https://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/PSSC22
It seems like they’d be pretty easy to make, and way lighter than QRD diffusors. I’m just curious to know if they are actually functional.
yeah i am wondering as well
If they don’t work you can use them as the world’s most expensive spice shelves…
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I honestly dont know boz, it seems that the design should work by looking at it.
However, the more i read up on and delve into acoustics the more confused i get!
The rabbit hole goes deep as i’m sure you know.
When i was researching my room modes and absorbtion for my studio i touched upon diffusion and qrd but it all seemed very frequency specific and incredibly difficult to undrstand and design correctly.
I’m sure a lot of company’s make these things that just look nice, and probably serve some sort of diffusion. But honestly, its a mathematical nightmare!
They LOOK way cooler than the usual; stuff but I’d love to know how they work (I mean how WELL).
According to the blurb, you get a “a low-level reverberant tail to create a full, well-developed sound even in small footprint spaces” with this SpaceCoupler. As I understood it, the idea of a diffuser was to scatter the reflections of sound waves in a way that they all don’t bounce of walls uniformly and then end up interfering with what you are hearing from the speakers. Therefore you have the foam diffusers and the plastic and wood diffusers that use non symmetric shapes to scatter the sound waves.
This thing seems to have a completely different function. It uses those pigeon holes to add a reverb tail to your sound to give your small room the feeling of being a bigger space. If you’re trying to tame your sound in your room, I would think taking away reverb / echo / reflections would be the way to go.
Yes but in a larger room combining diffusion with absorbtion you can get a better sounding (flat response) room than with just absorbtion alone.
Breaking up the soundwaves helps prevent nulls and dead point or areas of exaggeration.
But it depends directly on placement and distance from walls/ speakers/absorbtion etc.
Designed correctly the things work in harmony but the distances/ frequency/ densitys etc need to be worked out accurately to gain a good neutral room. Otherwise just fill it with bass traps
Look at your source and who built these. Russ would never put his name on something he wouldn’t stand behind, and there are very few acoustics engineers world with his proven level of expertise in this field. Russ also would not have created them if he didn’t believe there was a legitimate need in the market.
Ethan and GIK’s websites both say these are not as simple as measure boards and gluing them together.
Forget about Sweetwater…I’d call RBDG directly and ask one of the guys in his firm why these are different or possibly better than anything else being sold.
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This is where I feel like theory and practice don’t line up very well. The peaks an nulls that really cause issues in a room are all happening at low frequencies. But to have a diffuser that is breaking up 100Hz they’re going to be taking up half the room.
I’ve never A/B’d good diffusers before. It’s just an experiment that’s hard to do. But I have A/B’d crappy diffusers and I was surprised by the difference it made to the way the room sounded. I took before and after impulses, I just can’t find them right now. I’ll try to dig them up.
I guess my question is, are real diffusers even necessary? As long as you are breaking up the sound, especially from parallel walls, does it matter that much that the diffusers are “true” diffusers?
I doubt it matters, but its way over my head to understand either way. I got bored with the science and my room wasnt big enough for diffusers. But hell, they look cool and they definitely do disperse the sound so prob give you some form of possitive result even if they are diy or asthetic rather than mathematically correct.
Overall i think controlling low end more important like you said.
Looking forward to seeing pics of your nee build.
Good luck dude
With my qualifications as a rank amateur(!), I can at least tell you all what I went through in my room. I’m in a rather largish square room, carpeted with a set of built in closets opposite the mixing desk and monitors. For the first few months of me sitting and working there, I thought all was good with my sound. Everything I mixed was ridiculously bass heavy on all other systems apart from my monitors. Having no experience, I thought it was the problem of my monitors, so I just mixed with the bass lower in the mix. Except now I could actually not hear that bass at all in my own mixes through my monitors.
I predominantly record vocals for my YouTube channels, and noticed that any word I spoke beginning with the letter “w” would resonate in the most bizarre way in the room. I then played some tones through my monitors, ranging from 50hz to 300hz. As they were playing I moved my head from mixing position to the left and right, and then went to various places in the room to see what was happening. I realised that from my mixing position, just moving my head slightly to the left and right I could go from loud to almost no sound while the test tones were playing. It just so happened I was sitting in one of those nodes where the bass was cancelling out.
After this I built myself 4 large (100cm x 60cm) bass traps from rockwool. I placed 4 of them around my mixing position. The difference now is night and day. Although the cancellation of bass isn’t 100% resolved, I would say it’s about 90% resolved. Measuring the actual decibel level of the tones around my room, I can see that there is far less interference now. Only yesterday I finished building another 4 traps, which will be placed on the top edges of this room to try and get that remaining 10% if possible. My biggest problem is now the flutter echo, which is going to be hard to tame as the room is not dedicated to mixing, therefore any option of putting panels of foam all over it will not be met with enthusiasm from my wife.
Surprised in a good way or bad way?
Curious to know myself.
Dave Pensado has said he has to rely on his metering at times because he’s aware of some heavy flaws in his room. If he’s not above using meters, then neither am I 
lol. I was surprised to hear Andrew Schoeps and Yoad Nevo say they fall back on headphones to ballpark the low end levels before taking them to a rented control room with a good design for a final pass.
Cool man! What’s you’re channel? I’d love to check it out.
That gives me hope - if Pensado’s room isn’t 100% dialed in there might still be hope for me!!
My channel is a technical channel I made for my students, you can find it if you search for ESH ICT in YouTube. The videos are mostly about learning software, although lately the channel has started getting a little popular (unexpectedly) because I made some tutorials on video editing. I actually wouldn’t mind an opinion on the recording of my voice. It started off with me recording my voice on a Zoom H2 in my living room, and has now moved to a bass trapped room with a RØDE NT2a
found them. These measurements are from an empty office room with tile floor and bare walls. There was an empty lab bench in there. Before had nothing on the walls, the “after” had a package of these on the walls. Just 2" deep Styrofoam diffusers.
https://www.auralex.com/product/metrofusor-sound-diffusor/
Before:
After:
And here’s a spectrograph of the two.
Tom Lord Alge got some pretty amazing results out of a room many would have probably deemed unusable. This was his old room.
Here’s his new one…
Its a pretty normal room at his house in Miami.
When I realized that him, and a bunch of other guys had pulled their studios back into their houses, that gave me a little hope too!
BOZ… thats hard to believe it was that drastic a change. im skeptical.
so how many of these diffusers did you put up and which walls etcc. details. thats a huge change according to the clips.