Sound acts like light in a lot of ways. If you shine a flashlight at a mirror, the light beam gets reflected back at the angle of incidence (for example, if you pointed the light at the mirror at a 45-degree angle, it would reflect off the surface at 45 degrees and back into the room). Sound the same way. Acoustic treatment is the act of stopping the sound bouncing off the various surfaces of the room. A diffuser jumbles up these reflections so they don’t return back into the room directly.
Reflection points are places in a mix room where the audio from the speakers hits the nearest walls and ceiling. The first reflections are known as early reflections, and it’s in the engineer’s best interest to kill these reflections. The reason being that if the engineer hears the direct sound vibration from the speaker to his or her ear, he or she will then get a second version of the same vibration that’s reflected off the nearest walls and ceiling but at a slight delay. This confuses the brain and ultimately messes up the stereo image, which results in inaccurate mixes that could sound strange on different systems such as consumer headphones. These reflections happen behind the engineer, too, and reflect off the back wall thus reflecting back into the engineer’s ears with an even longer delay. The best way to deal with this is to place absorption and/or diffusers at the reflection (or mirror) points.
What Frequencies Do I Diffuse?
Within the “diffusion” acoustic-treatment bracket, there are several types of diffusers that treat specific frequencies. I wanted something broadband, meaning it would diffuse as many frequencies as possible for my money.
I would like to install a sound diffuser that has deep gutters to break up lower frequencies and, within each gutter, even smaller gutters to break up the mid and higher frequencies. Each gutter varies at very specific depths, this is the part acoustic scientists have mathematically configured for optimum diffusion. As much as I wanted to add these not only practical but awesome-looking panels in my room.