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Just delivered

Now that the room is, not done, but well treated, I can give an idea of the results. My initial thoughts were I may have over done it a little. After a few more hours of listening I dont think that's the case.

Overall there is a much warmer sound. The instruments as well as voices are much more focused. Decay and detail is much improved. Three things shock me about the changes.

One, for some reason low freq's sound better to me. This makes no sense to me since these panels should have nearly no impact in that freq range. Maybe I'm imagining it. Franklin can you clear this one up for me/us?

Two, the improvement in the sound when watching things like the news, and normal TV at modest volumes. I'm actually thinking this might be the biggest improved area.

Three, I'm surprised by how much echo is still coming from the left untreated side of the room. To my left when seated is a half wall for the stairs. This half wall is about 11ft from me, 10ft from the left speaker. It also has many items along its span which would act as a diffuser. The next wall on the other side of this half wall another7-8ft beyond it. So we are talking about a fairly open, good distance away left hand side boundary. Still it comes into play.

I will tell you the gaines you get from these fairly cheap, easy to install panels is great money spent. Four boxes, 56 panels comes in at well under $400.00. Theres not a single upgrade you can make for that money that will come close to as doing as much. With that said these panels do fall short of what you can expect from going 2" 703 with a 1" gap. This should come as no surprise to anyone.
 
The room and it's treatments are essential to great sound reproduction.

Very happy for you Jack!!
 
Dentman said:
One, for some reason low freq's sound better to me. This makes no sense to me since these panels should have nearly no impact in that freq range. Maybe I'm imagining it. Franklin can you clear this one up for me/us?
Click to expand...

There are several reasons the low bass may sound better after putting up midrange absorption panels.

  • Sounds which generate bass also generate midrange and treble. We tend to associate the click or whack of a kick drum as the impact of the sound, not the bass. The following bass after the whack is what makes it a kick drum and not a snare drum. If the click/whack frequency range now sounds better with less early reflection/delays, less room shimmer, less slap echo, then the bass instrument you are hearing sounds better and thus the bass frequencies seem to sound better regardless of the acoustics changing at all for the bass frequencies. This also applies to pitched instruments like piano, bass guitar, double bass, and so on, as well as most bass frequency sound effects used in movies. About the only musical sounds which should not change are the low frequency rumbles rap artists use which are generally sine wave generators at 40Hz, or whatever.
  • The treble in the room may have been washing out and making such a tonal and directional mess that your brain was unconsciously working in overdrive to understand the sounds it was being fed. It is in our nature to unwittingly try to locate and identify every sound we hear, and if the room was causing tons of short term echoes (first reflections arriving less than 20mS form the initial sound), your brain was likely very confused and desperate to use everything it could to better understand what it was hearing. From what you were seeing to what your memory was telling it you should be hearing, you may have put so much processing power into that work that you were not free to pay attention to the bass quality or characteristics. Once you eliminated most, if not all, of the early reflection issues, reduced the treble washout, and made it much easier for your primal-instinct brain to locate sounds and be easily fooled by the illusion of stereo imaging, then you became free to notice less crucial stuff such as bass and high treble sound quality.
  • Even though the panels might have very little impact overall on the bass, they still have a small amount of affect. The bass decay may have only improved by a small percentage, but it probably still improved.
  • Finally, you very well may have been listening differently now that things are different in the room. Our ability to truly remember an auditory experience is shockingly limited. Most studies claim that within a few seconds our brain forgets what it heard and only remembers our impressions and interpretations of what it heard. Basically, our brains used sound to create images and knowledge of an experience. So, there is no truly effective way to compare a room with acoustic treatments to the same room without unless we can add and remove the acoustic treatments in a matter of mere seconds. However, we can remember how the sound made us feel, how we interpreted the sound, and what we liked or disliked about how we interpreted the sound.

Those are at least some reasons the bass sounds better now.
 
Thanks for shedding some light on what I was hearing. I thought I was going goofy. I should have stated in what area of the freq range I'm noticing this. I'd say in the 180hz-60hz area's. I've not yet listened to any hard hitting bass stuff like rap. I've also not played any movies. Breaking bad season 3 is about as close as I've gotten to theater stuff.
 
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