Acoustic Treatment

With our range of absorbers, bass traps and diffusers, the acoustics of any control room, live room, or home recording studio can be reined in, making microphone recordings sound professional and the audio image during the mixing phase sound tighter - getting the best out of your studio monitors. Even echoey living rooms and offices can benefit from a little acoustic treatment. By adding just a couple of panels, everything can suddenly sound much more warm and cosy, and you'll even understand each other better.

Improve the Acoustics of Your Studio with Sound Absorbing Panels

If you're not too happy with your recordings or mixes, then you might be tempted to blame your equipment. But, before you start shopping for a better microphone or a new set of studio monitors, it might be worth having a look around you first. If you're surrounded by bare walls and when you clap your hands it sounds like your sitting in a plate-reverb plug-in, then you might want to invest in some acoustic panels to temper that natural echo in your studio space. With even a little acoustic treatment, your microphones are likely to sound way better and when you're mixing, you'll immediately get better, more detailed audio out of your old studio monitors.

Sound Dampening Panels at Home or in the Office

Modern living rooms and office spaces with a lot of glass and concrete can have a minimal, clean and contemporary look, but all those hard surfaces only lead to horrible acoustics. Bad acoustics can actually make it harder to understand one another, and staying in such a room for long periods of time can actually lead to listening fatigue. By bass acoustics, we mean that there's nothing in the room to absorb any of the natural echoes - they're just free to bounce from wall to wall and from floor to ceiling, resulting in shrill reverb. By breaking up wide surfaces with absorber panels you can quickly calm that reverb down and create a more cosy sounding room.

Sound Dampening Panels for the Ceiling

Since an echoey room is caused by large bare surfaces, when it comes to adding acoustic treatment, it's worth looking up. Basically, the biggest bare surface in any room is usually the ceiling. Luckily, most wall-mounted absorber panels can also be suspended from the ceiling. This interrupts the reverb bouncing between two parallel surfaces: the floor and the ceiling. And since it's not very practical to slap absorber panels on the floor, acoustically treating the ceiling can make all the difference.

Wooden Sound Panels

Sound panels made from wood, plastic and other hard materials are referred to as diffuser panels, and do a different job to absorber panels. So instead of absorbing sound waves, diffuser panels scatter them. Imagine throwing a handful of ping-pong balls at a flat wall. They'll all bounce off in roughly the same direction. Translate that back into sound waves, and you have the cold, shrill reverb of a bare-walled room. Now, if you throw your ping-pong balls at a very uneven surface, they'll bounce all over the place. This is what the uneven surface of diffuser panels does to sound waves, stopping them from ricocheting off the opposite wall, and making them an excellent fix when you need to treat larger recording spaces.

Wall, Ceiling & Floor Sound Isolation

Sound isolation does something entirely different to acoustic treatment. Rather than enhancing sound in a space, sound isolation is designed to keep sound from leaking out of the space - so isolating it. This is really useful if you don't want to bother any of your neighbours with loud music. Sound isolation only works if you apply it to the entire space, which is why a lot of studios choose to simply build an entire isolated room within a room - like a box within a box. You're more likely to find the materials needed to isolate a room, or build an entire isolation room, at your local DIY warehouse than in a music shop.

Frequently Asked Questions About Acoustic Treatment

How effective are acoustic panels?

Porous acoustic panels are incredibly effective when it comes to absorbing mid-frequency and high-frequency sound. By installed just a couple of panels, you'll immediately notice that the sound is slightly dryer. These kinds of panels are less effective when dealing with lower-frequency sound. For that job, you'll need to use some bass traps.

Where do you need to place acoustic panels?

Just like the ball in a pin-ball machine, sound waves move through any space in straight lines. If you know where the sound is coming from and where your ears are positioned when mixing, or where your microphone is positioned when recording, then you can easily figure out which surfaces are causing the problem and where you need to put your panels. So, in the control room, for example, it makes sense to put your panels on the side walls, the wall to your rear and on the ceiling.

What are acoustic wall panels?

The term 'acoustic wall panels' usually refers to a panel that's designed to absorb sound. By hanging acoustic panels on the walls of a room, or even the ceiling, the natural echoes that would usually bounce from surface to surface are deadened a little, flattening the sound and making it easier to understand one another and to hear music more clearly.