Why Do You Need Acoustic Treatment?

Isolating a room to withhold sound need not cost the earth. The simple cone shaped paper mache construct of the humble egg carton can suffice as a rudimentary acoustic insulator (Provided you have the time to attach them to the walls and ceiling and a penchant for eggs.).  It completely depends on the nature of the sounds you are treating, and the degree of ‘dampening’ required, but it is a technique available to everyone for a myriad of applications from a home recording studio to a home theater system.

Sound moves in wave form – as we have discussed – which in itself is a vibration, or ‘shock wave’ traveling through a medium as a difference in air pressure. Gradually, as the wave dissipates away from its source, it loses its intensity which is why sound actually ‘sounds’ quieter from a distance; the signal becomes less concentrated and the subtle flavors of the sounds overall presence is lost.

This is an amicable outcome if we want to diminish certain sounds, but what if we desire to concentrate the sound? Insulating a room to remove unwanted noise from the outer environment is a common form of acoustic treatment, particularly within the realm of a recording studio, but sound can also be intensified and its output maximized without compromising its overall quality or causing interference.

Home theatres are an excellent example of this; Relaxing in your favorite chair to watch your favorite movie is a highly enjoyable experience which will be affected by the nature of the sound quality. Surround sound systems which deliver crystal clear audio along the entire frequency range are useless if they are housed in a theatre with bad acoustics because the sounds will ‘leak’ out of the room like water from a bucket with holes in it.

The solution is to acoustically treat the interior walls and ceiling of the room to keep the sound in. Not only will the area outside the room be isolated from the noise, (allowing you to really ‘crank up’ the volume) but the entire palette of the frequency spectrum will be washing over those within the insulated environment; the booming bass of an explosion, the crystal clear mid-range of spoken dialogue, and the high range treble of the music to accompany the visual will bounce around the room like a million rubber balls, completely changing the feel of the movie from average to amazing.

This also holds true for any budding record produces who wish to insulate a room for a home recording studio. The objective is to isolate the room from the outside area whilst at the same time insulating the sounds within the recording environment. The effect here is two pronged; it allows for a better recording of the instruments to be achieved because the sound is prevented from ‘escaping’ the studio, and external interferences are isolated from any recording devices, averting the likelihood of any ‘sound contamination’ occurring during the recording process.