# Treat my garage?



## Silas (Jul 30, 2011)

After signing a new lease today, I'm looking forward to setting up my theater properly, instead of in my dorm room. Unfortunately, the house is simply too small to fit my speakers and screen properly in a room, so my housemates and I have decided to follow in the steps of our neighbors and make our living area in the garage. This means that the garage, which i estimate to be about 20ftx20ftx20ft (super tall garage ceilings). The walls are just bare drywall right now and the floor is cement. Being that I built some very nice speakers and have a rather nice setup, I'd hate for all the echoing to ruin the experience. By no means do I expect to be able to replicate a true home theater, but I'd like to treat it as best as possible within a reasonable budget. What would be the best way to deaden the sound in the space? Other than the garage door guides, there is nothing on the ceiling or wall. I have absolutely no idea where to start. Insulation? Tons of acoustic foam? I'm really at a loss here...

EDIT: I should mention I don't intend for it to be sound proof. That's simply not possible with a big garage door. I just want to eliminate as much of the echoing as possible. The whole cu-de-sac is college students, so noise isn't really an issue anyway. I'll probably insulate the garage doors but that is about as much as I'll be able to do to the door.


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## bpape (Sep 14, 2006)

Is the room already drywalled or just the ceiling and exposed stud walls?

Acoustic foam is just going to suck the life out of the high frequencies and leave the bigger problems untouched. You'll need a fair amount of broadband bass control - especially with basically a perfect cube shape where all of the dimensions pile up on top of each other.

We'd also need to address early reflections, have a dead front wall, etc.


Bryan


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## Silas (Jul 30, 2011)

It's already got drywall up, thankfully, since I wouldn't bother doing anything if it wasn't. I'm not sure if it's a perfect cube (probably isn't, but I really couldn't tell and didn't have time to measure. It seems a little longer than deep. Although I'd like to avoid it, I could put up some 2x4's and make a wall over the front wall to make it deader. This would be quite expensive however and I'm wondering if a few well placed acoustic panels and bass traps would be able to accomplish the same.


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## bpape (Sep 14, 2006)

Deadening the front wall is used to stop reflections from the surrounds from contaminating the front soundstage and degrading screen lock. That is just one piece of the acoustic scheme. Doing other panels for reflections, broadband bass control, specific cancellations, etc. will also help, they're just doing different things than the front wall.

Bryan


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