Why should you treat your room with sound absorbing panels

In short, sound-absorbing panels reduce sound reflections in mid and high frequencies which will make the sound in the room more "real".

When you’re producing content, especially content with sound, it’s important that what you’re hearing from your speakers is as close to “real” as you can get. Unfortunately, that may not always be the case, especially if your room is untreated.

Treating a room for acoustics is a simple but important step in getting your content to sound consistent across the multitude of speaker setups that your audience will hear it on. From headphones to phone speakers to a high-end sound system, you want your mix to sound clean.

Treating a room for sound simply means putting up acoustic panels and diffusers in order to reduce the number of sound reflections in a room that might distort the sound while you’re working on it.

For example, an untreated room might reflect a certain frequency of sound, either phase canceling a sound to make it “disappear” in the mix, or doubling up the sound making it seem louder. This can have ramifications if you fix this in the mix because in other rooms and on other speakers, this will show up as overcorrection which leads to muddy, distorted, or fatiguing mixes.

Using a simple solution like blankets or egg cartons can absorb or deflect some of these frequencies, but the range of frequency will be low. Using a product like Audiglow sound absorbing panels will catch a higher range of sound, ensuring that you won’t have issues with reflections or echoes while mixing your sound.

As a rule of thumb, a good mix can be spoiled by bad acoustics and poor monitoring. You’ll have to know if your room is “dead” or has high-frequency reflections so that you can remove them from the equation.

IF you're looking to take your productions to the next level, it pays to look in to optimizing your space for acoustics with acoustic panels or other sound absorbing strategies.