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In Reply to: RE: Treating a room with rear-firing woofers posted by David Aiken on June 02, 2011 at 15:36:14
Thanks for you input David.
I realize that the only way to know what will work for me is to try it...but unfortunately, living in Canada, with the cost of shipping and import sales taxes, if I were to buy, try and return...there'd be a significant cost to me. Thus my trying to get an idea if putting MondoTraps behind speakers with rear-firing woofers is a general "no-no" before I go ahead with it. My guess is that I will like what the MondoTraps do - I just don't want to be limited in their placement due to my speaker configuration. There is the option of trying my speakers with the woofer firing forward though...lots of tweaking opportunities with bass traps and speakers that could fire forward or backward!
Of course the traps could be deployed elsewhere in my room, but there are some limitations to the room configuration. Ideally, I'd put them in the corners behind the speakers.
Follow Ups:
My speakers are Dynaudio Contour 1.3 SEs, a rear ported stand mount monitor. I've got them toed in to directly face me and that means that the ports are actually firing at the Mondo Traps in the corners behind them. I like the result I get and don't have a problem with the port firing at the trap. The speakers are roughly 4' from the side walls and 6'8" from the wall behind them so there's a fair amount of space between them and the traps. I don't know over what angle the port radiation spreads but I think it's probably large enough to ensure that a fair amount of the port radiation is striking walls rather than the traps.
I think a fair bit will depend on how close the speaker is to the trap (closer means a greater proportion of the radiation will be trapped) and whether the rear axis of the speaker's radiation pattern is centred on the trap (centred will result in more absorption since radiation falls off as you move off axis, even for woofers though low frequency radiation falls off a lot less than is the case for high frequencies).
Also, in the case of my Mondo Traps, I have them mounted mid-wall so there's a bit under a 2' area of uncovered corner below the trap as well as a similar area above. With floorstanders that gap at the bottom is probably high enough to ensure that a low mounted rear facing woofer doesn't fire at the trap but at the walls below, providing reflection at the woofer height.
There's a lot of variables and I don't think anyone can predict whether a given person will like the result of a particular treatment in a particular room with absolute certainty. I don't think what you're considering is an absolute no-no but I do think the results will depend a lot on setup and personal taste.
David Aiken
Thanks for the advice David - in my case, the rear-firing woofers are almost on the floor, so the center will certainly be below the mounting height of the Mondo Traps, meaning that I won't be firing RIGHT into them.
On the other hand, the speakers are reasonably close to the walls - only 2 feet out from the side walls, though further from the front wall.
Based on your advice, I've decided to order regular Mondo Traps for the corners rather than the corner ones, as the regular ones will be more flexible if I decide to alter their placement. This way I can experiment a bit to find the perfect spot for them, if corner placement doesn't tickle my fancy.
A good way to start. If things work out you can always buy a pair of the corner Mondos and then experiment with other locations for the original ones.
You can learn a lot by treating a room in stages, and/or simply moving panels around to try them in different locations. Knowing what something will do in theory is useful, but it's not the same as trying it in your room. Often it's not a matter of whether something works or not but rather one of where it works best, or of how much is enough and how much is too much. I think you get better sound in a treated room, but what sort of treatment, where it's placed, and how much treatment to add aren't questions with a fixed answer that will work for everyone. There is no substitute for a bit of experimentation in my view.
David Aiken
Just an update...I've installed 3 Mondo's in corners, 2 reflection panels (1 Micro and 1 Mini HF), and a few BareTraps in ceiling-wall corners, and the improvement is dramatic. I don't have any measurement equipment other than my ears, but at the end of the day I play music for my ears so they're a pretty good tool...
As some others have noted, the surprise is not that there's an improvement - I wouldn't have spent my hard-earned if I didn't expect an improvement. What's surprising is that there is no compromise involved at all - music is just as lively as before, only much more focused due to the lack of excessive resonances in the lower midrange and in the bass.
There are the obvious things that you notice in an instant upon entering the room. The lack of echo when shutting the door to the room is startling at first - it's as if my entire room previously had a delay pedal on it which kind of smeared sounds a bit, whether it be music or just the sound of people talking. That delay pedal effect has been removed. This is a particuarly big improvement with music that already had a fair bit of echo/reverb to begin with, such as the new Fleet Foxes album, which now sounds breath-taking (both musically and sonically).
The improvement in the bass is equally dramatic, if not more so. Suddenly everything is rock solid on the bottom, with much flatter response. This is clear in songs where the bottom end has varied frequencies - such as the (non-audiophile-approved) U2 song "Somedays Are Better Than Others". There's a lot of electric bass stuff in that song, and it sounds incredibly smooth and natural, with all notes sounding the same volume instead of the peaks and valleys that were there before. Another big improvement is the kick-drum - its sound is now more powerful and restrained at the same time. It's now a kick-drum, not a kick-wall...if you know what I mean. I hear the "note" that the drum is making as opposed to the "sound". The resulting effect is an increased tightening of the bottom end, as opposed to "more" or "less" bass.
So...I guess I can conclude that the rear-firing woofers are a non-issue in relation to bass trapping. In the case of my speakers, the woofers kick in at such a low frequency that they're likely omnidirectional anyways.
As to the installation...I'm no handyman, but can state that the wall-mounted traps (and the one stand-mounted trap) were quite simple to install. The ceiling-wall traps are much harder to install and I needed the help of more handy people to get them up. For the handy helper though, this was a very very simple project. We did not find that putting BareTraps rather than the more expensive MiniTraps in the ceiling-wall corners was any added complexity - we would have had to do exactly the same process with one or the other.
Obviously I haven't compared these room treatments to any others, and am biased since I did spend my money on them. But I think that I can clearly state that in my room at least, both general absorption and bass trapping were needed, and the RealTraps provide both of those in perfect measure, without compromising any area of frequency response in my room, and while looking great. I'm sure many other rooms would benefit from a similar treatment.
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