DIY Sound Absorption panels for Home Recording Studio

Published on March 7, 2017

Audio Tutorials

acoustic panels, DIY, Home studio, sound absorption

We’ve all experienced bad sound recording somewhere. Most likely what we where experiencing was echo. When standing in an empty room, that echo is very clear. Definitely if you clap in your hands. In most other rooms, such as your living room, such echo is less noticeable. But when taking out a microphone we do realize that there’re many sound reflections.

So if you’re building a home studio for recording music, podcasts, Youtube videos or whatever, you wanna take it to the extreme and acoustically treat it. In simple words, this comes down to absorbing the sound.

Professional sound absorption panels, base traps or reflectors can cost a lot of money and are for most people not an option when starting out or creating a simple home studio. So you can either chose to put mattresses against your wall and place thick carpets on the floor. That might be the cheapest solution, but it’s not so flattering. That’s why we’ve came up with a very cheap and simple DIY solution for creating your own sound absorption panels.

The Materials

• Rockwool or any other isolation panels. We used 100x60x5 cm (40x24x2 inch) panels that came in a pack of 8.
• Fabric of any color you like. We got the cheapest we found which was polyester.
• Wooden plates, but make sure they are very thin and lightweight. We got MDF material of 1 mm or 0.04 inch thick
• Staples and a good staples machine

We advice to get everything from a local hardware store.

Sound Absorption

From our tests we can conclude that isolation panels work just as good as the more expensive Auralex or Primacoustic panels. We definitely used more as we where afraid they wouldn’t absorb as much as the professional panels, but now we ended up a a little ‘too dead’ room. So we might bring down some panels in the future. For a natural sound, it’s always good to have some kind of reflections.

EMC Test Room

In the tutorial we talked about a sound absorption room where you could hear your own blood stream. Veritasium put his own pysche on the line by testing if you could go insane in one of the most silent rooms in the world.

VideoBlocks

This video was supported by Videoblocks, an easy to use site full of stock footage, vector images, stock photos, music, sound effects and more.