Newsletter

Your Room Sound is Always Important. You receive this newsletter because you love great sound. But just because you love great sound doesn’t mean you want your living room to look like a recording studio. Maybe your studio workflow prohibits the installation of 20-odd TubeTraps and StudioTraps.

Guess what? You can fix your room sound while consuming a minimum of real estate and potentially enhancing the room decor. Corner-mounted Fractional TubeTraps and PanelTraps to the rescue!

What About Those Built-in Acoustics?

You may or may not know that some “TubeTraps” are not round, nor are they Tubes!

The original, authentic, archetypal TubeTrap is still a cylinder and contains all the elements of room acoustic control that we hold dear. But the application of an RC-time constant lumped parameter acoustic bass trap can be-and has been-applied to many shapes, sizes, and geometries. This week we will start to look at some non-cylindrical versions of the classic ASC corner loaded pressure-zone bass trap. This week’s focus: QuarterRound TubeTrap (QRTT).

What is a QuarterRound TubeTrap?

Similar to the classic cylindrical TubeTrap, a QRTT utilizes a flow-resistive membrane surrounding a capacitive air volume to increase efficiency of low frequency sound absorption. Just like it is with its tubular brethren, a larger internal volume permits operation to lower frequencies. And just like the classic TubeTraps, each QRTT contains a built-in treble range polycylindrical diffuser. The icing on the cake: because its shape is that of a quarter-cylinder, each one only takes up one quarter the space of the full-round model, despite operating across the same frequency range!

Shown below is a cross-section of a QuarterRound TubeTrap, which is similar to full-round and HalfRound, but instead is shaped like a quarter-cylinder.

Techron by Crown: Cutting Edge TEF Analysis System, ca. 1985.

You may remember the days when Apple IIe and Commodore 64 ruled. Then there were the subsequent rapid chip and electronics advancements that put a Pentium in every home by the dawn of the 21st century, and by 2020, more computing power in the palms of our hands than was used to land astronauts on the moon. But in 1985, an all-in-one calibrated audio analysis system utilizing Time Delay Spectrometry was pretty amazing and is very cool even today!

Here, the first image shows the reverberation time of the bare room and the second shows the room with QRTT corner treatment.

Observe how quickly the room sound decays after installing the QRTTs. The RT60 has been cut by over 60 percent between 35 and 550 Hz! And this is with zero panels on the wall, with corner treatment protruding a mere 8 inches into the room–greatly reducing the mud and boom sounds.

And below we see the cumulative spectral decay (waterfall, for short) of the empty room followed by the treated room.

“How do I get these in my room?”

Because of varying room dimensions, each order of QRTTs is built custom for your unique situation. Custom lengths can be made up to 8 feet long! Factors such as baseboards, crown moulding, picture rails, and architectural soffits can require further customization. Therefore, QRTTs are not available for online purchase at our e-commerce store. We prefer to help guide your choice of diameter and length to help assure the acoustic and aesthetic results you are looking for. We want to turn that frown upside down!

Custom work of this type commands a premium above that of our classic full-round TubeTraps. But how can you put a price on domestic tranquility when the goal includes immersive and realistic sound reproduction? Settle for nothing less than the best acoustics available—they also look the best!