DIY Building Professional Acoustic Panels
Today we will go over reasons why you need to treat your room and tweak its acoustic properties if you intend to record sound or video which contains sound.
Not only are we going to talk about how you can build your own professional acoustic panels but also demonstrate the effect it has on your recordings!
What Are Acoustic Panels Used For?
Professional acoustic panels are really, really helpful to dampen reverb while recording audio/video. If you, however, want to treat a full room it can easily add up and leave you with a huge bill.
Can you DIY-built professional-grade acoustic panels?
Yes, it is possible and easier and cheaper than you might expect!
In this video, I compare different microphones and placements without and with room treatment. I will also lead you through the process of building your own acoustic panels and make your room sound more like a studio. The best part is the cost. One panel came in at a material cost of 15 Euros. That is super cheap =)
Commercial Audio Panel Solutions
Every DIY solution should be measured, compared, and contrasted to commercial solutions. While DIY often is cheaper, the time investment sometimes does not justify going the DIY route.
In this case, even if you are a professional artist, a media agency, podcaster, video editor, audio engineer,… the overall cost in time and material still beats any commercial solution. By building your own acoustic panels you also do not have to sacrifice any quality compared to commercially produced panels.
Professional Acoustic Panels available:
Note: this is by far the cheapest ready to buy solution out there. Fancier ones can be had for 3 times the price!
Audio Foam Panels:
The alternative to such larger panels is acoustic foam. It is relatively cheap to get, and you see it in almost every semi-professional YouTube video out there. For most people and YouTube viewers, this material signals professional audio like no other.
However, to get any effect out of it, you need to plaster these all over your walls and still will mostly diffuse very high frequencies only.
I also fell for this stuff in the beginning but quickly realized that this stuff does not cut it.
DIY Acoustic Panel Solution
DIY building your own acoustic panels undoubtedly is the most cost-efficient alternative here. DIY Acoustic panels give you the best bang for your buck.
You can customize your panels to fit your room and either go crazy with colors and patterns or make them barely noticeable. You can even make them look better than most commercial solutions.
Another bonus is that the installation can be made non-permanent. This allows for rearranging the room acoustics and to take the panels off for cleaning.
It is super easy to add extra air-space to create a gap between the soundproofing material and the wall. This can either be done within the frame or you add spacers to the frame to add some distance to the wall.
Additional air-gap-space reduces the sound energy even more and makes the acoustic panels more effective.
Benefits
Cost
There is the most obvious benefit to building your own acoustic panels and that is cost. I just spend around $20-@25 USD per panel. Considering the size of the panel, no commercial solution can keep up with the DIY method of building sound absorption panels. The ones that are affordable usually don’t give you nearly as much as you pay for them. Plus, the cheap solutions make your room look bad.
