Noisy ceiling

A drastic / brutalist option would be to remove the ceiling and make a feature of the guts that have revealed. These can be treated / tightened etc. as appropriate. You could then make a feature of the exposed gubbins, or paint it all a neutral colour so that it blends in …

That is also my chain of thought, break the entire gypsum ceiling and start to look for the culprit but looking deeper, touching and feeling, i guess this will give me a better idea of what to treat.

Playing music in the room is going to be difficult during the work in progress, the speakers are very heavy and my speaker cables are not long, but i will see if there is something i can do.

Yes, setting up your system in a building site is not ideal. Perhaps just use a Muso and crank up the volume?
Good luck!

Unfortunately it is not easy to test room acoustics in my neck of the woods (Dubai), hence no way to test them, the only way is to go with the recommendation of specialist such as GIK with whom I am currently talking to, place an order, ship by air freight and hope it works, if it does not, then tough luck, am stuck with them.

Currently planning to go with Soffits (4 sets), floor standing Impressions (6 pcs) and maybe a few Impressions on the ceiling. But, still discussing with them and other vendors, so lets see.

Interesting, my brother has Muso, I’ll get my hands on one and see if it is powerful enough for me to have the same vibrations or not. I can see an experiment coming over the weekend :slight_smile:

Hi Hani, just a word of caution purely based on my experience- be careful not to put absorbers between the inside edges of your speakers on the front wall, as this will start to interfere/ kill the top-end of your replay. If your room is deep the front wall in this area ( between speakers) has very little deleterious effect and more suited to a delightful yet subtle piece of unframed art work :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: ATB Peter

PS. Is it a possibility to play with speaker positioning ie moving them slightly further away from the wall?

Hi PeterR, it is not really possible to play with speakers, i already have them 55cm from the back wall, i tried various permutations with both listening and REW measurements, however this seems to be the best, and i do not plan to have anything on the back wall between both speakers, might consider a diffuser but only if it bring a big impact.

I am attaching a drawing both 2D and 3D.

As you can see, i do have a very wide room, however not deep at all, my problem is actually with the depth.

You can see in the drawing, 2 portable Impression panels on the left, three on the right, and one Soffit on the right of speaker, and 2 in the back. This is not final, still WIP.

You can see below the latest measurements i did, one week ago, huge peak and huge delay on time domain at around 40 Hz, i know i cannot remove this, but would like to bring it down as much as possible.

Hi Hani.
Would be interesting to put your room dimensions into the Amroc Mode Calculator ( Suspect Lucas has already done this) without the alcovy bit, which is probably also throwing a tad of a spanner in the works. Please at least for my own personal curiosity, what is your floor to ceiling measurement? Intriguing stuff this :partying_face: Peter
It would be great if we could get Thomas down from his mountain top and chip in on far more important things!

Hi PeterR,
Lukas hasn’t actually suggested Amroc, however I have come across it in the past. Below is a pic.

As you can see, X does not fall in the Bolt area, one of my reasons for wanting to create a virtual wall using the Impression panels is to have a better room setup, this is demonstrated in the below pic where width is brought down from 9.5m to 4.5m, then X is almost touching the Bolt area.

The height is 2.8m.

If you follow the 17 x 10 x 23 for ideal room setup, them my 2.8m height should ideally have a width of 4.76 and a length of 6.44, so am very far from those ideal numbers, only way to get closer to them is by creating a virtual wall (Impression panel).

We’ll have to stop one day and just start to enjoy the music :laughing:

1 Like

Well well Hani, you have certainly done your home work :+1:t3:. Just persevere and the end game surely will become the enjoyment of your music. I am very happy with what I achieved after a year :sweat_smile:
All the best with it Peter

Thanks Peter, I have seen your system pics and the beautiful view to your garden, you have the luxury of lying down sipping a nice glass of red wine, well done. Am almost there, but not there yet… :laughing:

2 Likes

The BBC don’t used DX air conditioning or Fan Coil Units in their studios, they make too much noise. They use Chilled Beams.

Not useful info in regard to the OP situation. But, worth considereing by anybody intending to fit A/C in a listening room.

1 Like

Whilst trialling products may not be feasible, testing acoustics is just as easy there as in the UK! Get a copy of REW (full name Room Equalisation Wizard): it is free downloadable software, with excellent room acoustic measurement capabilities. You will also need a measuring microphone: the one recommended by REW (MiniDSP UMIK-1) is not very expensive (about £100 new, often available cheaper secondhand - and resellable similarly if no longer wanted). First thing is measure as is, at your ear position when listening, and see what that looks like. Otherwise GIK can even advise (I believe as a free service) what measurements are appropriate To assess room treatment, and are happy to receive REW measurement files to interpret.

I’d heard of chilled beam, but never (as far as I know!) come across them.
Are they ever used in domestic buildings? Retrofitable?

Good question.

I’ve no experience of chilled beam use residential buildings. But I’d be surprised if there aren’t people installing them. It’s not rocket surgery, :grinning::grinning: no more complicated than and very similar to UFH.

Chiller or Air Source Heat Pump, valve, room air temperature sensor, coolant flow temperature sensor, condensation detector and simple controller.

Hello Innocent_Bystander, I have done REW measurements, I have also posted the Spectrogram graph few posts above. I was referring to physically testing room treatment products such as bass traps since they are not available in Dubai, and the only way to get them is to air fright them from Europe (GIK, Vicoustics, Hofa, etc…), consider that air freight cost alone will be around 600gbp.

First google hit…

aldanube

No good?

Not really @AndyR, this company is a hardware trading company, been in their store recently, kind of like ACE Hardware.

You can find some acoustic treatment companies in Dubai, but I guess they mainly cater for night clubs and cinemas, they are not really interested in small home projects.

My home maintenance company has offered to bring their “acoustic” expert on Sunday and have a look, waiting to see their input and see if they can fix my problem. I will be updating with his comments once he has come down and taken a look.

Ah well. The website looked promising.

Can’t help thinking there must be someone catering for local recording studio, broadcast, media company etc market. Any local pro-audio businesses that might have the contacts?

Other than that, how about local architects?

Thanks @AndyR, a local contractor is visiting me with their “acoustic professional” tomorrow, will wait and see if they can shed some light and solve the problem I have.

If I do go down this road, I guess i will be starting a new thread with my experience, pictures of the work done, the before and after measurements and my personal view of the impact of all of it. I think it will be helpful for users who have gypsum ceiling or false ceiling and who happen to experience something similar but are not sure how to go around it.

It could also be that the Scala EVO has revealed this culprit since they are very powerful and very revealing , I do not recall having this a few years back when I had my Martin Logan Ethos speakers (which were electrostatic).