Carpet and Furniture Acoustics - Are they effective?

Can I use carpet as acoustic treatment?

Can well placed furniture be an alternative to proper acoustic treatment?

Everything in your room can have an affect on your acoustics, but oftentimes the effect isn’t what we expected. Things like furniture and flooring will absorb or reflect sound in ways that can be hard to predict which might lead you to wonder what you should leave or take out of your room or whether it’s a suitable room to begin with.

There are always some types of rooms you should try to avoid. Square or very small rooms can be difficult to treat as well as rooms with low ceilings or asymmetrical designs. However, In many of these cases, even if you have a room that’s not ideal, it’s still possible to optimize the room enough so that it works for your needs.

Things like vertical beams and columns might look like they’d cause issues, but mostly their effect on room acoustics is negligible. Windows can be a little bit more difficult to treat around, but glass and drywall actually have similar reflectivity, and there are more than a few methods for placing treatment in front of windows.

Many people worry that their hardwood flooring is too reflective and that they need a carpeted room to build their studio in. If you tested two empty rooms, one with hardwood and one with carpet, then the one with carpet would sound much better with such a large surface area acting as an absorber. This might lead you to think that carpet is definitely better than hardwood flooring for room acoustics, but the truth is a little more complicated.

For absorbers, a good rule of thumb is that the thicker the material the lower the affected frequencies. While most all absorbers are several inches thick, even the thickest carpets are never much more than a half inch, so they’re only going to be effective in the high frequencies.

In smaller rooms the challenge of treatment is usually absorbing enough of the lower frequencies without over absorbing the mids and highs. It’s why our flexrange series has the option of a range limiting membrane so that you can absorb lower frequencies while retaining the mids and highs, which gives a more balanced room suitable for audio or music. Carpet will do the exact opposite and completely miss the bass frequencies while absorbing the useful high frequency sound which can make the room sound dead.

The same can be true for thin curtains and drapes or soft and plush furniture. Many of the household items that absorb sound do so in the treble ranges that can be useful in retaining a rooms liveliness.

Larger pieces like couches can start to absorb lower frequencies, but they’re not nearly effective enough to be used as an alternative to bass traps. Leather can be very reflective and the internal structure of most furniture is built with standing strength, not acoustics, in mind. That being said it’s often worth it to experiment with moving furniture around to see how it affects your room acoustics.

Having an Area Rug that you can move around is a good compromise from wall to wall carpeting that can leave your room sounding dead. An area rug can be useful when setting up record zones for live rooms, or if you just want to experiment with treating different areas of your floor.

No matter what the room you're starting with, there are always improvements to be made, so even if you’re worried your room isn’t ideal for acoustics, tell us about it via the room acoustics advice form and we’ll break down the best methods for achieving great sound.

[jackedkerouac]

"There's always improvements to be made". Exactly. That's why I've taken to recording vocals in my closet. I'll spend more on room treatment after I land more gigs

[homecinemademo]

Your videos are really easy to follow.

[AngloSaxon]

I use thick carpet tiles on my studio walls it works great

[paulk]

Surely carpet is a diffuser not an absorber as it has very little depth and a very distorted surface material 🤔

[XNaglfarTheImpalerX]

What about the foam flooring tiles that are used for gyms? How would that affect the sounds?