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Re: Taming of the music room.

I gotta ask a couple more questions:

Q. What do you mean by suspended ceiling with 3" fiberglass?
A. If it's t-bar with compressed fiber ceiling (nasty dusty stuff) tiles replace them with fiberglass. You can buy them from several companies that fit in exactly the same space. Immediately your room will have a shorter decay time. It might even be good. A mild absorber over a large area works well. That's sometimes called a cloud when done intentionally. Won't help with low frequencies though.

Q. Are the doors normally open or closed. Try them open and closed. That could cause an interesting change of behavior to your room. Open they may reduce sidewall reflections.

The distance you are to your speakers compared to the distance you are from the rear wall (~25ms-40ms? round trip for sound)would most certainly give you reflections that are too long in time to be helpful and would more likely be harmful unless controlled.

I like to break these long low rooms into smaller artificial spaces. Consider getting 2 to 4 panel portable wall dividers (a couple of sets of bi-fold doors (borrow them don't buy them)) or a very heavy curtain, as a trial if nothing else, and place it as far back to the ping-pong table as possible across center section or the room (say 6-8' wide). The curtain will deaden the reflections and the dividers may liven up the space (more ambience but also more brightness, edge). See what effect you get. Still won't help bass.

Those nasty bass problems. That extra L to your room could actually be a little reverberation chamber for lower frequncies to return to the room very late in time. That, the long room (modes) and the hard floor and you would get very some bad bass. Some of that could be solved by careful speaker and seating positions (avoid modes) but that wouldn't help long bass frequency hang times(decay times for modal problems with accompaning frequncy response problems). For that you need low frequency absorption.

I know there is a fondness for corner bass traps on this forum but I just don't think that's enough wall area compared to the room as a whole. If I had to help this room I'd use an 8'-10' wide and floor to ceiling or even the entire front wall behind the speakers as a trap. It could be very similar to Ethan's instructions for corner traps. Frame the wall out 8"-10" (simple 2"x4"x24") with flush faced 2"x2'x4' 705 in the framing (the facing out). Loosely fill the cavity behind with standard house fiberglass. Cover it with almost any cloth. I prefer to use a 1"-2" RPG bad panel instead of faced fiberglass as the front surface. The BAD panel stays absorptive out to about 1Khz (see URL link) and then it is midly diffusive and midly absorptive and the structure is very absorptive to well below 100Hz. Does wonders for imaging too. I've use something like this in dozens of rooms and it works well (measured using ETF and Sample Champion with MLS and sweep to determine effectiveness before and after). This also can be shown to be effective with CARA as a simulation.

We can't get down to the real very low frequencies to do much good but for that make use of good speaker and seating positions.

There are always more elegant and costly solutions. I look forward to additional comments from others.

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