Defense Gutter

If you’re like most people, you may think that bass traps have more to do with fishing than with home theater acoustics or that Owens Corning 703 goes in the attic to help keep the house warm instead of in the listening room to add warmth to your music. You’d be wrong on both counts. Both are acoustic room treatments used to help make sure that you are getting the performance that you paid for from your home theater or stereo system.

Getting the right electronics equipment is a good start for a home theater or music system, but it is by no means the end of the job. The audio produced by any music or home theater set-up is strongly affected by a phenomenon called room acoustic effects. The room effects can change and distort the sound waves that are produced by your system between the time they leave the loudspeaker and the time they reach the ears of the listeners in the room. Furthermore, they can exert a different type and level of distortion to every different listening position in the room, making adjustments or corrections with an equalizer completely ineffective in restoring the original sound.

Instead of changing the sound of your systems and hoping that the room will fix it, the system should be set to provide the purest sound possible and then steps should be taken to remove the room from the acoustic equation altogether. Every room is an echo chamber. The walls, floors, and contents of a room affect the sound waves that travel through it, by absorbing some, and reflecting others at varying levels depending upon the frequency of each wave. By the time the sound reaches the listener, the tonal balance can be entirely different that it was when it left the speakers. The fix is to make the surfaces in the room, or at least the worst offenders, uniformly absorbent so that they do not alter the balance of frequencies.

That’s where Owens Corning 703 comes in. Owens Corning 703 is an acoustically absorbent rigid panel that can be placed over the most highly reflective solid surfaces in the room, typically, the walls. It need not line the entire room, but can be placed at strategic locations to knock down the strongest reflections that are directed toward the listening area. By reducing these echoes and restoring the tonal balance, vocal clarity can be greatly increased while perceived harshness and fatiguing brightness can be dramatically decreased.

Bass traps help to correct another acoustic issue found in most home theater rooms. Standing waves occur when very long bass tone sound waves are folded back upon themselves resulting in areas in the room that experience extremely high boosts to the bass level and other areas that are subject to too little bass due to bass cancellation. Bass traps, absorb these waves in the areas most likely to create problems, generally the corners of the room.

Room acoustic treatments are designed to render the room acoustically inert, so that all you hear is the sound the way it was originally recorded.