It’s 1/26/23, and I’m watching this while this video is years old. Just moved into my first apartment and noticed a lot of echoing. Was about to buy some sound panels until I came across this. Saved me money and gave me the opportunity to make a memory while I make some of these with my girlfriend. Not many people may read this, but a great DIY idea for all.
Aww that is the sweetest. I appreciate you coming to share the cute memory too! I also think this will be a really worthwhile day for me, and I can do it w my kid.
hey guys audio engineer here. Towels and sponge will only kill off high frequencies, leaving a honkiness and rumbling from like 1000hz and below. For a little more money (or free if you have it lying around) use housing insulation (rockwool). Also to make it work better, make an air gap between the panel and the wall! An inch of air gap has the same effect as an extra inch of panel thickness!
Hey there, I know its been a few years since you've posted this, but I just wanted to throw in that the testing you are doing for the sound panels are for sound isolation, not for sound absorption. If you look for professional sound isolation materials they tend to be very dense (which is why the towels worked very well, they were more dense than the foam you were using). The result is that you can have a drum tracking in one room, and barely hear it in the mixing room. This is different from sound absorption because those foam panels do a very good job at minimizing reflections. They take the sound and bounce it off in different directions, but not back at where the sound came from. To test this, it might be worth figuring out how to set up the microphone behind the speaker (so it doesn't pickup the speaker itself) with the speaker pointed at the material you are testing. At the end of the day, the towels worked really well for the job so no harm done. Just thought I'd offer my thoughts on why the test showed a different result. Cheers!
Yep, unfortunately, his test setup is completely wrong. In his test, a simple board would have won. And the foam has no effect at all in his test, because it only works in conjunction with a rigid surface. That is what it is made for. The way he used the foam is more comparable to a windshield for microphones.
I do a lot of this kind of testing at RF frequencies and it would be easy to poke all kinds of holes in his testing methodology, but personally, i think he did a great job here. In fact, he actually DID do a reflection test when he hung them on the wall an listened. The bottom line is, he found a low cost method to improve the sound and the results speak for themselves. He's not trying to open a testing facility. He's just trying to find an inexpensive, easy way to improve his sound quality and I think he achieved that very nicely.
How will this work on the low frequencies? (As in the repetition on oscillating fans ?) Very hard to deal with..! All night, every night for 2 yrs! Help!
@@sandrahammond5566 His testing only went down to 500 Hz. Foam and 1-2" of towels (i.e. dense cotton) will greatly improve reducing slap-back and flutter echoes. But they'll have very little impact below 250 Hz and almost none below 125. To affect lower frequencies, you need mass, depth, and quantity. Think of minimum 4" thick, better 6-8" thick, and best: go for 12" thick. The thicker, and the higher quantity - the lower your impact will be. With 4" inches at Left and Right first reflection points and ceiling above, you can start to make a significant difference. Then put 8-12" behind your speakers (pulled away from the front wall as much as possible, and absolutely out of the corners!) and in your front wall corners, and you'll have strong improvement. Do some mic testing. If you find (as is common) that low frequency energy is collecting near your walls, and particularly in corners, add 4-12" at these locations (i.e. vertical front and rear corners of room). You can leave an air gap and performance will improve (i.e. 4" with a 4" air gap might perform more like 6" of treatment). Have fun!
@@indolering I mean I made 4 panel for my home teather just for test and see if my surround sound will perform better, guess what it sounds absolutely better so I made 6 more for corners and sitting area. and remerber we are not professionals try to sell something it is just to perform better than average
@@sandrahammond5566 To deal with low frequencies requires bass traps and typically those are made from something a lot denser than the panels put on walls to deal with mids and highs. I just see this towel idea as a great option to rockwool panels.
[important info regarding the testing] Thanks for the comments everyone! Some pretty interesting discussion going on and it's all very friendly - thanks for that, TH-cam can be hostile sometimes so it's great to have such a warm audience. Now, there have been many comments pointing out that my test only measures *transmission* and not *reflection*, so is essentially unsuitable for my initial testing goal. While this is partly true, testing reflection is pretty difficult to do in a home environment, and the only way to do it that I can think of would be to spend a long time in the middle of a field with a powerful speaker and mic rig, which is really beyond the scope of what I was prepared to do for the video. My tests are not rendered pointless however - it would do no good to have only measured reflection, as the thinnest lightest material would have won (like foam), as nothing would have bounced back. Reflection and transmission need to be tested together to measure how much sound passes through, and how much sound is reflected back - this should give an indication of how much sound is absorbed by a given material. Regardless, only testing the transmission doesn't affect the outcome of the project at all, as any sound waves reflected by the panels themselves would have theoretically bounced off the wall anyway - again this is why reflection wasn't tested, as it doesn't matter so much for a panel setup (though would matter very much for a vocal booth). Open to hear any thoughts about it though! Keep up the great discussion. :) Matt
Hi Matt. I think the test was a good idea and well done. Studios will invest tens of thousands (and some hundreds of thousands) into professional grade sound insulation regardless what towel you throw at them. But for home user and TH-camr on budget this is great. Thanks a lot for sharing and keep up the good work. This is by far the easiest and most effective DIY project I have seen.
Love the video but please can you put in a warning. I had to literally throw my headphones off at the testing part it hurt my ears so bad. People will react differently ofc. but a little warning wouldn't hurt.
Following the same logic, I also think that the test should be pretty accurate. Of course if you would test something like sheet metal the same way, it would appear excellent since the sound would reflect from it and not get to the mic. But with the tested materials it shouldn't matter at all.
I think there is a significant difference between testing sound passing through a material and sound bouncing off of it. The results may change when microphone and speaker are boht on the same side or the material like they will be in the final application. But that is just an assumption ;)
You've got such a pragmatic, analytical mind! Now you should address how to soundproof a room as much as possible. So one could play loud music in it without disturbing others or how one could make it so we can't hear our neighbors. Everyone has noisy neighbors sometimes. Especially early in the morning!
You're wrong. He made acoustic panel in diy way. An acoustic panel is used to reduce the echo effect. Remember, it is not soundproofing. If you want to avoid noisy neighborhood, you should look into soundproofing rather than acoustic panels. Mass loaded vinyl is the solution for your problem.
“A towel, [The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy] says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-boggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.”
I love the scientific approach. It’s exactly what I need for recording my audiobooks. I just wish the lawyers would hurry up with the purchase of my house so I can get started. ;-)
haha I've always thought it weird to see those massive red carpet but it turns out your grandparents are geniuses. do the younger generation still do it and does it make the house more dusty?
Matt I must say that your channel is one of my favourite channels on TH-cam, they are always extremely well made and I can really tell that you are putting A LOT of work into them. They are often within reach for us lazy DIY:ers as well and I might actually do this one! Thanks for an awesome tutorial!
Blankets work very well too, especially the quilted ones used by shipping/moving companies. You can get shipping blankets at places like Harbor Freight. Another source for cheap blankets, besides your local thrift shop as mentioned in the video, is military surplus stores. The military surplus blankets won't be quilted. When doing interviews in large rooms or shooting video demonstrations in a kitchen, cover as much of the hard floors as you can with the blankets. You can pile them up below and near the mic as well as behind chairs where the interview is happening to cut down on reflections. Keep the camera pointed towards the subjects and your audience will never see the mountains of blankets hidden in the room.
Was reading apartment reviews about thin walls and need a soundproofing idea besides thick curtains for the windows and carpet for the floors, I needed something for the walls. This is amazing and will give me a fun diy craft to do while settling in
@Pablo Slalom this is what I would like to know. My party wall is dry wall only and neighbours are inconsiderate with noise! I have some underlay so may staple it to some battens and bang it through the wall!
“A towel, The TH-camr's Guide to the Internet says, is about the most massively useful thing a TH-camr can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold and unforgiving comment section; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Vidcon, inhaling the heady vapors of glory; you can sleep under it beneath the stars because you have spent all your money on a fancy camera; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow DSL speeds as you contemplate switching to a different ISP; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Algorithm of to avoid demonstrations (such a mind-boggingly stupid algorithm, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and you can hang it on the wall for sound absorption, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.”
Hi! Environmental acoustic technician here; the foam panel is known to have very poor performance. A variable density polyester mat fares much better... almost as good as yours, which is truly impressive. The added benefit of the towels is mass, which can be kind of an hindrance but also greatly absorbs pressure waves. Great job!
You’re an idiot. Men do more ironing than women. This ain’t the 50s anymore smh www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8633967/Survey-finds-52-cent-British-men-claim-ironing-home.html
I love this. I have never done testing, but I have always just hung up blankets and fabric on the walls when I lived in an apartment and had shared walls. It drastically cut down on noise transfer (and in places that weren't properly insulated- temperature transfer). And again, they can be found at the second-hand shops for relatively cheap and if you don't like the look of them you can just hang a prettier fabric on the top/outside and it works great. Might not look the coolest, but it is cheap and easy and can be done in multiple different ways from nailing blankets on the wall to layers of them to frames and on and on. This is also how I do curtains lol. But you can achieve trashy to classy with just a bit more money and/or effort. Thanks for sharing this with us and doing the fancy testing piece so people believe you lol ;) Cheers Edit: Also, wanted to say that you can easily still put shelving over top if you make less layering in places you need things to be flush to the wall (or you can even cut out holes- I try to just cut 3 sided holes in the smiley face direction so if I take the shelf down I can let the flap fall back down and mostly not look too bad).
haha. reducing reflection means it just passes through to the um, wall it's tacked to. and then reflected BACK. hence TRANSMISSION is key. not many people can afford an anechoic chamber wall. lol
Put the absorbers in the corners.. the distance between the material and the wall dictates which frequencies will be cought by it. A bass wave can be half a meter long as I´ve learned. Generally stopping the mid and high frequencies is not such a problem as having to deal with a rolling bass in a room.
Definitely interesting. A better way to test however would be to use a sweep tone and a time windowed measurement so that you can place the test material on a hard acoustically reflective surface on the ground and measure the impact of the material on reflections. You're measuring how much sound transfers through the material, not how much is reflected back. This may or may not be a good indication of how well it reduces reflections in a room. It's a better indicator of how well it might avoid complaints from neighbors. From your test we know it's good at sound containment, we don't know for certain that it's good at absorption. With a time windowed measurement both the loudspeaker and the microphone are mounted in the air above the test area. The loudspeaker directs sound down at the floor where it reflects back up to the microphone. Sound also travels a direct path from the loudspeaker to the microphone but this sound is time windowed out of the measurement data. The sweep tone starts and the software waits enough time for the sound to reach the floor and bounce back to the microphone. Prior to that time the direct sound hitting the microphone is ignored. Once the initial reflected sound arrives at the microphone the software filters out and ignores every frequency but the start frequency of the sweep. This filter window sweeps with the sweep tone so that only the frequency just arriving from the floor reflection is included in the data. The sound arriving along the direct path from loudspeaker to microphone is ignored. First take a measurement of the reflection off the hard acoustically reflective floor surface. This is stored as your reference. Next you place the various test materials on the floor and overlay each materials data with the reference data. The difference tells you how many dB down the reflection is across frequency. Instead of just a few discrete frequencies with no scaling, you get a nice frequency response graph indicating exactly how effective the material is at absorbing sound as a function of frequency. I think the towels probably actually do work pretty well, possibly better than the acoustic foam you tested. It's just that this test isn't a true valid way of proving it.
correct. His test only measured the transfer loss from one side to the other. For example, a sheet of plywood would have dominated these tests...allowing perhaps the least amount of sound to pass through...lol, but would do nothing to change the reverb time of the room. Its important when considering acoustic material to evaluate based on the measured change in reverb time when installed. Most acoustically significant material has published data in this regard. His before/after room sound evaluation gives perhaps a good indication. It would have been meaningful to test the equivalent surface area of the acoustic foam in the same room, which most likely would have had a tremendous impact as well.
Excellent testing. Thanks Matt! The towels work better because sound gets trapped in airspace. Towels provide excellent diffusion. I've never seen them deployed to quite this scale, nor tested against pro foam tiles, so thanks so very much for this. I'm a recording engineer and this info is solid gold. Cheers mate!
i'm years too late for this, but if you ever repeat something similar: it is actually easy to measure sound reflection. there is a free software called REW that can compute the reverberation time of a room. this is a good indicator for how much echo is in your room, and this is directly related to the amount of sound that is reflected vs absorbed in the walls. you can measure the reverberation time of a naked room, and compare it to a room having one of your panels, or one panel of professional sound absorption foam. i used this method to set up two of my rooms, and it works very good. you can clearly see (and quantify) the effect of various measures i took to reduce the reverberation time.
I'm going to make some of these to stop all the echos in my bakery shop, I'll get some prints on them to reflect what I sale instead of the walls reflecting voices. Thanks so much for the idea
Valid point, but its for a bakery shop, the bakery is behind it. But others may have to think about the insulation aspect which could be a benefit or hindrance depending on the individual situation.
Guess I made a bit of an assumption that the panels were going somewhere hot, oops! I agree that these panels (with prints of baked goods) would look excellent in the store part of your bakery.
If you ever doubt the importance of this - search youtube for the great white disaster - and see how fast non flame-retardant soundproofing burns and spreads!
So I tried doing this and I have a few remarks and stuff I did different. First off all I would first cut the towels to size, attach them to the frame and all the way at the end, attach the main white towel with the stapler. This way, you can cover the rough edges that you cut in the red towel as seen at 6:00. It also makes sure that you can position and stretch your towels inside and check for sewing mistakes. Most importantly, you can make everything perfect untill adding the front towel of the panel. This is important because, depending on your towel thickness, you'll see it looking at the panel from the side. In this case, the red towel would be very visible from the side.
I know it's been a while since you posted it but this tutorial was so high quality I almost started crying. The craft, the graphics, the editing, the professional narration and humor. It reminded me of what is good content. Thank you :)
I had a very strong "metallic" reverb in my room. I took 5 towels, folded them once and hung them up around the room. Obviously a temporary solution, but it took me 5 minutes and now my room has no obvious reverb. Towels are super good at absorption, thank you for the tip!
ik ya said temporary and ya probably fucked them off by now but what i did is use flags instead of a towl for the face of the frame looks really good they also use the flag thing at work to kill noise
Reading the comments below I am laughing and flabbergasted at the same time. Seems they haven't watched the whole video. The end part clearly shows the difference in the sound quality of the voice and room. He is not making his rooms sound proof he is just using the towels to reduce bouncing sounds of the walls. Come on you all appreciate his brilliant effort.
Would you suggest his findings can be used to keep sounds from exiting a room? I snore and I need to keep the noise in my room - it currently transfers through my thin drywall - thanks in advance for your help.
CDaniel J80 he got his towels free An most men have hand tools laying around Everyone I know have a shed full of tools it’s also much cheaper than acoustic panels that don’t perform all to well. Sound isolation is based on the wall you need a air space in between with 2 layers of sound sealer it would require destroying the thin wall and putting up a new one that cancels out any excess noise from in and out the room. It’s how a studio is usually made acoustic is just for looks it’s also very flammable so are towels but it’s all about the better isolation and there’s many ways to make acoustic yes it’s going to cost money just like everything else in this world but it’s the only way to prevent sound from entering and exiting.
There is a notable difference in sound quality. However, the testing method leaves something to be desired - he tests the sound going through the materials, rather than bouncing off it, which the end result panel is used for. Reverb does get reduced, but not as much as it could have been if a more relevent testing method had been used. Foam works better for reducing reverb, while towels are better (according to this test) for blocking sound. These are two different things.
thus sound proofing since thats the goal is to stop the vibration of sound and since its sound waves I think it worked as hoped! I decided last winter to build a sound proof room in my garage since its really long I had 2x4s up and insulation then fabric covering the insulation it was pretty quiet then I put on drywall and no longer absorbing the sound as much the vibration going up the drywall is what caused that so again he is correct in putting this together just saved me 90 plus dollars I would have spent on sound proofing panels going to pick them up tomorrow yes thank you sir for showing us a great way to save money
I have a professional Whisper Room in my home studio (the real deal, not the home cooked variety), and the best solution I found for blocking air conditioning noise from the outside was a couple of air mattresses. Yes, just plain $10 air mattresses. Two are on the side facing the air conditioner, one at an oblique angle to baffle noise from reaching my door. On the other side, another one wedged between the booth and the interior room wall provides even more isolation from the cement apartment. On the inside, I block noise from the ventilation system with a layer of garage floor foam. Total cost: about $70. And the noise floor inside dropped from about -46dB to lower than -72dB. So low I don't even need to use the noise gate in my pre-amp anymore, which prevents those frustrating "chops" at the starts of words. I'm thinking of adding these panels to the wall in the room to kill noise even further. Brilliant video.
Thanks so much. I live in an apartment and really need a sound dampening booth because I attempt / experiment / play different types of flutes and a bit of guitar. I play at the lowest possible volume now which is so low I can barely hear myself. I think this technique may be helping me improve in certain areas but I can't hear myself enough to really know. Do you think I would dampen enough sound that my neighbors would not hear if I use air mattresses for the walls and roof on a small booth? I could add towel panels inside as well. I still plan on playing at an extremely low volume and only from 5pm to 8pm. I could either make the "Air Booth" in a spare bathroom or bedroom. I'm not sure if my neighbors ever hear me but they probably did a little until I started using the super low volume technique. I'm on the first floor. Thanks again!
*The simplicity of this testing and project is pure genius. I appreciate your contribution to youtube. Keep up the good work and thanks for the ideas* DexterousX
1. Manly men who did their own sewing once ruled the world. They were called the Royal Navy. They even had little kits (called "hussifs," short for "housewife") full of sewing supplies. 2. A guitar teacher of mine who did a lot of recording at his house hung up two layers of heavy curtain all around his "music room." Sound from an amp or acoustic guitar (or whatever other instrument) would travel through the first layer of curtain, be attenuated, through the second layer of curtain, be attenuated some more, bounce off the wall, hit the second layer of curtain and get attenuated again, then pass through the first layer of curtain, attenuated yet again. This technique _dramatically_ reduced the reverberations in the room, which can be difficult, especially in the rectangular prism-shaped rooms favored by architects.
There's a lot of misunderstand going on in the comments. Given foam materials, the walls of the room you're in reflect the sound, not the foam. This is why he's testing the permeability of the materials, the sound needs to get to the wall and bounce off to create echo. Materials can reflect sound which would make this test obsolete, but I'd be willing to bet these types of materials sound reflection is arbitrary. Like I said, The foam does not significantly reflect sound itself, if you built a room out of foam or towels there would be no echo, because these materials don't reflect sound enough to create one. So we're not testing how much the materials do or don't reflect sound, we're testing how much they let sound pass through, because we know these materials won't reflect sound to a significant degree.
That's true. It would have been good to have tested both sound transmission AND reflection though - I tested sound transmission because it's quite easy to do. Not sure how I'd go about testing reflection, and none of the critics have mentioned how I could do that. Had I found a way to test reflection, and then only tested reflection, it would have been a pretty pointless test as the thinnest lightest material would have won (like foam), as nothing would have bounced back. I guess the two need to be done together to measure how much sound passes through, and how much sound is reflected back - that should give an indication of how well sound is absorbed by a given material.
Great job on your videos! Really enjoy them :) I work with some really sharp acoustic engineers and I am asking them about this very idea which is quite interesting. I would think (this is just a thought) that one could create a sound in a small enclosed space (thinking a 8' plywood box). Then after a second or so turn the sound off but leave the mic on and measure the remaining sound. Then compare those results to different materials
This is true, but ultimately it doesn't matter. If you have awesome absorption, no reflection will occur. The sound would have to make it through the towel dampening frame, hit the wall, then make it *back* through the frame again. Doubtful tbh that it could ever do that unless it was extremely loud.
You are correct, in a way, but also consider this: A concrete wall does a magnificent job of blocking the *transmission* of sound (you can barely hear what's going on in the other room when the walls are concrete) but they are absolutely terrible at damping the reflection of sound (standing in a concrete room, the reflections/reverb would be hideous). In other words, blocking the transmission of sound is not the same as blocking the reflection of sound (a good sound transmission blocker isn't necessarily a good sound reflection damper). In the case of this video, towels are fairly good because they act as both blockers of transmission as well as dampers of reflections (sound doesn't reflect easily off the surface of a towel), but the testing he does is virtually pointless from a scientific point of view. He's simply not testing the material in an applicable setting. Again, for his testing, he could have put a concrete barrier between the microphone and the speaker, and it would have shown magnificent sound blocking behavior, but putting concrete on the walls would only make the reverb in the room much worse.
Cave Johnson Because we already know that the materials don't reflect sound what you're saying doesn't apply. The reason your example of using concrete works against his method is because concrete reflects sound, if we use materials that don't reflect sound in the first place, there's no need for designing a test that accounts for the variable of sound reflection.
Ok, I really hope people read my comment, and take precautions. I'm not saying you CAN'T use this method, just be mindful of the risks and take steps to minimize them. 1) Fire hazard. These can be hung on walls, but do *NOT* put them in a spot where there are outlets that are going to be used. Keep all electrical wiring away. Keep any and all sources of heat away, don't put them over heating vents or radiators, and obviously, no open flame. 2) Moisture. If your studio or office or youtube-video-making-hole-in-the-wall is not humidity-controlled, well, it should be, for the sake of all the equipment. This could be as easy as getting a meter and finding out that it just happens to stay at around 30-38% ambient humidity all the time, so you don't NEED to get any additional equipment. It *COULD* be more complicated, if the humidity gets high, you need a dehumidifier (you can obviously turn it off while you're recording) in that room. High humidity in a room with a bunch of towels hanging on the walls can be a huge problem, leading to the growth of mildew and mold, even deadly black mold spores that will go airborne the moment you turn on a fan or do anything that shakes the towel-panels around a bit. There IS a better option, but you can't quite do it for 5 bucks a panel. Do exactly what he did with the wood frame, but then put in some rigid fiberglass insulation (Owens-Corning 707 or 705 or 703, or Roxul if you have a bit more to spend). The white towel on the outside is an acceptable covering, although in won't be necessary, and you could cover it cheaper with basically any dense fabric (ask about the fabric's resistance to fire and moisture) from the fabric store. You obviously need to cover BOTH front and back of these panels, so you aren't getting dust from the insulation in the air. Use hot glue around the edges to make a decent seal, and if you are using speaker-cloth or a similar stretchy nylon or rayon type fabric, maybe wrap two layers to contain the insulation well. This will raise the price of your acoustic treatment to around 20 bucks a panel (4' x 2' panels), but it will also do a far better job inhibiting the reverberation and comb-filtering of the really low frequencies, which are the ones that are most problematic for recording audio, and also LISTENING to audio, if you are editing, mixing, mastering a musical track for your video, or if you came to this video because music is what you do and why you need acoustic treatment in the first place. Good luck everyone. Feel free to ask me any questions, if you don't get an answer within a day, it means I didn't get a notification, so just post it on my channel.
I'm trying to reduce outside noise from coming in a 5X6 window. I have big pieces of styrofoam packing panels, 1-2 inch thick. If I cover these with towels or blankets, can I hang them in the windows? Tx.
what about doing the towel on the outside but putting foam in the middle? cut the foam to size and add hot glue or even cold clue in between around the edges? saves time on cutting a sewing towels and would probably work just as much albeit probably just a bit less. the towels work so great because of the fibers on it which act like sound catching fibers to help reduce the noise, all you would need is the outer towel to slow down the sound and the foam can do the rest with like said maybe slightly less successful results but still effective enough right?
Unfortunately, the use of tapestries in the Middle Ages was a lot more practical, since they were necessary on the walls and sometimes doorways in winter months for insulation and proper heating. They were aesthetically pleasing because no one wants to look at some plain rags on the wall. Tapestries told stories, usually they had depictions of biblical events, or hunting scenes and so on and since they were so portable (unlike the heavy large paintings of the time) they were rolled up and carried around with people also as a status symbol. But it is nice that someone’s mind was blown, hope that facts have mended it.
@Don Mega I knew a man some years ago that went to Africa on a missionary trip for a week. Before he left, his wife loaded the food up with garlic. While he was in Africa, he sweated the garlic out of his body which it annoyed his human companions. It was apparently even more annoying to the local vampires. He was the only one the mosquitoes left alone.
Who would have known that a video made 6 years ago would help me, an almowt 47 year old, starting on a dream of mine!!! Thank you so much for this !!! We al have to start somewhere!!
Matt, you Yorkie genius, thanks for the vid! BUT (here it comes), as one of those fore mentioned media professionals who has done fairly serious research into acoustics over the past 20 years, let me tell you that the problem area for sound build up is in the sub 150hz range. This is were products like Owens Corning 703 really do their work. I'd like to see a test of your towel absorbers with these low frequencies that are so hard to mitigate against the OC 703, and/or a sound absorbing rockwool. And FYI, I used a giant 6 inch absorber composed of rolled up clothes for over 7 years, lols, and now use hanging packing blankets, about a foot off the walls, of my recording room.
The goal was to tame a room in the voice frequency range! not many voices have too much power at 150! Certainly not Matt's! - But, reducing all frequency reflections back to a recording microphone when doing the sort of recording Matt is doing is preferable. That said, some 'live' feel is also not to stop the vice from being too intimate and dry. Reduction of standing waves is also useful in the lower frequencies, but, it's the early and mid reflections that cause the most damage to voice recordings.
Like you said, the goal is to reduce all frequency reflections/build up, not just mids and highs. I'd bet the towels might be moderately effective at low hz. It is fairly easy to tame higher frequencies, the challenge is the lows, and I'd have liked to see a complete test including the challenging areas. And male voices certainly do have power in the sub 150 hz range, and failing to reduce buildup in that range will leave a stuffy muddy recording. The idea is broadband absorbers should reduce buildup at all frequency ranges. And unless you completely cover every square inch of wall, ceiling and floor space you'll have a degree of reflection and liveness. A whole lotta words to say, I wish he did a full spectrum test including the difficult area. RETEST! :)
alpha numeric I understand what your saying, and partially agree; however this is not an SOS test, neither is this the SOS channel. Matt does easy to follow DIY projects that just about anyone can do with moderate results. For the audience type, his test demonstrated that different materials have varying levels of success in absorbing and dissipating energy thereby reducing reflections to a budget microphone in the type of acoustic space the average content creator is working in - in this context, the test was fine as a demonstration and the resulting DIY product was a success to some degree also. Now; If Veritas were to publish the same set of tests ect.... Then the commentary would be very valid and just. Let remember the level the channel is aimed at. IMHO
I use the Owens Corning 703 or comparable. You get it at Heat and air places because the same material is used to insulate heating ducts. It's much easier to work with and cheaper than towels. That said the difference in the voice sound was impressive and there are many people who can get some old towels who won't go to the trouble to use compressed fiberglass. Thanks
I have just made a new room in My house to play drums uncaring about neighbors, And I was about to buy some acoustic sponge, spending 200€. You just saved my wallet. Thanks a lot
"We're going to use a long piece of wood, cutting it down into shorter pieces." Yep, that's about what I understand out of every woodworking video on TH-cam.
A very comprehensive and interesting test. The only drawback I can see from your analysis is that in the garden you are testing how effective the materials are at preventing sound being transmitted whereas inside you are using them to prevent sound being reflected. You could well come up with a structure which was a great sound insulator (the first case) but was still very bad at preventing reflected sound (the second case). Just something to think about!
From the real-life test in the video we can see that the towel works pretty well but I do agree with Andrew the test is for isolation not absorption. According to this test a triple insulated glazing window would show even better performances as there is vaccum between the layer, which should give near perfect acoustic isolation. However the absorption of such a window should be as terrible as any window since the surface is almost perfectly flat, therefore reflecting sound nicely. Still the DIY panels look good, are cheap and seems to do the job. Plus if you want to combine your home studio with a sauna, you already have the towels.
Yes he measured transmission not reflection. In his use case he is trying to reduce the sound reflections from the wall. Drywall is very dense and a good sound reflector. If you reduce the transmission through the panel, the sound won't reach the walls to be reflected back into the room. The preferred material for commercial and DIY panels is Roxoul fiberglass batts which is very dense. It's also used inside walls to soundproof studios. Without doing testing, I would guess 6 layers of towels would approach the density of Roxoul. Certainly closer than the other materials he tested. As a bonus, not only reduces wall reflection, but helps sound proof walls too. Less transmission from the other side of the wall. Too much density like MDF board and it becomes reflective. Softer materials like Roxoul and towels also tend to absorb sound because the porous material diffuses the sound internally. Basically converting sound energy into heat. This is why furniture like couches and mattresses help the acoustics of a room. A bare wall tends to reflect sound back onto the same path it came from. The echo is caused by the longer path and slight delay to the microphone. Convoluted foam panels commonly used to reduce reflections, works more by diffusing the sound rather than absorbing it. Sound still reaches the walls, but is reflected back in many different directions. Sound bounces around the room and cancels itself out. Less sound reflects directly back to microphone for less echo effect.
From. what I've been reading there are several elements to improving sound in a room. First is a sound barrier from say a neighbour, and that is somewhat what you are doing placing a mic behind the barriers. People who sell the acoustic foam explain that the whole way it works is that it should be attached to a hard panel (the harder and thicker the better).I used plywood or MDF. The sponge absorbs my voice and the wood gives a hard surface that echoed but keeps my studio quiet. Then there are reflective baffles which are generally a hard surface of all random angles. This diffuses the echo by bouncing it around the room but mainly away from the voice. By being a very hard surfactace it also blocks the noise too. Your experiment and idea to use towels is awesome and my next build I will be using this for sure. I do think adding a back panel could help neighbor noise also.
@@KennyFubaralo The problem with this is that the paint tends to reflect sound and the canvas is usual not porous enough to let sound through, so the towels will have minimal to no effect. You would basically just be hanging paintings, which would be pretty, but not great for sound absorption
Nicolas Barrows you can have a towel customization service anyway.. it’s unusual not too expensive however and recreates a canvas if you wish a drawing
DON'T DO IT LIKE HIM! THIS WILL MAKE YOUR ROOM EVEN WORSE! IT IS NOT ABSORBING THE LOW FREQUENCIES WHICH YOU WANT TO CONTROLL IN YOUR MIX. HE JUST ABSORBING THE THE HIGHER FREQUENCIES. THIS WILL UNBALANCE YOUR ROOM EVEN MORE!
I was looking for cheap options to treat my room, and I was getting ready to throw in the towel (pun very much intended) but then I came across this great video! Thanks for the help!
I feel the purpose of his video was to find a simple, easy to do, cost effective method, and everyone in the comments is freaking out saying he did everything wrong.
I don’t understand how people come to channels like this, especially when the maker is very clear about the fact that their ideas are for the ‘average’ Joe with plans that can b made for less expensive than buying from a company, which I thought was made very clear by most of these channels subject title of “DIY - Do It Yourself”...and the replies from people who are upset that the makers didn’t use the most modern science including testing that most college engineers wouldn’t understand...using the most sophisticated testing instruments out here - I thought the whole idea of ‘DIY’ pretty much meant ‘copy some cool stuff for cheap with acceptable results by the average guy/girl? When the video showed the difference between the sounds heard before and after these panels were just as valuable as test results from an expensive measuring instrument these people insist on using. Obviously there are degrees of ‘diy’ ideas, from using the cheapest material one can find to using only the best quality one can afford...common sense usually produces the self-explanatory nature of each individual video on TH-cam, so I thought. *I think this guys videos r some of the best diy videos on TH-cam, especially for the fact that I can SIMPLY and very cost-effectively manufacture these ideas with premium results.
As EWF said, "Thats the way ... of the world!" Today, everrry idiot, every where feels like they just HAVE to talk shit (criticize) n pick every theory, every ppl's videos apart. Smh. We've TRULY reached epidemic proportions with this bullshit. Sad.
DIY Perks asked about how to test reflection. the answer - set up microphone to record in the room then inflate a balloon up and pop it. then do the same exact thing with the panels in the walls. make sure you're inflating the balloons the same exact amount. to see the results, brinh the audi into your audio editor and look how the decibels drop over time. That should show you how fast the echo in the room is dying out over time based on treatment. I believe true acoustician use a particular balloon and microphone but maybe you'll be able to see something with just the general microphone that you're using in this video and standard balloons as long as they're being inflating at a consistent amount. that's my 2 cents. Might build some of these for my room. as my teacher would say "fuzz it up" to decrease echos.
this video rocks. I'm probably just not that well-read, but I don't understand all the comments. He clearly demonstrated how the panels absorbed reflections, as well as isolating/soundproofing. If anything we got a double whammy over here, Tom. Dude, thanks for the video!!
What I mostly enjoy , after every inspired Matt's video, which I absorb with enormous pleasure, is the plentitude of various really funny and clever comments, fact that reflects the spiritual and humorous level of a majority of the followers. Which also leads us to some interesting conclusions about Matt and his job!!, isn't it? Well done, good ol' Matt! Cheers from Greece!
you did the right thing. there are enough comments showing why his tests are not what he says they are. for sound deflection your panels will work perfectly. he is testing for sound absorption with the side effect of the material also deflecting a good amount. use your ordered matrial and see the towels you have as an extra option :))
I think this guy is just elegant when it comes to making videos and it's a rare quality not found in many hosts these days. Cheers mate. Also, for a youtuber or content creator who just got a 250$ condensor or a Zoom H5 for his/her vocals echo is certainly a main concern and only people who listen/track/record 24bit audio in a studio environment will ever have to face the challenge of getting that perfect deflection to absorption ratio that makes their recordings wide and crisp. You wouldn't need to fret that much if you weren't such a professional. On the other hand if you just wanted to soundproof your room then this might not be the solution for you. You would be better off layering chipboard and foam an inch or so away from your walls and reinforcing the doors so thwy don't leak, or.... you could always just find a better place to jam :p just sayin... I personally just open up my cupboard where all my clothes are and play my acoustic facing the cupboard so the sound doesn't escape off the room walls and it doesn't so there's another idea for guitar players.
Amazing! Only thing I would be worried about is possibly mold as atmospheric moisture gets trapped in the cotton towels (organic material is beloved by mold) and the darkness inside the panel helps mold truly flourish. I guess it will most likely be a non issue if you live in a dry climate.
The towel does a good job as sound blocking, which the initial tests are showing. It coincides with the concept that more mass equals better sound blocking, the towels are obviously heavier than any of the foams. For pure sound blocking the best material is usually something like MDF or Chipboard. The towels also however double up as sound absorption as well, meaning it changes the inside sounds in a room as well, because the surface of the towel is soft and fluffy, it reduces sound reflection. The acoustic foam is only meant to deal with sound reflection for inside a studio, it isn't meant to have any property in sound blocking property, open cell foams basically have no sound blocking property.
I think the reason that the towels work so much better than foam is that they are somewhat loose where the foam is rigid. Materials that can move will translate the energy in sound vibrations into silent tiny movements. Rigid materials can't do this, so more is sound energy can pass through. Great video BTW!
You made an important mistake: There is a major difference between blocking the sound and preventing the reverb. If you judge a material just from it's ability to block sound waves, then the best material for that application is lead. In fact, lead is actually used to make soundproof rooms. That does not mean that the room sounds good at all... Indeed, a room covered with lead panels would be a nightmare of reverb. If you want to test the attitude of a certain material to prevent the sound from reverbing, then you should put the microphone next to the cabinet (preferibly a highly-directional mic) and use it to capture the "bounce" of the sound. And you will notice that the professional acoustic foam does a GREAT job at absorbing the sound WITHOUT making it bounce backward. That being said, the solution actually works and i will absolutely try it. I just wanted you to know that you have made a "soundproof test" to judge something that wasn't meant to be soundproof, but rather "reverb-proof".
Love the video! Good test. Although I must inquire rather than testing (through) the material. Test with speaker facing material and microphone behind the directed sound to simulate the purpose of the project. Thank you for investing time in R&D! Can't go wrong with a towel!
Master UnitCharles ☝️ agreed, wouldn’t have commented had I read this first. Take all the testing out of the video and the towels are still a good budget way to go! But in this test, drywall would ‘perform best’
Stereo mic mixed down to mono or duplicated to the other channel would be much better and takes 2 seconds to do and considering the topic is how to get better sound, I don't think that the comment was particularly wrong. This would be like someone doing a video on lighting and having a terribly under exposed image. :)
This is a brilliant test that goes to show that the tighter weave of cotton has much better sound absorption than the expensive sound acoustic foam that you find even in high-end studio baffles. Absolutely ingenious trial and error testing with good equipment. I will incorporate this excellent method in my new ambient electronic studio. Thank you very much!!!
In the old days, even before your parents were born, hanging carpets on the wall had three advantages; it dampened sound, retained heat and it looked great. It’s a shame we don’t reuse our old carpets now. A simple cleaning would extend their lives 100%.
Generally yes, but practically - Im pretty sure natural materials behave differently than plastics. All those carpets back then were out of 100% cotton at least - or wool. And 99% of carpets nowadays are made out of 100% plastic.
Thanks. Intelligent analysis not sold on marketing options. Good. Another excellent method is white melamine scrubbing sponges, some 25 mm thick. Stuck to the ceiling in various patterns with small gaps (which enhance sound asorption from their sides as well), they look cool. I ordered three cubic meters from China (very cheaply because of amount) and did the job myself. With a helper, you work out a rapid 6-spot gluing method and the pieces fly up the ceiling. Weight zero. Improvement? Stunning. Imagine the echo in a bare concrete box (as the hall was) and then with the sponges on the ceiling. Sound is perfectly muffled. Melamine is not your usual overpriced sponge (which has been analysed as being quite useless here) but a top level sound absorber due to its open cell micro- structure (unlike sponge). Very cheap in mass, very light and the extra benefit being never having to buy another kitchen sponge...
THAT. IS. NUTS! Loving your content. I usually don't have the time to make some of the projects that you do but definitely doing these for my own filming / recording studio 👍👍👍👍👍👍
Interesting results! Would have been nice to have acoustic rock wool (batts) included as that is a common cheap/DIY alternative also. Thanks for taking the time to perform and share this experiment :)
YOU JUST ROCKED MY WORLD! I literally almost purchased some foam just hours ago. I record music at home and am desperately looking for inexpensive sound DIY's! If you could ever consider doing a vocal booth for recording, I would cry tears of joy! PLEASE consider it will you?! :) THANK YOU FOR ALL your content!
It’s 1/26/23, and I’m watching this while this video is years old. Just moved into my first apartment and noticed a lot of echoing. Was about to buy some sound panels until I came across this. Saved me money and gave me the opportunity to make a memory while I make some of these with my girlfriend. Not many people may read this, but a great DIY idea for all.
Let hos Knows if it works or not
Congratulations, I hope you're enjoying your new home! (And that the panels are working)
Did they work?
Aww that is the sweetest. I appreciate you coming to share the cute memory too! I also think this will be a really worthwhile day for me, and I can do it w my kid.
aww
hey guys audio engineer here. Towels and sponge will only kill off high frequencies, leaving a honkiness and rumbling from like 1000hz and below. For a little more money (or free if you have it lying around) use housing insulation (rockwool). Also to make it work better, make an air gap between the panel and the wall! An inch of air gap has the same effect as an extra inch of panel thickness!
That's physics for you. You understand that sound is a wave.
@@chrissmith7259 well, you know... AND PARTICLES... but you’re most certainly right.
@@pwnwin You're thinking of light, not sound.
@@jimnasium452 oh shit i was. Funny how hard I be trippin sometimes.
the graphs show a significant reduction at 500hz with 3 towels, though.
Hey there, I know its been a few years since you've posted this, but I just wanted to throw in that the testing you are doing for the sound panels are for sound isolation, not for sound absorption. If you look for professional sound isolation materials they tend to be very dense (which is why the towels worked very well, they were more dense than the foam you were using). The result is that you can have a drum tracking in one room, and barely hear it in the mixing room. This is different from sound absorption because those foam panels do a very good job at minimizing reflections. They take the sound and bounce it off in different directions, but not back at where the sound came from. To test this, it might be worth figuring out how to set up the microphone behind the speaker (so it doesn't pickup the speaker itself) with the speaker pointed at the material you are testing. At the end of the day, the towels worked really well for the job so no harm done. Just thought I'd offer my thoughts on why the test showed a different result. Cheers!
I’m no expert on this (but I am an engineer) and I straight away thought this.
Same here dude. I was like "shouldn't he be testing for sound reflection somehow? And not the ability to cover up sound? "
Yep, unfortunately, his test setup is completely wrong. In his test, a simple board would have won.
And the foam has no effect at all in his test, because it only works in conjunction with a rigid surface. That is what it is made for.
The way he used the foam is more comparable to a windshield for microphones.
you just saved me a lot of work, I was considering doing this.
However the results of the towels are still very impressive!
@@TrailBikeMike I thought about this option... what if a guy made theses panels to fit inside the wall between the studs? Your thoughts?
“There is nothing in the universe so massively useful as a towel.”
Don't forget to bring a towel!
most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. 💁🏿♀️
Thanks for all the fish!
You're a towel
@@makeitthrough_ Mommmmm that man call me a towel!
I do a lot of this kind of testing at RF frequencies and it would be easy to poke all kinds of holes in his testing methodology, but personally, i think he did a great job here. In fact, he actually DID do a reflection test when he hung them on the wall an listened. The bottom line is, he found a low cost method to improve the sound and the results speak for themselves. He's not trying to open a testing facility. He's just trying to find an inexpensive, easy way to improve his sound quality and I think he achieved that very nicely.
How will this work on the low frequencies? (As in the repetition on oscillating fans ?) Very hard to deal with..! All night, every night for 2 yrs! Help!
@@sandrahammond5566 His testing only went down to 500 Hz. Foam and 1-2" of towels (i.e. dense cotton) will greatly improve reducing slap-back and flutter echoes. But they'll have very little impact below 250 Hz and almost none below 125. To affect lower frequencies, you need mass, depth, and quantity. Think of minimum 4" thick, better 6-8" thick, and best: go for 12" thick. The thicker, and the higher quantity - the lower your impact will be. With 4" inches at Left and Right first reflection points and ceiling above, you can start to make a significant difference. Then put 8-12" behind your speakers (pulled away from the front wall as much as possible, and absolutely out of the corners!) and in your front wall corners, and you'll have strong improvement. Do some mic testing. If you find (as is common) that low frequency energy is collecting near your walls, and particularly in corners, add 4-12" at these locations (i.e. vertical front and rear corners of room). You can leave an air gap and performance will improve (i.e. 4" with a 4" air gap might perform more like 6" of treatment). Have fun!
Exactly, his test is crap because it doesn't reflect real-world sources of noise.
@@indolering I mean I made 4 panel for my home teather just for test and see if my surround sound will perform better, guess what it sounds absolutely better so I made 6 more for corners and sitting area. and remerber we are not professionals try to sell something it is just to perform better than average
@@sandrahammond5566 To deal with low frequencies requires bass traps and typically those are made from something a lot denser than the panels put on walls to deal with mids and highs. I just see this towel idea as a great option to rockwool panels.
[important info regarding the testing] Thanks for the comments everyone! Some pretty interesting discussion going on and it's all very friendly - thanks for that, TH-cam can be hostile sometimes so it's great to have such a warm audience.
Now, there have been many comments pointing out that my test only measures *transmission* and not *reflection*, so is essentially unsuitable for my initial testing goal. While this is partly true, testing reflection is pretty difficult to do in a home environment, and the only way to do it that I can think of would be to spend a long time in the middle of a field with a powerful speaker and mic rig, which is really beyond the scope of what I was prepared to do for the video.
My tests are not rendered pointless however - it would do no good to have only measured reflection, as the thinnest lightest material would have won (like foam), as nothing would have bounced back. Reflection and transmission need to be tested together to measure how much sound passes through, and how much sound is reflected back - this should give an indication of how much sound is absorbed by a given material.
Regardless, only testing the transmission doesn't affect the outcome of the project at all, as any sound waves reflected by the panels themselves would have theoretically bounced off the wall anyway - again this is why reflection wasn't tested, as it doesn't matter so much for a panel setup (though would matter very much for a vocal booth).
Open to hear any thoughts about it though! Keep up the great discussion. :)
Matt
Hey Matt,
How would this compare to rockwool type absorbers you see all around?
Hi Matt. I think the test was a good idea and well done. Studios will invest tens of thousands (and some hundreds of thousands) into professional grade sound insulation regardless what towel you throw at them. But for home user and TH-camr on budget this is great. Thanks a lot for sharing and keep up the good work. This is by far the easiest and most effective DIY project I have seen.
Love the video but please can you put in a warning. I had to literally throw my headphones off at the testing part it hurt my ears so bad. People will react differently ofc. but a little warning wouldn't hurt.
Following the same logic, I also think that the test should be pretty accurate. Of course if you would test something like sheet metal the same way, it would appear excellent since the sound would reflect from it and not get to the mic. But with the tested materials it shouldn't matter at all.
I think there is a significant difference between testing sound passing through a material and sound bouncing off of it. The results may change when microphone and speaker are boht on the same side or the material like they will be in the final application. But that is just an assumption ;)
The piles of dirty laundry around my room now have their own special reason for existing.
Acoustics.
Will your mom buy you a nice DAW if you clean up your room?
Funny, but also effective (for real)l... Trying to get house-guests to buy into it might be an issue though. ;-)
genius !
Works for dirty underwear too.
Houuyyyaaaa 😂
You've got such a pragmatic, analytical mind! Now you should address how to soundproof a room as much as possible. So one could play loud music in it without disturbing others or how one could make it so we can't hear our neighbors. Everyone has noisy neighbors sometimes. Especially early in the morning!
You're wrong. He made acoustic panel in diy way. An acoustic panel is used to reduce the echo effect. Remember, it is not soundproofing. If you want to avoid noisy neighborhood, you should look into soundproofing rather than acoustic panels. Mass loaded vinyl is the solution for your problem.
exactly, this isn't sound-proofing, this is sound-absorption. 2 very different things. What you're describing is a complete structural overhaul.
“A towel, [The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy] says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-boggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.”
This was exactly what I thought!!
I hate umbrella's..I always carry a towel!! 😃
Funny as it is, it's also very true. It's the first thing I pack when I go backpacking, no matter where I go or for how long. Thank you, Mr Adams.
@@aking3624 whaaaaat a psycho
th-cam.com/video/W-LALMkFR4s/w-d-xo.html . I stick to Towelies
While he was drilling that frame his neighbors were searching for an effective soundproof DIY on youtube
😂
Incredible! Exactly what i need for my space :) Thanks Matt!
Great to hear! Feel free to tweet me a pic of what you come up with if it's successful :)
Yee Hi Dmitri, such a coincidence
good morning starlord
would love to see it in a video. The more impressions the better. I will make a few myself and hope it turns out great.
I love the scientific approach. It’s exactly what I need for recording my audiobooks. I just wish the lawyers would hurry up with the purchase of my house so I can get started. ;-)
Accidentally had this muted and was in turn extremely impressed with how well the panels worked for a moment
I appreciate your humor.
MMCU Made Me Crack Up!
I could barely hear through the subtitles with my phone muted
Played Tarby played 👏
😂😂😂
You'll have to speak up, I'm wearing a towel.
I'm dying!
excellent
Not bad.
XD oh my! that got me the moment i came to the comments!! damn!
this makes so much more sense now! :O
Towel sales went up 23.9% when this video was released.
Nice one.
I used Bounty
lol
I know right lmao
Surely 42%...
This is why people in eastern Europe hanged carpets on the walls. We just wanted to have a quality sound tv room.
Tapestry has an additional purpose in modern society.
i was so blinded in these years.....
hahaha Touché
haha I've always thought it weird to see those massive red carpet but it turns out your grandparents are geniuses. do the younger generation still do it and does it make the house more dusty?
@@tempeleng You'll hardly find these in Poland nowadays. Just on the floors.
Been juggling with ideas to build DIY panels on the cheap. Yours are the best: easy, cheap, performant, and looking not too shabby.
Matt I must say that your channel is one of my favourite channels on TH-cam, they are always extremely well made and I can really tell that you are putting A LOT of work into them. They are often within reach for us lazy DIY:ers as well and I might actually do this one! Thanks for an awesome tutorial!
Thank you! :)
seriously the videos are very well organized and informative, thanks diy perks
Blankets work very well too, especially the quilted ones used by shipping/moving companies. You can get shipping blankets at places like Harbor Freight. Another source for cheap blankets, besides your local thrift shop as mentioned in the video, is military surplus stores. The military surplus blankets won't be quilted.
When doing interviews in large rooms or shooting video demonstrations in a kitchen, cover as much of the hard floors as you can with the blankets. You can pile them up below and near the mic as well as behind chairs where the interview is happening to cut down on reflections. Keep the camera pointed towards the subjects and your audience will never see the mountains of blankets hidden in the room.
Was reading apartment reviews about thin walls and need a soundproofing idea besides thick curtains for the windows and carpet for the floors, I needed something for the walls. This is amazing and will give me a fun diy craft to do while settling in
@Laura Brown not as good as a bath towel!
@Pablo Slalom this is what I would like to know. My party wall is dry wall only and neighbours are inconsiderate with noise! I have some underlay so may staple it to some battens and bang it through the wall!
“A towel, The TH-camr's Guide to the Internet says, is about the most massively useful thing a TH-camr can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold and unforgiving comment section; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Vidcon, inhaling the heady vapors of glory; you can sleep under it beneath the stars because you have spent all your money on a fancy camera; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow DSL speeds as you contemplate switching to a different ISP; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Algorithm of to avoid demonstrations (such a mind-boggingly stupid algorithm, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and you can hang it on the wall for sound absorption, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.”
As soon as I saw the towel, I came looking for this comment. Thank you for the Douglas Adams reference. ^_^
@@DiogocsOliveira he surely knows where his towel is
I couldn't have written it any better. Great!
Hahah
[standing ovation]
Hi! Environmental acoustic technician here; the foam panel is known to have very poor performance. A variable density polyester mat fares much better... almost as good as yours, which is truly impressive. The added benefit of the towels is mass, which can be kind of an hindrance but also greatly absorbs pressure waves. Great job!
Oh finally a more honest acoustic technician lmao
A guy who's man enough to do his own ironing and sewing? Liked and subscribed.
You’re an idiot. Men do more ironing than women. This ain’t the 50s anymore smh
www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8633967/Survey-finds-52-cent-British-men-claim-ironing-home.html
@@anthonyfletcher8053 Not every guy is the same, so stfu
@@anthonyfletcher8053 it was just a joke, man x.x
@@brownieluvsYT wow.. i apologize.. the school system has truly failed you if you dont know how averages work..
@@roflmows Im aware of this, still a stupid joke.
I love this. I have never done testing, but I have always just hung up blankets and fabric on the walls when I lived in an apartment and had shared walls. It drastically cut down on noise transfer (and in places that weren't properly insulated- temperature transfer). And again, they can be found at the second-hand shops for relatively cheap and if you don't like the look of them you can just hang a prettier fabric on the top/outside and it works great. Might not look the coolest, but it is cheap and easy and can be done in multiple different ways from nailing blankets on the wall to layers of them to frames and on and on. This is also how I do curtains lol. But you can achieve trashy to classy with just a bit more money and/or effort. Thanks for sharing this with us and doing the fancy testing piece so people believe you lol ;) Cheers
Edit: Also, wanted to say that you can easily still put shelving over top if you make less layering in places you need things to be flush to the wall (or you can even cut out holes- I try to just cut 3 sided holes in the smiley face direction so if I take the shelf down I can let the flap fall back down and mostly not look too bad).
I've always wondered why I become soundproof coming out of the shower...
Gold 😂😂😂
😂😂😂😂
Out of the many interesting comments, this one made me laugh instantly!
Bahahaha
Lol)))) good one!!!!!!!!
Ironing towels in the garden... how very British :)
Especially with a cup of tea :)
haha. reducing reflection means it just passes through to the um, wall it's tacked to. and then reflected BACK. hence TRANSMISSION is key. not many people can afford an anechoic chamber wall. lol
theonlyari
Put the absorbers in the corners.. the distance between the material and the wall dictates which frequencies will be cought by it. A bass wave can be half a meter long as I´ve learned. Generally stopping the mid and high frequencies is not such a problem as having to deal with a rolling bass in a room.
Don't forget manly!!
I wonder how many MK Ultra assassins were triggered into action by that tone sequence.
And how many dogs thought it was the dinner bell and ate the neighbours pet?
Hahahahah
The 2.3k people who unliked the video
I now remember my mission
lol
Definitely interesting. A better way to test however would be to use a sweep tone and a time windowed measurement so that you can place the test material on a hard acoustically reflective surface on the ground and measure the impact of the material on reflections. You're measuring how much sound transfers through the material, not how much is reflected back. This may or may not be a good indication of how well it reduces reflections in a room. It's a better indicator of how well it might avoid complaints from neighbors. From your test we know it's good at sound containment, we don't know for certain that it's good at absorption.
With a time windowed measurement both the loudspeaker and the microphone are mounted in the air above the test area. The loudspeaker directs sound down at the floor where it reflects back up to the microphone. Sound also travels a direct path from the loudspeaker to the microphone but this sound is time windowed out of the measurement data. The sweep tone starts and the software waits enough time for the sound to reach the floor and bounce back to the microphone. Prior to that time the direct sound hitting the microphone is ignored. Once the initial reflected sound arrives at the microphone the software filters out and ignores every frequency but the start frequency of the sweep. This filter window sweeps with the sweep tone so that only the frequency just arriving from the floor reflection is included in the data. The sound arriving along the direct path from loudspeaker to microphone is ignored.
First take a measurement of the reflection off the hard acoustically reflective floor surface. This is stored as your reference. Next you place the various test materials on the floor and overlay each materials data with the reference data. The difference tells you how many dB down the reflection is across frequency. Instead of just a few discrete frequencies with no scaling, you get a nice frequency response graph indicating exactly how effective the material is at absorbing sound as a function of frequency.
I think the towels probably actually do work pretty well, possibly better than the acoustic foam you tested. It's just that this test isn't a true valid way of proving it.
Really now
correct. His test only measured the transfer loss from one side to the other. For example, a sheet of plywood would have dominated these tests...allowing perhaps the least amount of sound to pass through...lol, but would do nothing to change the reverb time of the room. Its important when considering acoustic material to evaluate based on the measured change in reverb time when installed. Most acoustically significant material has published data in this regard. His before/after room sound evaluation gives perhaps a good indication. It would have been meaningful to test the equivalent surface area of the acoustic foam in the same room, which most likely would have had a tremendous impact as well.
Excellent testing. Thanks Matt! The towels work better because sound gets trapped in airspace. Towels provide excellent diffusion. I've never seen them deployed to quite this scale, nor tested against pro foam tiles, so thanks so very much for this. I'm a recording engineer and this info is solid gold. Cheers mate!
@DethFiesta Yes. Thanks for clarifying. I was trying to explain exactly that. They're sound-insulators.
glenesis i get a lot of noise from the outside traffic. Can I apply into my windows?
"Sound gets trapped in airspace" !!! ROFL Stop it you're pinging my BS meter.
@@fins59 actually. Layers of air can help with decoupling - where the sound wave goes from a wave into a vibration and back into a wave.
@@bannnnner Quote "where the sound wave goes from a wave into a vibration and back into a wave"
Are you a comedian?
Firefighter: "the fire is till being investigated, but dude had artwork of Towels everywhere."
😅😅😅😅😅
Haha
can also be handled by spraying the towels with a special spray ;)
Borax performs well as a fire retardant. It's just not washable. Also serves to repel pests that might want to nest in the towels.
The poor man, no one could hear his screams.
Having scoured the youtubes, I always end up back on this video as the gold standard DIY sound damping project.
Well done.
i'm years too late for this, but if you ever repeat something similar: it is actually easy to measure sound reflection. there is a free software called REW that can compute the reverberation time of a room. this is a good indicator for how much echo is in your room, and this is directly related to the amount of sound that is reflected vs absorbed in the walls. you can measure the reverberation time of a naked room, and compare it to a room having one of your panels, or one panel of professional sound absorption foam.
i used this method to set up two of my rooms, and it works very good. you can clearly see (and quantify) the effect of various measures i took to reduce the reverberation time.
I'm going to make some of these to stop all the echos in my bakery shop, I'll get some prints on them to reflect what I sale instead of the walls reflecting voices. Thanks so much for the idea
Sounds like a good use case!
Don't forget that these panels will be insulative as well. I don't think I'd put them in a bakery, too hot.
Valid point, but its for a bakery shop, the bakery is behind it. But others may have to think about the insulation aspect which could be a benefit or hindrance depending on the individual situation.
Guess I made a bit of an assumption that the panels were going somewhere hot, oops!
I agree that these panels (with prints of baked goods) would look excellent in the store part of your bakery.
Maybe attach the towels with snaps so they can be laundered?
I believe the properties of professional acoustical tiles include them to be nonflammable. This is something to consider.
Nothing a stinky can of nonflammable spray can't solve.
You could soak them in flame retardent before construction.
muffinluveruuu lmao! thanks
If you ever doubt the importance of this - search youtube for the great white disaster - and see how fast non flame-retardant soundproofing burns and spreads!
My point exactly.... I remember that disaster like it happened yesterday.
So I tried doing this and I have a few remarks and stuff I did different.
First off all I would first cut the towels to size, attach them to the frame and all the way at the end, attach the main white towel with the stapler. This way, you can cover the rough edges that you cut in the red towel as seen at 6:00. It also makes sure that you can position and stretch your towels inside and check for sewing mistakes. Most importantly, you can make everything perfect untill adding the front towel of the panel.
This is important because, depending on your towel thickness, you'll see it looking at the panel from the side. In this case, the red towel would be very visible from the side.
I know it's been a while since you posted it but this tutorial was so high quality I almost started crying. The craft, the graphics, the editing, the professional narration and humor. It reminded me of what is good content. Thank you :)
I had a very strong "metallic" reverb in my room. I took 5 towels, folded them once and hung them up around the room.
Obviously a temporary solution, but it took me 5 minutes and now my room has no obvious reverb.
Towels are super good at absorption, thank you for the tip!
ik ya said temporary and ya probably fucked them off by now but what i did is use flags instead of a towl for the face of the frame looks really good they also use the flag thing at work to kill noise
Reading the comments below I am laughing and flabbergasted at the same time. Seems they haven't watched the whole video. The end part clearly shows the difference in the sound quality of the voice and room. He is not making his rooms sound proof he is just using the towels to reduce bouncing sounds of the walls. Come on you all appreciate his brilliant effort.
Ikr
Would you suggest his findings can be used to keep sounds from exiting a room? I snore and I need to keep the noise in my room - it currently transfers through my thin drywall - thanks in advance for your help.
CDaniel J80 he got his towels free An most men have hand tools laying around Everyone I know have a shed full of tools it’s also much cheaper than acoustic panels that don’t perform all to well. Sound isolation is based on the wall you need a air space in between with 2 layers of sound sealer it would require destroying the thin wall and putting up a new one that cancels out any excess noise from in and out the room. It’s how a studio is usually made acoustic is just for looks it’s also very flammable so are towels but it’s all about the better isolation and there’s many ways to make acoustic yes it’s going to cost money just like everything else in this world but it’s the only way to prevent sound from entering and exiting.
There is a notable difference in sound quality. However, the testing method leaves something to be desired - he tests the sound going through the materials, rather than bouncing off it, which the end result panel is used for. Reverb does get reduced, but not as much as it could have been if a more relevent testing method had been used. Foam works better for reducing reverb, while towels are better (according to this test) for blocking sound. These are two different things.
thus sound proofing since thats the goal is to stop the vibration of sound and since its sound waves I think it worked as hoped! I decided last winter to build a sound proof room in my garage since its really long I had 2x4s up and insulation then fabric covering the insulation it was pretty quiet then I put on drywall and no longer absorbing the sound as much the vibration going up the drywall is what caused that so again he is correct in putting this together just saved me 90 plus dollars I would have spent on sound proofing panels going to pick them up tomorrow yes thank you sir for showing us a great way to save money
I have a professional Whisper Room in my home studio (the real deal, not the home cooked variety), and the best solution I found for blocking air conditioning noise from the outside was a couple of air mattresses. Yes, just plain $10 air mattresses. Two are on the side facing the air conditioner, one at an oblique angle to baffle noise from reaching my door. On the other side, another one wedged between the booth and the interior room wall provides even more isolation from the cement apartment. On the inside, I block noise from the ventilation system with a layer of garage floor foam. Total cost: about $70. And the noise floor inside dropped from about -46dB to lower than -72dB. So low I don't even need to use the noise gate in my pre-amp anymore, which prevents those frustrating "chops" at the starts of words. I'm thinking of adding these panels to the wall in the room to kill noise even further. Brilliant video.
Thanks so much. I live in an apartment and really need a sound dampening booth because I attempt / experiment / play different types of flutes and a bit of guitar. I play at the lowest possible volume now which is so low I can barely hear myself. I think this technique may be helping me improve in certain areas but I can't hear myself enough to really know. Do you think I would dampen enough sound that my neighbors would not hear if I use air mattresses for the walls and roof on a small booth? I could add towel panels inside as well. I still plan on playing at an extremely low volume and only from 5pm to 8pm. I could either make the "Air Booth" in a spare bathroom or bedroom. I'm not sure
if my neighbors ever hear me but they probably did a little until I started using the super low volume technique. I'm on the first floor. Thanks again!
*The simplicity of this testing and project is pure genius. I appreciate your contribution to youtube. Keep up the good work and thanks for the ideas* DexterousX
1. Manly men who did their own sewing once ruled the world. They were called the Royal Navy. They even had little kits (called "hussifs," short for "housewife") full of sewing supplies.
2. A guitar teacher of mine who did a lot of recording at his house hung up two layers of heavy curtain all around his "music room." Sound from an amp or acoustic guitar (or whatever other instrument) would travel through the first layer of curtain, be attenuated, through the second layer of curtain, be attenuated some more, bounce off the wall, hit the second layer of curtain and get attenuated again, then pass through the first layer of curtain, attenuated yet again. This technique _dramatically_ reduced the reverberations in the room, which can be difficult, especially in the rectangular prism-shaped rooms favored by architects.
There's a lot of misunderstand going on in the comments. Given foam materials, the walls of the room you're in reflect the sound, not the foam. This is why he's testing the permeability of the materials, the sound needs to get to the wall and bounce off to create echo. Materials can reflect sound which would make this test obsolete, but I'd be willing to bet these types of materials sound reflection is arbitrary. Like I said, The foam does not significantly reflect sound itself, if you built a room out of foam or towels there would be no echo, because these materials don't reflect sound enough to create one.
So we're not testing how much the materials do or don't reflect sound, we're testing how much they let sound pass through, because we know these materials won't reflect sound to a significant degree.
That's true. It would have been good to have tested both sound transmission AND reflection though - I tested sound transmission because it's quite easy to do. Not sure how I'd go about testing reflection, and none of the critics have mentioned how I could do that.
Had I found a way to test reflection, and then only tested reflection, it would have been a pretty pointless test as the thinnest lightest material would have won (like foam), as nothing would have bounced back. I guess the two need to be done together to measure how much sound passes through, and how much sound is reflected back - that should give an indication of how well sound is absorbed by a given material.
Great job on your videos! Really enjoy them :)
I work with some really sharp acoustic engineers and I am asking them about this very idea which is quite interesting. I would think (this is just a thought) that one could create a sound in a small enclosed space (thinking a 8' plywood box). Then after a second or so turn the sound off but leave the mic on and measure the remaining sound. Then compare those results to different materials
This is true, but ultimately it doesn't matter. If you have awesome absorption, no reflection will occur.
The sound would have to make it through the towel dampening frame, hit the wall, then make it *back* through the frame again. Doubtful tbh that it could ever do that unless it was extremely loud.
You are correct, in a way, but also consider this: A concrete wall does a magnificent job of blocking the *transmission* of sound (you can barely hear what's going on in the other room when the walls are concrete) but they are absolutely terrible at damping the reflection of sound (standing in a concrete room, the reflections/reverb would be hideous). In other words, blocking the transmission of sound is not the same as blocking the reflection of sound (a good sound transmission blocker isn't necessarily a good sound reflection damper). In the case of this video, towels are fairly good because they act as both blockers of transmission as well as dampers of reflections (sound doesn't reflect easily off the surface of a towel), but the testing he does is virtually pointless from a scientific point of view. He's simply not testing the material in an applicable setting. Again, for his testing, he could have put a concrete barrier between the microphone and the speaker, and it would have shown magnificent sound blocking behavior, but putting concrete on the walls would only make the reverb in the room much worse.
Cave Johnson Because we already know that the materials don't reflect sound what you're saying doesn't apply. The reason your example of using concrete works against his method is because concrete reflects sound, if we use materials that don't reflect sound in the first place, there's no need for designing a test that accounts for the variable of sound reflection.
Ok, I really hope people read my comment, and take precautions. I'm not saying you CAN'T use this method, just be mindful of the risks and take steps to minimize them.
1) Fire hazard. These can be hung on walls, but do *NOT* put them in a spot where there are outlets that are going to be used. Keep all electrical wiring away. Keep any and all sources of heat away, don't put them over heating vents or radiators, and obviously, no open flame.
2) Moisture. If your studio or office or youtube-video-making-hole-in-the-wall is not humidity-controlled, well, it should be, for the sake of all the equipment. This could be as easy as getting a meter and finding out that it just happens to stay at around 30-38% ambient humidity all the time, so you don't NEED to get any additional equipment. It *COULD* be more complicated, if the humidity gets high, you need a dehumidifier (you can obviously turn it off while you're recording) in that room. High humidity in a room with a bunch of towels hanging on the walls can be a huge problem, leading to the growth of mildew and mold, even deadly black mold spores that will go airborne the moment you turn on a fan or do anything that shakes the towel-panels around a bit.
There IS a better option, but you can't quite do it for 5 bucks a panel. Do exactly what he did with the wood frame, but then put in some rigid fiberglass insulation (Owens-Corning 707 or 705 or 703, or Roxul if you have a bit more to spend). The white towel on the outside is an acceptable covering, although in won't be necessary, and you could cover it cheaper with basically any dense fabric (ask about the fabric's resistance to fire and moisture) from the fabric store. You obviously need to cover BOTH front and back of these panels, so you aren't getting dust from the insulation in the air. Use hot glue around the edges to make a decent seal, and if you are using speaker-cloth or a similar stretchy nylon or rayon type fabric, maybe wrap two layers to contain the insulation well. This will raise the price of your acoustic treatment to around 20 bucks a panel (4' x 2' panels), but it will also do a far better job inhibiting the reverberation and comb-filtering of the really low frequencies, which are the ones that are most problematic for recording audio, and also LISTENING to audio, if you are editing, mixing, mastering a musical track for your video, or if you came to this video because music is what you do and why you need acoustic treatment in the first place.
Good luck everyone. Feel free to ask me any questions, if you don't get an answer within a day, it means I didn't get a notification, so just post it on my channel.
Well put
I'm trying to reduce outside noise from coming in a 5X6 window. I have big pieces of styrofoam packing panels, 1-2 inch thick. If I cover these with towels or blankets, can I hang them in the windows? Tx.
what about doing the towel on the outside but putting foam in the middle? cut the foam to size and add hot glue or even cold clue in between around the edges? saves time on cutting a sewing towels and would probably work just as much albeit probably just a bit less. the towels work so great because of the fibers on it which act like sound catching fibers to help reduce the noise, all you would need is the outer towel to slow down the sound and the foam can do the rest with like said maybe slightly less successful results but still effective enough right?
Give them a soak in boric acid dissolved in water. Dry off and they'll be resistant to mould. Boric acid is a common ant killer powder.
Boric acid also a fire retardent.
the reason they hung Tapestries in castles and churches in the middle ages
you kinda just blew my mind. practical and beautiful.
Unfortunately, the use of tapestries in the Middle Ages was a lot more practical, since they were necessary on the walls and sometimes doorways in winter months for insulation and proper heating. They were aesthetically pleasing because no one wants to look at some plain rags on the wall. Tapestries told stories, usually they had depictions of biblical events, or hunting scenes and so on and since they were so portable (unlike the heavy large paintings of the time) they were rolled up and carried around with people also as a status symbol. But it is nice that someone’s mind was blown, hope that facts have mended it.
This blew my mind
@Don Mega
I knew a man some years ago that went to Africa on a missionary trip for a week. Before he left, his wife loaded the food up with garlic.
While he was in Africa, he sweated the garlic out of his body which it annoyed his human companions. It was apparently even more annoying to the local vampires.
He was the only one the mosquitoes left alone.
Wow I didn't know that!
Watched at least 15 of these videos on this subject and this by far outshines them, Thank YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!
Thank god this guy uploaded, i was running out of content to watch
yeah... mondays are boring
Now you're out of content again.
I am in the same boat.
Nothing on TV but olympics
go learn spanish
+BitsAndBites Y entonces para mí qué?
Bloody Olympics - not really a massive fan
Hit the dollar stores they have canvas art panels so your one step up just fill the back with towels and your done
it can be more sound reflective so less sound gets inside and trapped
What sizes do they have? I would think that 2’ X4’ would be an average size. Do they have anything that big?
@@trusso11783 depends on the store near you I’ve boughten 24/36 canvass for painting project
yes I was wondering the same thing as I watched this........
Ooh I like this. And then you can paint them 😊 👩🎨
Just watched this 4 years later, and it’s amazing to see how the quality was always amazing!
Who would have known that a video made 6 years ago would help me, an almowt 47 year old, starting on a dream of mine!!! Thank you so much for this !!! We al have to start somewhere!!
Matt, you Yorkie genius, thanks for the vid! BUT (here it comes), as one of those fore mentioned media professionals who has done fairly serious research into acoustics over the past 20 years, let me tell you that the problem area for sound build up is in the sub 150hz range. This is were products like Owens Corning 703 really do their work. I'd like to see a test of your towel absorbers with these low frequencies that are so hard to mitigate against the OC 703, and/or a sound absorbing rockwool.
And FYI, I used a giant 6 inch absorber composed of rolled up clothes for over 7 years, lols, and now use hanging packing blankets, about a foot off the walls, of my recording room.
The goal was to tame a room in the voice frequency range! not many voices have too much power at 150! Certainly not Matt's! - But, reducing all frequency reflections back to a recording microphone when doing the sort of recording Matt is doing is preferable. That said, some 'live' feel is also not to stop the vice from being too intimate and dry. Reduction of standing waves is also useful in the lower frequencies, but, it's the early and mid reflections that cause the most damage to voice recordings.
Like you said, the goal is to reduce all frequency reflections/build up, not just mids and highs. I'd bet the towels might be moderately effective at low hz. It is fairly easy to tame higher frequencies, the challenge is the lows, and I'd have liked to see a complete test including the challenging areas.
And male voices certainly do have power in the sub 150 hz range, and failing to reduce buildup in that range will leave a stuffy muddy recording.
The idea is broadband absorbers should reduce buildup at all frequency ranges. And unless you completely cover every square inch of wall, ceiling and floor space you'll have a degree of reflection and liveness.
A whole lotta words to say, I wish he did a full spectrum test including the difficult area.
RETEST! :)
alpha numeric I understand what your saying, and partially agree; however this is not an SOS test, neither is this the SOS channel. Matt does easy to follow DIY projects that just about anyone can do with moderate results. For the audience type, his test demonstrated that different materials have varying levels of success in absorbing and dissipating energy thereby reducing reflections to a budget microphone in the type of acoustic space the average content creator is working in - in this context, the test was fine as a demonstration and the resulting DIY product was a success to some degree also. Now; If Veritas were to publish the same set of tests ect.... Then the commentary would be very valid and just. Let remember the level the channel is aimed at. IMHO
Someone with a brain :-)
I use the Owens Corning 703 or comparable. You get it at Heat and air places because the same material is used to insulate heating ducts. It's much easier to work with and cheaper than towels.
That said the difference in the voice sound was impressive and there are many people who can get some old towels who won't go to the trouble to use compressed fiberglass.
Thanks
I have just made a new room in My house to play drums uncaring about neighbors, And I was about to buy some acoustic sponge, spending 200€. You just saved my wallet. Thanks a lot
Me too
"We're going to use a long piece of wood, cutting it down into shorter pieces."
Yep, that's about what I understand out of every woodworking video on TH-cam.
@Duribethin What; glue them all together just to cut them down again? Now you be talkin' all DAFT.
I prefer short peices of wood, and a board streacher..... now where did I leave it
We are going to start out with small pieces of wood and cutting them bigger
@Duribethin I think they call my method "the Army way".
My method is to start with a fat wallet and slim it down until the panels are installed on my wall.
I liked this eight years ago, it's still my 'go-to' DIY for sound panels. Great channel Matt.
the neighbours must've thought you were contacting the aliens
@Christi Edison yeah, that's what curtains in Home r used for.
A very comprehensive and interesting test. The only drawback I can see from your analysis is that in the garden you are testing how effective the materials are at preventing sound being transmitted whereas inside you are using them to prevent sound being reflected. You could well come up with a structure which was a great sound insulator (the first case) but was still very bad at preventing reflected sound (the second case). Just something to think about!
Yet more proof that Ford Prefect was absolutely right about towels.
Sas that hoopy, Ford Prefect, there’s a frood who really knows towel is
I'd give you a like but you already have 42
@@Culbret Deep. And Blue.
After 2hrs of searching online, this was by far the BEST! Thank you
This might be the greatest budget sound dampening video I've ever seen
Why aren't you testing for reflection instead of transmission?
Andrew Lankford that would make the most sense. But this will show you bleed through and that translates to absorption in a diff way.
From the real-life test in the video we can see that the towel works pretty well but I do agree with Andrew the test is for isolation not absorption. According to this test a triple insulated glazing window would show even better performances as there is vaccum between the layer, which should give near perfect acoustic isolation. However the absorption of such a window should be as terrible as any window since the surface is almost perfectly flat, therefore reflecting sound nicely.
Still the DIY panels look good, are cheap and seems to do the job.
Plus if you want to combine your home studio with a sauna, you already have the towels.
Yes he measured transmission not reflection. In his use case he is trying to reduce the sound reflections from the wall. Drywall is very dense and a good sound reflector. If you reduce the transmission through the panel, the sound won't reach the walls to be reflected back into the room. The preferred material for commercial and DIY panels is Roxoul fiberglass batts which is very dense. It's also used inside walls to soundproof studios. Without doing testing, I would guess 6 layers of towels would approach the density of Roxoul. Certainly closer than the other materials he tested. As a bonus, not only reduces wall reflection, but helps sound proof walls too. Less transmission from the other side of the wall.
Too much density like MDF board and it becomes reflective. Softer materials like Roxoul and towels also tend to absorb sound because the porous material diffuses the sound internally. Basically converting sound energy into heat. This is why furniture like couches and mattresses help the acoustics of a room.
A bare wall tends to reflect sound back onto the same path it came from. The echo is caused by the longer path and slight delay to the microphone. Convoluted foam panels commonly used to reduce reflections, works more by diffusing the sound rather than absorbing it. Sound still reaches the walls, but is reflected back in many different directions. Sound bounces around the room and cancels itself out. Less sound reflects directly back to microphone for less echo effect.
I was going to ask the same question. But you already did.
@@philliptoone me too
Always know where your towel is. Douglas Adams FTW. 👍
Steven Franey my first thought ... jokes
YUP! DON'T PANIC!!!
From. what I've been reading there are several elements to improving sound in a room.
First is a sound barrier from say a neighbour, and that is somewhat what you are doing placing a mic behind the barriers.
People who sell the acoustic foam explain that the whole way it works is that it should be attached to a hard panel (the harder and thicker the better).I used plywood or MDF.
The sponge absorbs my voice and the wood gives a hard surface that echoed but keeps my studio quiet.
Then there are reflective baffles which are generally a hard surface of all random angles. This diffuses the echo by bouncing it around the room but mainly away from the voice.
By being a very hard surfactace it also blocks the noise too.
Your experiment and idea to use towels is awesome and my next build I will be using this for sure. I do think adding a back panel could help neighbor noise also.
I think a smart idea would be to stuff towels behind canvas paintings hanging on the wall
i think that might actually work pretty well indeed
@@KennyFubaralo that would be the easiest instead of all the work building frames. but I wonder if the canvas won't allow the sound waves to enter
@@KennyFubaralo The problem with this is that the paint tends to reflect sound and the canvas is usual not porous enough to let sound through, so the towels will have minimal to no effect. You would basically just be hanging paintings, which would be pretty, but not great for sound absorption
Nicolas Barrows you can have a towel customization service anyway.. it’s unusual not too expensive however and recreates a canvas if you wish a drawing
@@sandrogioselli3261 not a bad solution!
RIP people who have their PC volume high and with headphones
😭😭😭😭😭😭
The comment I've been looking for
I THINK I GOT BRAINWASHED
Me
😂😂😂😛😛😛😜😜😜
Thanks for the video. I was literally just about to spend $100 on foam panels for my home studio. I will definitely be trying this first.
DON'T DO IT LIKE HIM! THIS WILL MAKE YOUR ROOM EVEN WORSE! IT IS NOT ABSORBING THE LOW FREQUENCIES WHICH YOU WANT TO CONTROLL IN YOUR MIX. HE JUST ABSORBING THE THE HIGHER FREQUENCIES. THIS WILL UNBALANCE YOUR ROOM EVEN MORE!
@@alexanderbluhm8841 why not just use studio headphones?
this is bad for a real room acooustic treatment, but a success for towel sales.
I was looking for cheap options to treat my room, and I was getting ready to throw in the towel (pun very much intended) but then I came across this great video! Thanks for the help!
Your towel fell down you pick it up with an acoustic hand 🤓
I feel the purpose of his video was to find a simple, easy to do, cost effective method, and everyone in the comments is freaking out saying he did everything wrong.
I don’t understand how people come to channels like this, especially when the maker is very clear about the fact that their ideas are for the ‘average’ Joe with plans that can b made for less expensive than buying from a company, which I thought was made very clear by most of these channels subject title of “DIY - Do It Yourself”...and the replies from people who are upset that the makers didn’t use the most modern science including testing that most college engineers wouldn’t understand...using the most sophisticated testing instruments out here - I thought the whole idea of ‘DIY’ pretty much meant ‘copy some cool stuff for cheap with acceptable results by the average guy/girl? When the video showed the difference between the sounds heard before and after these panels were just as valuable as test results from an expensive measuring instrument these people insist on using. Obviously there are degrees of ‘diy’ ideas, from using the cheapest material one can find to using only the best quality one can afford...common sense usually produces the self-explanatory nature of each individual video on TH-cam, so I thought. *I think this guys videos r some of the best diy videos on TH-cam, especially for the fact that I can SIMPLY and very cost-effectively manufacture these ideas with premium results.
As EWF said, "Thats the way ... of the world!"
Today, everrry idiot, every where feels like they just HAVE to talk shit (criticize) n pick every theory, every ppl's videos apart. Smh.
We've TRULY reached epidemic proportions with this bullshit. Sad.
When recording "Don't forget to bring a towel."
"When you get out of the water you need to dry off right away to avoid catchin' a cold. That's why Towelie says, "Don't forget to bring a towel."
"That's the theme to funky town"
The noise will get just a little high.
I have no idea what's going on.
Justin Ransburg favorite internet comment ever
Thanks for that great test!
Greetings from Germany :)
@@laurabrown1474 Stop advertising this bullshit with 20 accounts all over these videos
schon komisch das son tuch besser is als was teures
After so many years, this is still the "go to" video when friends want to make a home recording studio and ask me about acoustic treatment.
That yard is so nice. I’m not into gardening but damn it looks good
I noticed that!
DIY Perks asked about how to test reflection. the answer - set up microphone to record in the room then inflate a balloon up and pop it. then do the same exact thing with the panels in the walls. make sure you're inflating the balloons the same exact amount. to see the results, brinh the audi into your audio editor and look how the decibels drop over time. That should show you how fast the echo in the room is dying out over time based on treatment. I believe true acoustician use a particular balloon and microphone but maybe you'll be able to see something with just the general microphone that you're using in this video and standard balloons as long as they're being inflating at a consistent amount. that's my 2 cents. Might build some of these for my room. as my teacher would say "fuzz it up" to decrease echos.
"Well done, towel". That was adorable. Excellent video, thank you!
this video rocks. I'm probably just not that well-read, but I don't understand all the comments. He clearly demonstrated how the panels absorbed reflections, as well as isolating/soundproofing. If anything we got a double whammy over here, Tom. Dude, thanks for the video!!
What I mostly enjoy , after every inspired Matt's video, which I absorb with enormous pleasure, is the plentitude of various really funny and clever comments, fact that reflects the spiritual and humorous level of a majority of the followers.
Which also leads us to some interesting conclusions about Matt and his job!!, isn't it?
Well done, good ol' Matt! Cheers from Greece!
" Don't forget to bring a towel."
- Towlie
42 of them. And a pot of tea.
"No, Towlie; we don't wanna get high."
I love your videos, but sound insulation and sound absorption is not the same. cheers
The issue of flammability should not be overlooked.
Safety first.
more like overcooked
Everything is flammable, given the right temp even air can burn.
Please explain
oxygen is fuel.
You Sir have cracked the code for the best budget acoustic paneling great stuff! Towels !!!
As usual, absolutely awesome video!! Thank you for sharing such a nice idea with us.
Best regards from a Spanish sub :D
Experimentar En Casa Baia baia
❤️❤️
this video suddenly appeared on my recommendations after i ordered 5 panel acoustic foams for $150... :')
Oh shi...
well time to instead go and buy $150 worth of towels.
you did the right thing. there are enough comments showing why his tests are not what he says they are. for sound deflection your panels will work perfectly. he is testing for sound absorption with the side effect of the material also deflecting a good amount.
use your ordered matrial and see the towels you have as an extra option :))
I think this guy is just elegant when it comes to making videos and it's a rare quality not found in many hosts these days. Cheers mate.
Also, for a youtuber or content creator who just got a 250$ condensor or a Zoom H5 for his/her vocals echo is certainly a main concern and only people who listen/track/record 24bit audio in a studio environment will ever have to face the challenge of getting that perfect deflection to absorption ratio that makes their recordings wide and crisp. You wouldn't need to fret that much if you weren't such a professional. On the other hand if you just wanted to soundproof your room then this might not be the solution for you. You would be better off layering chipboard and foam an inch or so away from your walls and reinforcing the doors so thwy don't leak, or.... you could always just find a better place to jam :p just sayin... I personally just open up my cupboard where all my clothes are and play my acoustic facing the cupboard so the sound doesn't escape off the room walls and it doesn't so there's another idea for guitar players.
yea this impressed me also
Amazing! Only thing I would be worried about is possibly mold as atmospheric moisture gets trapped in the cotton towels (organic material is beloved by mold) and the darkness inside the panel helps mold truly flourish. I guess it will most likely be a non issue if you live in a dry climate.
The towel does a good job as sound blocking, which the initial tests are showing. It coincides with the concept that more mass equals better sound blocking, the towels are obviously heavier than any of the foams. For pure sound blocking the best material is usually something like MDF or Chipboard. The towels also however double up as sound absorption as well, meaning it changes the inside sounds in a room as well, because the surface of the towel is soft and fluffy, it reduces sound reflection. The acoustic foam is only meant to deal with sound reflection for inside a studio, it isn't meant to have any property in sound blocking property, open cell foams basically have no sound blocking property.
I think the reason that the towels work so much better than foam is that they are somewhat loose where the foam is rigid. Materials that can move will translate the energy in sound vibrations into silent tiny movements. Rigid materials can't do this, so more is sound energy can pass through. Great video BTW!
I now say "well done, towel" every time i use one XD
man you remind me of a Sim @ 1:21
Thank you so much for this video so helpful, no filler, great testing.. wish all how to videos were this good!
You made an important mistake: There is a major difference between blocking the sound and preventing the reverb. If you judge a material just from it's ability to block sound waves, then the best material for that application is lead. In fact, lead is actually used to make soundproof rooms. That does not mean that the room sounds good at all... Indeed, a room covered with lead panels would be a nightmare of reverb. If you want to test the attitude of a certain material to prevent the sound from reverbing, then you should put the microphone next to the cabinet (preferibly a highly-directional mic) and use it to capture the "bounce" of the sound. And you will notice that the professional acoustic foam does a GREAT job at absorbing the sound WITHOUT making it bounce backward.
That being said, the solution actually works and i will absolutely try it. I just wanted you to know that you have made a "soundproof test" to judge something that wasn't meant to be soundproof, but rather "reverb-proof".
Love the video! Good test. Although I must inquire rather than testing (through) the material. Test with speaker facing material and microphone behind the directed sound to simulate the purpose of the project.
Thank you for investing time in R&D! Can't go wrong with a towel!
Master UnitCharles ☝️ agreed, wouldn’t have commented had I read this first. Take all the testing out of the video and the towels are still a good budget way to go! But in this test, drywall would ‘perform best’
you should host Art Attack. bring it back man, you got this!
YEE
Finally a DIY channel completely opposed to Five Minute Craps! Subbed and about to test this tutorial, thanks!
u are talking about sound improvement,maybe u should start with making your mic sound the same on the left and right channel
You should learn how to construct a basic sentence.
+Filip get a life you ugly
Egg
tru dat
Stereo mic mixed down to mono or duplicated to the other channel would be much better and takes 2 seconds to do and considering the topic is how to get better sound, I don't think that the comment was particularly wrong.
This would be like someone doing a video on lighting and having a terribly under exposed image. :)
+Eric Lefebvre a better analogy would be having an image that's slightly red shifted on a video about exposure.
It’s all fun and games until you accidentally contact aliens with those sounds
Hi, you rang?
Awesome! Perfect for what I'm working on for my new apartment. Don't want to annoy my neighbors too much.
Please let me know how your idea works! I also live in an apartment.
This is a brilliant test that goes to show that the tighter weave of cotton has much better sound absorption than the expensive sound acoustic foam that you find even in high-end studio baffles. Absolutely ingenious trial and error testing with good equipment. I will incorporate this excellent method in my new ambient electronic studio. Thank you very much!!!
I used to record vocals in the front of an opened closet...
I still record my vocals inside the closet. I'm poor but it works great :)
It's OK to come out of the closet now . . . . :)
@@peterdarr383 lol
In the old days, even before your parents were born, hanging carpets on the wall had three advantages; it dampened sound, retained heat and it looked great. It’s a shame we don’t reuse our old carpets now. A simple cleaning would extend their lives 100%.
so i can buy random rugs from home depot stores and use that ?
@@MyFatty69 i think so, but i think it should be thick like 1-2 inch
in iran we actually do, but except on the ground not on the wall
I think that's why castles had tapestries
Generally yes, but practically - Im pretty sure natural materials behave differently than plastics.
All those carpets back then were out of 100% cotton at least - or wool.
And 99% of carpets nowadays are made out of 100% plastic.
I built two of these and they work very well.... A little more than $5 a piece (I spent $25USD each), but their performance is incredible
Thanks. Intelligent analysis not sold on marketing options. Good. Another excellent method is white melamine scrubbing sponges, some 25 mm thick. Stuck to the ceiling in various patterns with small gaps (which enhance sound asorption from their sides as well), they look cool. I ordered three cubic meters from China (very cheaply because of amount) and did the job myself. With a helper, you work out a rapid 6-spot gluing method and the pieces fly up the ceiling. Weight zero. Improvement? Stunning. Imagine the echo in a bare concrete box (as the hall was) and then with the sponges on the ceiling. Sound is perfectly muffled. Melamine is not your usual overpriced sponge (which has been analysed as being quite useless here) but a top level sound absorber due to its open cell micro- structure (unlike sponge). Very cheap in mass, very light and the extra benefit being never having to buy another kitchen sponge...
THAT. IS. NUTS!
Loving your content. I usually don't have the time to make some of the projects that you do but definitely doing these for my own filming / recording studio 👍👍👍👍👍👍
Interesting results! Would have been nice to have acoustic rock wool (batts) included as that is a common cheap/DIY alternative also. Thanks for taking the time to perform and share this experiment :)
“That’s why Towelie always says, “Don’t forget to bring a towel.”
Funky town
YOU JUST ROCKED MY WORLD! I literally almost purchased some foam just hours ago. I record music at home and am desperately looking for inexpensive sound DIY's! If you could ever consider doing a vocal booth for recording, I would cry tears of joy! PLEASE consider it will you?! :) THANK YOU FOR ALL your content!