I have my traps neatly mounted on my walls now. They were perfectly functional sitting on the floor for the last month, but MAN do they look better on the walls.
I have a mishmash of Realtraps and GIK stuff. I recall a conversation with the guys at GIK about the placement of full range traps vs absorption vs frequency limiter traps. He gave me the whole rundown on where you ideally place them, but at the end of the conversation told me, “…you know that where you put these doesn’t matter right?”. I was bit surprised. “What!?” He said something like “yeah, you just buy as many as you can afford and stuff as many as possible wherever you can. Given the size of your rooms, as long as you get a couple on your ceilings, it doesn’t really matter where you put them on your walls.”
So it appears that beyond having corner traps in the corners, and having something at your first reflection points, a lot of people seem to be heavily overthinking this. Last week I just measured the wall space as evenly as I could and simply hung them there. Working like a charm!
Good observation. The short answer is no, don’t ignore it.
There’s two ways my question to Ethan was different than my question to GIK. First, with Ethan, I was asking about all 6 corner traps in a left corner, vs splitting them up evenly (3 in the right and 3 in the left). Ethan’s response was that they work both ways, but work better when they’re distributed evenly.
The GIK traps in question weren’t corner traps, and I had just realized I forgot to add that. The guy I spoke with at GIK said he used to work with Ethan (his name was James). And he was surprisingly forthcoming and honest about why he thought Ethans traps were a little better.
What James said wasn’t going to matter, was over-thinking where to place huge load of 2 ft x 4 ft wall traps. In other words, if I have 6 traps mounted evenly across the middle of the ceiling or if they were slightly off-centered to be symmetrically above the monitors. Or if they were placed along the real wall 1 foot below where the wall meets the ceiling, or 2.5 feet below where the wall meets the ceiling. If I was gonna mount absorption to a regular house door, the absorption panel doesn’t care if door is made out oak, maple, or birch. It may matter theoretically on paper, but you wouldn’t hear a lick of difference.
So I was really asking Ethan a different question, but had I asked him the same questions I asked James, I’m sure he would have given me the same answer. That when it comes down to should I move this one a foot left, or this other one up two feet, it doesn’t matter. Just stuff as many as you can wherever you can!
Ah, cosmetics. If that guy tells you it doesn’t matter where they go, and if you can’t tell a difference with YOUR ears, it’d seem perfectly logical to me that you can hang them up on the wall.
Really, without measuring, you can only go by some guidelines. One universal guideline is that the farther off the wall it is, the better it works, because that’s where the velocity is. Putting it in a corner naturally sets it away from the wall.
Up against the wall, the air isn’t moving much at all, so putting a bass trap flat against the wall is kind of a waste.
