All,
I’m sorry if I offended anyone. That was certainly not my intent. I was hoping to take some of the mystique out of acoustics. I tried to keep my arguments to the point and not let it become personal. That must have gotten lost in my fervor to defend my position.
Rich,
I’m particularly sorry we couldn’t reach a friendlier outcome.
I will go back to lurking in the background and try not to step on anyone’s toes.
Scott
Like diffusion, midrange and high frequency absorption helps minimize echoes and ringing. But unlike diffusion, absorption also reduces a room's reverb time. This makes the sound clearer and lets you hear better what is in the recording by minimizing the room's contribution. For example, if you make mixing decisions in a room that is too reverberant, you will probably add too little reverb electronically because what you hear includes the room's inherent reverb. Likewise, if the room is overly bright sounding due to insufficient absorption, your mixes will tend to sound muffled when played on other systems because the treble adjustments you make will be incorrect.
Therefore, diffusion is used to avoid flutter echo, ringing, and comb filtering, but without reducing the room's natural ambience.
Without question, the most effective absorber for midrange and high frequencies is rigid fiberglass. Owens-Corning 703 and 705, or equivalents...
Next up some QRD gobos.
Scott,
Could you take a look at my system page and tell me where the diffusers would go in my room. I have a huge picture window behind the system that needs to be there WAF. However, could the diffusers be made out of styro-foam (sp) where I could move them easily? Interested in what you think.
Doug - out