Taming sound through acoustic wood panels

Speaking of making recordings, it is true that an assortment of factors become vital in terms of making a clean reproduction. The most apparent of these is background noise that gets captured and hampers the experience for the ultimate listener.

But one frequently neglected aspect is that of acoustic wood panels which can also have a negative impact.

Maybe you are planning on creating a home studio and you managed to get a complete empty room free for the studio. But during recordings, you may find that the sound becomes distorted. This is actually common place in rooms without furniture. Possibly you went to a theatre or auditorium and found that the sound was echo laden or muffled making it difficult to discern. These discrepancies are caused by sound acoustics.

What precisely is sound acoustics? Essentially, when any sound is generated, the ambience in which it is generated will have an impact on the final sound. When a sound enters a new ambience, one of the three things can happen which are transmission, reflection and absorption.

Absorption would downplay specific frequencies or usually muffle the whole sound scape while transmission is the passage of sound through the ambience. In an ideal ambience, there would be complete transmission which never happens in reality. Reflection of sound causes the sound to bounce off the ambience leading to echoes that lessens the sound clarity.

What precisely is a reverberation? A reverberation is a reflection of sound that is heard late enough for it to be heard as a unique sound of its own. The greater the effect, the more difficult it is to hear the original sound. That is why generally efforts are made to lessen this phenomenon.

So what can be done to lessen the impact of reflection? Any sound technician will know that the materials of an ambience will tremendously impact the acoustic attributes of the ultimate sound. Specific materials will reflect less. For instance, tilted ambiences reflect heavily while carpeted ambiences will absorb sound too much creating a muffled ultimate sound.

While creating an ambience, immense attention is given to the materials that are used to create it. The use of special materials like sound isolation solutions can lessen the reflective attributes of the ambience creating a better sound scape. These panels lessen the impact of reflecting making the final sound intelligible and clear. For specific situations, the sound absorption attributes of the material can be customized to absorb on specific frequencies that might be present in the ambience.

Conclusion

If your community doesn’t adhere to Chicago noise ordinance, or an official process for processing complaints, it should work with a condo management company to apply an ordinance that assists to make sure that residents experience two things every person requires in his or her home, and that is peace and serenity.

Since 1998, O’Neill Engineered Systems has been specializing in the custom design and installation of noise control products and systems to help you control noise. We can provide on-site acoustic analysis,