I had Auralex do a room analysis. They provided their technical recommendations, like moving the desk to the window as it would take advantage of the longer room dimension to allow lower waveforms to fully develop. I have some new curtains coming, and some corner fills on the next pay period.
Here's the thing. They recommended about $1500-$1800 worth of materials, which was out of my price range. I sourced similar materials through vendors on Ebay for about 1/10th of that price putting my entire investment into this room at about $200 including some nice flat Valspar interior paint.
As you enter the room,
Further into the room.
A quick glance at the west wall to the left after you enter into the room.
A room shot of the west/north wall moving toward the seated position.
Same view, but with more of the lower portion/floor so you can see my pedal board.
The North to East Wall.
A higher shot of the East wall.
Behind the iMac and studio monitors. These were free, I spent no $$ on these. They are packaging squares that are perforated and work wonderfully to trap low end.
All absorption products were applied using velcro tape. I purchased a 15' roll at Lowes for under $20, cut them into 1" segments, fluff side to the foam, rigid side to the wall. The smaller 12"x12" squares are nice and light and worked fine on their own. For the larger pieces on the North wall/mixing location, I helped them by using longer sections of velcro tape, and use some tacky spray to help them stick to the foam better. These are significantly heavier than the smaller pieces.
I used Flat interior paint by Valspar. When I had the room gutted, I did notice that the 15ms flutter echo wasn't as bright sounding, even prior to room treatment. Having done another room in gloss some years ago while I still lived in Ca. I can definitely tell that flat paint versus glossy paint is the better route to go if wanting to treat the room appropriately.
Once painted, and foam applied. The flutter echo is gone from the room, but, there is a slight early reflection between the East and West wall in the untreated areas, particularly at about 5 ' in height. Once I added the traditional bow/quiver/arrow array on the West wall, and the headpiece, and photo on the East wall, they are pretty much eliminated.
I still have another couple of pieces to hang, like the canvas painting on the floor, another poster on foam core board that is behind the door, and I've got 3 ea 12"x12" square foam pieces on the door itself.
The glass mirrored closet doors are coming out, and will be replaced with custom ordered curtains from Ikea, they'll just slide back & forth easily, but will dampen further waveforms. You can see my gigging 6 guitar briefcase in the right hand portion of the closet, unseen is the other side to the left, which just has all of the cases stored vertically.
I'm running Pro-Tools 12.5 something, Arturia V-Collection 5 (exclusively for all of my V-instruments) and my M-Audio AV-40 monitors do the trick nicely. I rarely playback at more than about 60 db, or just above conversation level. The room sounds so much more objective now, and translates as nice as my Sennheiser HD-280 Pro headphones do. My interface is an Avid Fast Track Duo.
All in all, I could not be more pleased. My Mac is maxed out with 32gb of RAM and performs flawlessly, no dropouts, no glitches.
