Help with room treatments

I’m wanting to add some treatments to my listening space. I’ve reached out to GIK and ASC. GIK is proposing more treatments than ASC (reflection points, diffusers on back wall, bass traps in corners and behind speakers). ASC has only recommended tube traps in the corners and treatment at reflection points.

The ASC traps alone are more expensive than all of the combined treatments GIK is suggesting.

Has anyone used treatments from either  of these companies? Do you feel the ASC traps are worth the added expense?
For home, I like GIK much more than ASC, especially for their soffit traps vs. ASC tube traps, the effectiveness of their panels, cost and professional help.

However, I would say, start easy. If you think it’s a big deal, you can add more components as you go along.

If money is no object, and you are designing a professional listening space, ASC has a really big range of diffusion products I might consider.


Years back I built a ton of bass traps and misc. panels to try to fix the bass response in my basement.  I built 27 cylinder bass traps and quite a few panels as well.  If I walked into my basement listening room and just sat there for a few minutes my ears would start bothering me.  It felt like tiny muscle cramps.  I guess my brain didn't know what to do about the complete dead silence.  We're used to ambient noise and it's a strange experience to be without it.  

It was too dead in there and I tend to think poured concrete basements are a bad place for audio but I definitely learned something by getting it so quiet.  I also bought the behringer measurement mic and real time analyzer.  I had the bass trapped and equalized to +-1 db.  The process taught me that frequency response isn't everything.  

I do think that the best way to decide how much absorption you need is to start out with way too much.  Start out with a completely dead room and take absorption out until you start to hear the sound of the room and keep taking absorption out until you hear as much of the room as you want.  I expect beyond that is to bring in dispersion.  I tried a little bit of that but not a lot.  


Agree, go with GIK due to their good service and pricing. You can start with bass traps in corners behind speakers and panels at 1st reflection points. You will need either diffusion or absorbtion on the wall behind speakers to improve imaging. Hard to say without knowing your room.

Please tell us the size and layout of your room, type of floor and walls.

Also check out ATS Acoustics, Piper City, Illinois. Check out their web site and give them a call. Very helpful personnel and fair pricing. They offer DIY and completed traps, diffusers, and panels.

I am not afilliated, just a purchaser of their products.
Above advice to start slow, add until you reach "saturation" and then back off is on target. Any seller that suggests buying a ton of traps to start with is to be avoided, a la Ethan "Mr. Anechoic Chamber" Winer.

are so many room problems the topic should probably be broken up into a number of subtopics.And the number of audiophile devices that have been introduced to combat all those problems has grown as a consequence. you got your Echo Tunes, Corner Tunes, Mpingo Discos, Skyline diffuser, Tube Traps,s, Helmholtz resonators, crystals, Marigo VTS dots,SteinMusic devices, Schumann resonators, PWB devices, etc.
I think the point of the thread was just who to spend money with.

Simple topic. Simple answer: GIK.

More on this, I recently went to the California Audio Show in Oakland. ASC was a sponsor. Rooms were terrible sounding. Midrange sucked right out of them, and yeah, almost 100% tube traps.  Could not wait to get home.

Only a couple of rooms had modest treatment, those sounded the best to my ears.


Speaking of the homemade bass traps, I have about 15 of them that I'd love to give away.  They make a huge difference in a room.  They're the Risch style fiberglass insulation, wire fence, high loft polyfill and burlap.  If anybody wants to experiment this is a chance to do it for next to nothing.  The hard part is that they're bulky and you'd need to pick them up here in a northern Chicago suburb.  Some of them look fine, a few are a little rough.  They could be easily recovered or just stacked and then covered with a blanket or something.  There are a lot of ways they could be dressed up to look how you want them. 

They are all cylinders, not all exactly the same size.  There's a uHaul about 2 miles from here.  You could rent a 10 foot truck for $20 plus mileage to take them home in. 

I spent a lot of time and a few grand building these 10-15 years ago.  I've got little kids now and this isn't the priority it once was.  I just moved, got rid of my storage unit and now I'm looking for a home for these.  It's a great opportunity for someone with the interest and space.  Any takers?
I have Tube Traps behind the listening position. Also, there are Shatki Holographs in each corner of the room. All were effective, but the most effective of all were the ten Synergistic Research HFT’s placed in the room according to the directions.

I’d start there before I spent a lot of money on room treatments.

Trying to find the ideal locations for room treatments such as echo tunes, tube traps, Shakti Halographs, Skyline diffusers, crystals, DIY Helmholtz resonators, panels by ear is like trying to solve five simultaneous equations in seven unknowns. The best you can do by trial and error is find satisfactory locations but the chances of finding all the ideal locations with using a SPL meter and test tone to establish where exactly the offending pressure peaks are located are about zero to none. What you wind up with using trial and error is local maximums. This is one case where measurements save the day.