Reddit reviews Owens Corning 703 Fiberglass Board 2" QTY 6

I'm glad that video helped you decide to do sound treatment, but frankly it's a terrible video. He is well intentioned and seems like he is doing some decent things but is woefully off base.

He confuses sound isolation from sound absorption (acoustic treatment). They work totally differently, and his microphone tests are, sadly, a farce. Stick a thin piece of sheetrock in between the sound source and the microphone, and it will block sound better than anything in his test. But does that make sheetrock good for sound absorption? Heck no.

The reasons the towels work better than foam in his test is because they do a better job blocking sound. But what works best for sound absorption used in acoustic room treatments? His tests, and yours show that towels DO work to absorb sound and reduce reverb (echo). But are they the best materials? No.

The standard DIY materials for sound absorption are Owens Corning 703or 705, or Roxul/Rockswool rockboard, in various thickness, though 2" is probably the most common. These have been tested along with other cost effective materials to be the primary goto items for sound absorption. Also sound diffusion panels are often very useful, especially to the rear of the listening position.

Sheetrock on the other hand, because of its density, is great for blocking sound waves. If for example, you were trying to "soundproof" a room - heavy sheetrock is a staple of cost-effective approaches, combined with isolation clips and damping. The mass helps to stop stubborn low frequency waves.

The towels will indeed work as you've found out, and can be done pretty cheaply, especially if you have enough on hand. But don't go thinking that what this guy's video showed was reasonable.

/sorry, rant mode off/

Hi, I had a similar problem. Everything out there seemed ridiculously expensive, so I built my own solution. Essentially, it's a nice pictureframe wall-art looking thing that has soundproofing baffles (Auralex Studiofoam) on it. Very cheap but very effective - our bedroom is like a tomb when these things are hung and bonus: they're easy to hang and remove as needed.

Update: I would likely use these boards now instead of the Auralex, after learning a bit about soundproofing materials.

Hope this helps. :)

Ah, a question I can help with as it's right up my alley (audio engineer).

Simply put, sound bounces around like balls on a pool table, loves hard surfaces and tends to pile up in corners so your best angle of attack is to soften the rebound. First get some carpeting going on, the thicker the better. It doesn't have to be wall to wall but it needs to cover at least 80% of the floor. That will eliminate a lot of the vertical bouncing.

Next go get some of this stuff. Build some wooden frames for it and cover them in burlap, hang them on the wall. You shouldn't need more than one box for a single car garage, two for a double. They don't have to be butted up edge to edge, you can spread them out. Keep putting them up till the reverb goes away.

If you do that and it still sounds boomy, you probably have a problem with low frequencies building up in the corners. Google up corner traps and build a couple. It's a little more involved but basically the same thing as the panels. That should get you going in the right direction!

https://www.amazon.com/Owens-Corning-703-Fiberglass-Boards/dp/B005V3L834

Frame it in some 2x2s and stretch fabric over it. Add a couple and you'll be good.

As someone intimately aware alcoholism and bipolar in parents and roommates - don't live with your mom.

Babies suck. Newborns shit at least a dozen times a day, only sleep for like 2-3 hours at a time at best, and cry because it's the only way they can communicate. It sucks. As a stay-at-home dad who raised two of them, I have a theory that all parents eventually abandon dealing with the poop smell, because we've grown so accustomed that we just don't smell it.

My solution to noise, for parents or anyone else in the house, is noise cancelling headphones and soft music. They start at about $30 on Amazon, and between noise-cancelling and listening to soft music through them, you will hardly hear the baby cry. Even regular headphones can do the trick, if they are the bulky around-the-ears type. And if you can pull together a couple hundred bucks, something like these headphones will change your life in more ways than one.

Alternatively, if you are looking to sleep and can't do that with headphones, you could look into soundproofing your room or building a box around the head of your bed. These are what you would use, although you'd definitely want to cover them with a cheap fabric of some kind as fiberglass is not fun to breathe or touch (Walmart is great for that, or you can use old towels/blankets). It's not a solution for everyone, but as someone who built an isolation room for sound recording I can say it works really well.

I know money is hard to come by at that age, and I know these solutions aren't perfect. I'm sorry babies suck.

Buy https://www.amazon.com/Owens-Corning-703-Fiberglass-Boards/dp/B005V3L834 and wrap them in fleece.

Absolutely! Happy to provide any details you want. My equipment list is on my website here

On my walls are home-made panels made of OC703, they hang on the walls like picture frames and are non-permanent. I can take more detailed shots of them, if you want.

I recorded this with a Sennheiser 416 shotgun mic, which is my current Go-To mic. I was practically eating it for this recording, cause I wanted an in-your-face sound, but normally I'm about 10 inches off the mic.

The audio goes into Reaper, and I have a few default plugins activated for every track I record. I have them in this order: Gate, deesser, EQ, Compressor, Limiter. I found that the order matters, I use EQ to roll off some bass, and a little bit right in the "S" sound frequency, because the compressor is going to come right in and boost them. I think it sounds better to cut them before the compressor does it's thing. The limiter is at the end to make sure I stay under Amazon ACX guidelines for -3db peaks.

Again, happy to provide any further details you're interested in. If you want more gory details about how I have things set up, just ask. I could talk about this all day!

For what it's worth, none of these booths are 100% sound PROOF.

Whisper Room was at VO Atlanta last year and had one of their 4 x 6 booths set up in the vendor room. With the door closed, I could still very clearly hear everyone outside the room. Yes, the sound was reduced dramatically, but I could still hear it clearly.

Short of building an anechoic chamber, You are NEVER going to have a room completely isolated from the outside world. You have to come up with a level of noise you can or cant afford to be acceptable with.

Unless you are doing audiobooks with a lot of long empty silences between paragraphs or lines of dialog, you are probably not going to need a whisper room.

There are two different things to consider: outside sound and inside sound.

The biggest problem with voiceover audio is inside sounds. The sounds created inside the room and bounce around the hard walls, ceilings and floors. This is the easiest thing to deal with and there are a number of things that you can use to absorb these reflections and reduce the echo. Things like acoustic foam or OC703 panels.

If the room is already acoustically treated, you could probably buy pre-built panels if you are just trying to remove some troublesome reflections. And if you want a specific room to work in, you might want to try a loose-walled curtain style booth like what Vocal Booth 2 Go has.

As for outside sound...if you live on a busy street, there's not much you can do about it. You could spend tens of thousands of dollars to completely acoustically treat your environment and youll still hear the Subaru with the coffee can-sized muffler when it drives by.

Cheapest way I've found to treat your space. Wrap these in cloth from your local fabric store. Pin to walls with long T pins. Cheep cheep. They actually link burlap cloth for sale for very cheap as well.

https://www.amazon.com/Owens-Corning-703-Fiberglass-Boards/dp/B005V3L834

Take a look at this post. OP used this.

Yes to the rockwool.

A sound room design is a lot like a high end home theater design. Look on those web sites for info and tips. You can also find DIY recording room designs out there.

There is another product out there called Homosote. It is a pressed cellulose fiber board. Dense and has good vibration absorption. It is designed to go between sheet rock and a stud wall/ceiling.

Having been involved with commercial anechoic chamber design and use, your best bet is to build a "room within a room". So basically a sub room that does not physically touch the rafters above. If the rafters are somewhat clear of water/drain/electrical stuff you can nest the new ceiling joists into the existing floor joists. At least 2x6s or 2x8s if the span is long. Then homosote / sheetrock / quietrock to the new "room".

Pay very careful attention to the joints and gaps. Seal them up with caulk or expanding foam in a can.

Use a garage service / fire door as it will have built in weather stripping to seal in noise. Put it at an odd fraction of the wall dimension. So not right in the middle. Put it at 1/3rd or 1/5th from the end of a wall.

The room dimensions need to be carefully considered. A square room will have really odd echos in it. There are calculators out there that will do the math for you, but you basically need each room dimension to be off by a factor of 1.4 (or square root of 2) Give or take. If you can't make it x1.4 off, then at least make them odd number dimensions and not the same. I don't care how much wall treatment you put up, it won't fix a room with a nasty reverb in it. Bigger is better as well. You will put a lot of sound energy into the room. Better dissipated in a bigger room, than a small one. Basically need to avoid even harmonics due to room dimensions.

> Not:
8' - ceiling, 8' - width, 8' - length

> More like this:
8' - ceiling, 11.5' - width, 9' - length

For wall treatments, the simple solution is to buy rigid fiberglass insulation panels. They are sold in 2x4 panels. Cover them with muslin and back them with 2x4 plywood and hang on the wall.

These things:
https://www.amazon.com/Owens-Corning-703-Fiberglass-Boards/dp/B005V3L834

For HVAC, use flex ducts and ensure that the holes into the house's existing ducts are not straight. You want the ducts to go around corners. If you want to go nuts, you can make the ducts out the rigid fiber boards.

The last thing, Don't muck it up. Sooner or later, you will sell the house. Make it look "normal" so it can be converted to a storage room or something.

Start with Owens Corning 703: https://amzn.com/B005V3L834
Then build a lightweight frame and wrap in a breathable black fabric. Google "DIY Acoustic Panels" and you'll see a ton of options.

This is what I use:

https://www.amazon.com/Owens-Corning-703-Fiberglass-Boards/dp/B005V3L834

With a little searching you should be able to get a case for about $100 shipped. You'll need 5 cases to cover 220 square feet.

The downside is that you'll need to cover it with cloth. I've used muslin with good results, anything similar that breathes will do, so see what's on sale at the fabric store. The easiest method I've found for wrapping these is to cut a piece of cloth long enough to fold over and cover both sides of the fiberglass, then sew up the remaining three sides with the fiberglass inside. To finish use upholstery pins to pull the extra cloth around back.

https://www.amazon.com/Dritz-9070-Upholstery-4-Inch-30-Pack/dp/B002LN9TS8

If you have space, you can get better low frequency absorption by placing these panels a few inches away from the wall or ceiling, so hanging them somehow would be ideal.

"Item Weight 2.6 pounds"
And that's why that product doesn't work. Foam is not used in bass traps because of that.
Bass traps in general need a good amount of density to work and the right material. Dense fiberglass is what is commonly used.
Compare that foam product with this one:

https://www.amazon.com/Owens-Corning-703-Fiberglass-Boards/dp/B005V3L834

There are plenty of tutorials on how to make a good bass trap out of fiberglass boards. You will get far better results.

So, if I were to have a room typically used for recording podcasts, these would make a noticeable improvement on sound quality?

You mentioned fiberglass insulation. Something like Owens Corning 703?

This advice has been shared with me by people with decades of combined experience, who record sample libraries professionally.

For recording the best/most flexible samples, your goals are:

• as "dry" as possible.
  
  
• absolutely the lowest noise floor possible.
  
  When you stack sound effects, the noise stacks with them. It may sound great as a single sample, until you stack 4 or more, then the noise is pretty audible. So you want clean preamps in a quiet space.
  
  Convolution software these days is flexible enough to let you put any sound in any environment realistically. Try to minimize the sound of the room as much as possible. This stuff is great for building isolation booths, make sure to cover it with felt or something though
  
  I'd recommend getting a handheld recorder like the Sony D100 (or older D50), the sound quality is great and has an extremely low noise floor. Excellent preamps.
  
  If you had more of a budget, I'd recommend going with a few Neumann TLM 102 or 103, and a sound devices recorder. That would give you the absolute lowest noise and best sound quality. This is what we use, and have gone through much trial and error.
  
  TL;DR For your budget, get the Sony D100