How many Acoustic Panels do I need?

This depends on the size of your room, your goals and a variety of other factors.  A certain amount of trial and error will be required to achieve the perfect balance.  We talk you through some of the main considerations below, so that you can achieve the results that you want.

Live vs Dead Spaces

A room’s acoustic characteristics, or the ‘sound’ of a room, can be described as live or dead.  A room with a lot of reflective surfaces will sound live, e.g. painted walls, wooden floors, bare windows.  The room will sound echoey and loud.  A dead room is the opposite, every surface is covered in soft material and there is no echo or reverberation.

Sometimes a live sounding room can be desirable, e.g. a large church hall in which you record drums and capture the booming echo with room mics.  But this only works if the room itself sound good, which is generally only the case with larger spaces where the sound has a chance to propagate, or spaces with nicely shaped walls.

A lot of the time in modern music production, we are using small, rectangular rooms, e.g. bedroom studios, rehearsal rooms, project recording studios.  These are generally the worst sounding spaces, and any reverb within the room will sound short and nasty.  We don’t want to capture it in the microphones, and we don’t want to hear it when we mix/playback.  Hence we look to deaden the room to some extent with acoustic treatment.

Note: A completely dead room is generally not desirable, or necessary.  Everything will sound completely flat!  Whether it be for recording, mixing, rehearsal, most of us are looking to tighten up the sound enough so that we can listen or record accurately, without covering every single surface with acoustic treatment.

Use Your Furniture

Studio equipment is generally not the only thing in the room – furniture is also required (or already in place!).  You can use certain items to your advantage in achieving a great room sound.

If your floor is made of wood, concrete or any reflective surface, consider putting down a rug or carpet.  This can help dampen some reflections from the floor.  Similarly windows can be covered with thick curtains.  A sofa at the back of the room will absorb a decent amount of sound as well.  These type of soft furnishings will not dampen reflections at all frequencies, but still help a lot to take the worst sounding reflections away.

Irregular hard surfaces, e.g. a book case full of books, can give diffusion of sound.  The more irregular surfaces in your room the better.  Straight, rectangular walls and corners generally give the worst acoustics.

Acoustic Treatment Zones

There are distinct stages in which you perceive the sound that comes from your monitors.

The first stage, is the direct sound , which is the unaltered sound that comes straight out of your speaker. Next, we get early reflections , which is the point after which your sound bounces off of any boundaries, such as your walls, your floor, or your desk.

Lastly, you'll get the sound of the reverberant field, which is where your sound interacts with the confines of your room in a complex manner. The most important or problematic areas in this regard are your back walls, side or parallel walls, and corners.

Direct Sound

Before the sound bounces around your room, you will hear the direct sound from your listening position. This portion of the sound is the most unaltered portion.

The goal is to make the direct sound the most prevalent portion of the sound so that you do not hear tons of reflections while sitting in your listening position.

Early Reflections

Soon after the direct sound hits your listening position, you'll hear sound reflections called early reflections. These are the reflected sounds that bounce off of the walls next to your desk, the ceiling above your listening position, and the desk itself, depending on how you orient your speakers.

After those early reflections, you get reflections that arise in the form of a complex network of reverberation from around the room.

To find where these early reflections are in your room, you can use a mirror in your listening position. While sitting in your listening position, have someone else slide a small mirror gently along each side until the speaker's acoustic axis comes into view.

This is the spot where you want to hang your panel to dampen early reflections. For treating early reflections on the other side, perform the same process once more on the other side wall.

Back Walls

If you're working in an average room, your back wall is likely parallel with the front wall. As you know from before, parallel walls can cause flutter echo. Beyond that, this parallel orientation can also cause standing waves.

Side Walls

Side walls can be concerning as well, especially those near the rear wall where your speakers are pointed. People will often install absorbers in these near-rear wall positions to prevent flutter echo.

Measure the response in your room

We recommend taking a scientific trial and error approach to room treatment.  First of all measuring the natural response of the room, experimenting with panel placement, measuring again, and tweaking as necessary.

Clap IR is an excellent free tool for measuring room response using your phone.  It can be downloaded from the app store.

Example 1 – Small listening room

For an average mix/listening room, as a rough guide, we recommend starting with 4 panels and treating the main reflection points in the room. You can then measure the room response and add/take away panels as necessary.

Install one panel to the left and one to the right of the listening position, and two behind the listening position.

Example 2 – Small listening room/further treatment required

Some rooms are more problematic than others, and there may still be some reflection issues within a room after treating the main reflection points.  Further panels can be optionally added to deaden a little further and achieve a nice sounding balance.  Behind the monitors is a good place to start.  Also above the listening position on the ceiling.

Example 3 – Larger/problematic mixing room

In this example, not only is the room a little larger, but is also somewhat awkward with a window at one end and an L-Shape.  Some more panels, and some trial and error are needed here.

Example 4 – ‘Live room’ for recording

Here we have a space where a band records, and several mics are placed around the room.  The room is a little more deadened to minimise any unpleasant sounding reflections spilling into the microphones.  Here we look to cover more than 50% of the available wall space.

Bass traps

AudioSilk panels are a broadband absorber, and deal effectively with a wide range of frequencies. High grade materials are used so that they are considerably more effective than similarly priced products of the same thickness.

Like any broadband panel, they become less effective at the lowest frequencies. If there is a significant bass problem in your room, then we recommend dealing with it using separate bass traps alongside our panels.

Further Advice

If you want to discuss room treatment, feel free to contact us.  We are happy to talk about your room and help you address specific problems!