.

Now, when it comes to low-end, small bass traps aren't going to do it. But these things are highly effective:

https://www.gikacoustics.com/product/gi ... bass-trap/

I've got four of them mounted horizontally where the wall meets the ceiling on the front and rear walls. And those things are huge. They are not just big foam squares either. There's no foam at all. Inside, there's a rounded/curved panel that turns your corners into rounded edges. So they're literally changing the shape of the room to cut down on reflections. They're highly effective, even in small rooms. But not cheap. And not at the additional expense of lots space.

Now, is my room totally flat? Nope. But where my largest peak was in the low end was around +12db prior to the additional treatment, the largest peak is +4.9db now. According to Reference anyway. I wish I had the old plots to post the before/after. Anyway, that's a huge improvement. That's just at the listening position. If I walked around the room with music playing, there was some really horrible shit happening in certain places and the whole room is much more well-behaved now.

[Benedict]

Let's take that stuff entirely off the table
If I walked around the room

There's a table & walking around now! Geez, that really changes everything.