I live in a small aprtment in Japan. My room has huge dips between 80Hz and 100Hz, confirmed with REW measurement. I can’t install large number of bass traps because
- Installing bass traps to the left rear corner blocks the way to the hallway.
- There are windows on the right side of the room.
- There is a sliding door behind MLP.
- The walls near the right speaker is located have an outlet and a ventilation hole, preventing me from installing bass traps very close to the floor. The walls near the left speaker don’t have outlets or ventilation holes, though I want to install same number of traps symetrically.
- The ceiling is little lower around front corners (about 2.0m. other places have 2.4m ceiling)
Item: ATS Acoustic Bass Trap - 24 x 36 x 4
Quantity: 2
Choose your fabric color: Ivory; Bass Trap Installation Hardware: Corner Installation Hardware; Desired Absorption Range: Full-Range; Desired edge profile: SquareItem: ATS Acoustic Bass Trap - 24 x 24 x 4
Quantity: 2
Choose your fabric color: Ivory; Bass Trap Installation Hardware: Corner Installation Hardware; Desired Absorption Range: Full-Range; Desired edge profile: Square
I’m thinking of importing those ATS acoustic bass traps to Japan via MyUS because bass traps sold in Japan are poor quality, or prohibitively expensive. DIY could be cheaper but requires some time and effort.
If more traps are really needed I could mount more traps on higher places on the wall this way, but I’m afraid that installing many traps in this way make me feel I’m in a even narrower room.
I’ve also seen claims that dual subs could solve standing waves, but is that true? Even if that’s true, could that be very annoying for my neighbors (even with very low subwoofer volume)? I currently only have front speakers (ELAC DBR62).
Bass traps are most likely to reduce the height of the peaks, but do little to the valleys. The valleys are result of speaker-boundary interference, the reflected waveform from a wall – usually the front wall – mixing in with the speaker’s direct radiation, and canceling it. If you had very thick and large panels behind the speakers, that would reduce the level of this reflection. Dip of 20 dB suggests that the wall is bare and reflection unattenuated, and the frequency 100 Hz suggests that distance between speaker’s front baffle and the wall is about 86 cm. Halving that distance would move the cancellation up to 200 Hz which is far less objectionable.
Halving distance? really?
I already moved the speaker away from the wall slightly because I read somewhere that causes bass to be stronger even for front-ported speaker like DBR62. If I remember correctly moving speakers away from the walls didn’t shift problematic frequencies.
I ran room mode simulator in the past, the result suggest that I’m going to have problems in frequencies I showed in OP.
I see that you edited the comment. As I said in another comment, I don’t want to move the front speakers further away from the walls for maintaining aesthetics. Adding a subwoofer and tweaking its placement seems like a only viable option for me.
> You can also try measuring l+r simultaneous sound because bass is often mixed in mono.
Do you mean that those dips may decrease if I measure both speakers at once? (It’s not that bad as it seems?) Maybe worth trying.
> Do you mean that those dips may decrease if I measure both speakers at once? (It’s not that bad as it seems?)
Yes, for bass frequencies for most music the mix is mono, so an L+R measurement will be more representative of the listening experience. Since your dips are at two different frequencies the impact could be quite significant - lazy style, if the sound from one speaker is cancelled perfectly at the dip (say a 20dB deep notch), with a second speaker at a different location providing half the total signal power will mean that the total SPL at that frequency only dips 3dB.