Wally wrote:
Serge Auckland wrote:

Anyway, Keith, room treatment:- As I may have mentioned before my feed
was so rudely interrupted, I treated my listening room with great
success (hard to find though, Great Success, padding would have been
easier) Used Acoustic Grade rockwool, and covered it with a linen
curtain for domestic harmony. I'll be pleased to help/advise if you
want to go that route.

How thick does it have to be, and what's the scoop with compressing it a
bit? With suitable holdy-togethery things, could it be formed into panels
that would fit behind the canvasses of oil paintings?


I used 70mm thick panels. These have an absorbtion coefficient of 1.00
above 500Hz, and 0.3 even as low as 125Hz. They would work even better
at the bottom end if you can space them 150mm from the wall. I didn't
have the space to do that, and anyway, I was trying to stop mid/high
frequency reflections. My bass problems are below 80Hz, and rockwool
won't help much that low. Thicker panels, say 100mm, would be a little
better at the bottom end, but I didn't think the extra weight, cost, and
difficulty in handling (100mm panels are pretty heavy) was worth the
marginal improvement.

Canvasses of oil paintings would be a very bad thing, as they would
reflect the treble and not pass it through into the rockwool for
absorbtion. You really need to have the rockwool bare, or covered in a
light cloth that doesn't reflect the higher frequencies. You can achieve
reasonably attractive results using a perforated covering, that has,
say, 80% open space, but it won't look like a solid surface.

Compressing the Rockwool is difficult, it's not very compressible at
all, and I don't see the point of trying. By the way, the nice thing
with rockwool, as opposed to glass-fibre, is that it doesn't cause itching.

Good luck

S.