Judging Need for Acoustic Treatment

Ok, how would you describe your room

-Hard surfaces everywhere, maybe lots of windows, tile floor, etc..
-Soft surfaces everywhere?
-Or a mix of the two (ideal)


Now your speakers

-Did you just throw them in the room and let it rip?
-Did you model to find the best locations to try to avoid stimulating any nasty room resonances?


Your listening position

- Are you seated in an ideal location and not in a mode?
- Are you hearing only the speakers and minimizing first reflections?





These are the type of questions you can ask yourself. Very basic. I would absolutely positively hopefully suggest that you read this thread: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=255432 It is very long but there is substantial information that will answer just about any question you can think of.

You always need treatment :-)

A good way to start judging the need is to measure room response between 18 Hz and 80 Hz, using a SPL meter and a calibration disc. If you have a difference between peaks and tops of more than 10 dB, you can get improvement with treatment; if you have a difference of over 20 dB you really should add treatments.

You can get an automated plot of the frequency response using something like Room EQ Wizard. If you have a laptop computer already, you can buy a $99 USB sound interface and a $49 Radio Shack SPL meter and a $5 cable to make it go -- the software itself is free.

Right on the MONEY!! REW is a great way to start. I would start with that and then contact a acoustic company for what kind of products or post on here for some help.
Most people just don't know what the benefits room treatment can really have, or better said how bad there room is effecting the quality of sound. You can't blame them, heck if you have never been in a well tuned room then how would you know what you are missing. If there is one question I get all day long, it would be "What will I hear when I install acoustics into the room?". My reply is "The real quality of your system"

Glenn

Yes. All rooms need bass trapping and first reflection treatment.


The first time you hear a properly treated room it will be very obvious, no matter what your level of audio expertise.


At some point folks are just fooling themselves thinking the sound is better. This is why so many people wrongly believe that a good room is needed to hear the improvement from high-end gear and cables, etc. In fact, a good (treated) room is needed no matter what level of gear you have. Once you get to a certain level of quality, which is not expensive with electronic gear, paying more gets you nothing. It's not the gear! It's the source material, the loudspeakers, and the room, in approximately that order.


You already got good advice about the Room EQ wizard software. But if you don't have a computer connected to your system you can just play a few low frequency sine waves and walk around the room while each plays. The peaks and nulls and bass variation will be very obvious. There are several such test signals on my company's site including a test tone "CD" you can make. Look here:

http://www.realtraps.com/info.htm

Also, I have to disagree with the usefulness of the Acoustic Treatment "master thread" here at AVS. It outgrew its value years ago, and now is too long, contains too many conflicting and outright wrong opinions, and will likely confuse more than help. See my Acoustics FAQ. It's a fair amount to read, but is infinitely shorter than the sticky thread, and all the advice is to the point and accurate.

--Ethan