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"Most professional engineers working in home studios will gladly spend $2k to $6k or even more for acoustic treatment that lets them mix with confidence."
"RealTraps' acoustics expertise has been validated repeatedly by our many famous customers."
"RealTraps is a true innovator, offering a wide range of unique and clever products."
"Our proprietary membrane increases LF absorption substantially, while reducing absorption at mid and high frequencies to avoid making the room too dead sounding."
"The most important question to ask a customer is how much they're willing to invest."
"Most of our panels can be mounted on microphone stands, or on RealTraps stands that are more stable and professional looking."
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Our common goal is to help customers achieve the best monitoring, and the best recording quality, possible. We all know that great gear matters, but having great acoustics is just as important. Even budget gear is usually flat within 1 dB over the audible range. But a typical untreated room has numerous peaks and nulls spanning 30 dB or even more! Although most of the discussion on this page is about recording studios, the information applies equally to audiophile listening rooms and home theaters. INCREASED PUBLIC AWARENESS OF ACOUSTICS Recording engineers and audiophiles are more aware of the importance of acoustics and room treatment than ever before. When RealTraps was founded in 2003, co-owner Ethan Winer was a lone voice in audio web forums explaining to newbies that their mix problems are most likely due to a lack of bass traps and other acoustic treatment. Now, almost everyone understands the importance of bass traps, absorbers, and diffusors. Yet most retail stores sell only thin foam, if they have any acoustic products at all, so they miss an important sales opportunity. Indeed, having a well treated room is even more important than which converters and preamps are used. Engineers and studio owners with large budgets will hire professional designers such as John Storyk, Fran Manzella, and Russ Berger. But the majority of engineers working in home-sized studios cannot afford $10k to $30k design fees. And that doesn't include the cost of treatment which of course is still needed. However, many people will gladly spend $2k to $6k or even more for a treatment solution that really works, and lets them record and mix with confidence. If you have even one RealTraps product in your store, your customers will be able to see and touch it. At least once a week we get a frantic call from someone asking where they can buy our Portable Vocal Booth today, right now. Having products people can see in person is far more compelling than a photo in a brochure, though we have attractive brochures for your stores too. We're also glad to drop-ship to your customers to save everyone the cost of shipping twice.
VALIDATED BY MANY FAMOUS CUSTOMERS Beside the top mixing and mastering engineers at left, other well-known RealTraps customers include: Herbie Hancock, Bob Clearmountain, Butch Vig, Atlantic Records, T Bone Burnett, NBC Universal Studios, Pixar, Telefunken USA, Sterling Sound, Mark Mothersbaugh, M-Audio, Voice of America, Full Sail, Klein+Hummel, Toyota, Subway, TASCAM, NBC-TV, NASA, Google, Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN), Fraunhofer USA, William Morris Agency, Ogilvy & Mather, McGill University, Columbia University, Universal Mastering, Berklee, US Army, Fox Sports, David Kutch, Museum Of Modern Art (MOMA), Pratt Institute, MIT, Bose Corp, Paramount Recording, Tulane University, SETI Institute, Brigham Young University, Epcot Center, Starz TV, US Forest Service, Johnson & Johnson, School of Visual Arts, Electronic Arts, Oxygen TV Network, VISA, ESPN, Warner Brothers Records, NYU, Abercrombie & Fitch, and Roy Hendrickson, chief engineer at Avatar Studios in NYC. LARGE VARIETY OF INNOVATIVE PRODUCTS RealTraps is a true innovator, having developed many unique and clever products that maximize sound quality for a wide range of budgets. The selling points below will help you explain to customers why RealTraps is the best choice for affordable yet highly effective acoustic treatment.
We also offer high-performance Ceiling Tiles that drop into standard 2x2 and 2x4 grids. These are similar to our popular MiniTraps and HF MiniTraps, but without the mounting frame. Our MiniGobos, and Stands let customers place acoustic panels in optimum places without mounting or wall damage. Other RealTraps Products are equally capable and attractive, offering the same high value for you and your customers. Top But RealTraps is much more than just a manufacturer of acoustic products. We're also acoustic experts and educators. We'll help you and support you at every step, advising what products are most appropriate for your customers and where they should be placed. We're also glad to answer general questions about acoustics and related theory. Acoustic treatment is nowhere near as complicated as many believe. Very few audio retailers understand acoustics and room treatment, and even fewer know how to sell it. If you spend a little time to learn the basics, you'll be able to sell an entire class of products that most other retailers overlook. HOW TO SPEC A CUSTOMER'S ACOUSTIC NEEDS Measuring a room, then building custom tuned traps, is old school and ignores boundary interference which causes peaks and deep nulls at all frequencies. Broadband bass trapping is simpler, and more effective for the small rooms many people use today. In most cases measuring the room is not needed at all, other than to see how bad the room is, or how much better it became after adding treatment. While room EQ is often touted as a solution for bad acoustics, it is not a viable substitute for bass traps and other treatment. EQ cannot improve the nulls, ringing, or comb filtering shown in the graphs farther down this page, nor can it reduce echoes and ambience. Therefore, all rooms need:
That's pretty much it! The main problems we encounter when spec'ing room treatment is showing people how to deal with irregular rooms such as an L shape, or an attic space having angled side walls. But neither of those are difficult to deal with - people just think they are! Other important issues are the need for left-right symmetry, especially in the front of the room, and explaining to people they need to keep the corners and side walls free of clutter to make room for bass traps and reflection absorbers respectively. The photos below show typical installations of RealTraps products. Click any photo to see it full size. Note that all room corners are viable for bass traps, not just those corners where two walls meet. Additional specific placement advice is shown on the Placing RealTraps page of our web site.
How much does it cost? In our demo video Hearing is Believing you can see - and hear - before / after frequency response, ringing, and RT60 graphs for a typical bedroom size space after installing $18,000 worth of acoustic treatment. It's not necessary to spend that much to get excellent results! But for those with the desire and budget for the very best, it's possible to make a typical bedroom size space absolutely stellar, sounding and measuring like a much larger room. What improvements can be expected? Some people wrongly believe that bass traps reduce the amount of bass energy in a room, but the opposite is often true. Peaks are typically 6 dB or less, but nulls can be infinitely deep. When the rear wall is closer than 10 or 15 feet behind the listener, the frequency response has two to four deep nulls below 200 Hz. This makes the bass range sound thin in the room, and is the main reason music that seems correct while mixing sounds too bassy when played in other rooms or in a car. High-Q peaks can also make music sound out of tune. For example, if a room has a strong resonance at 107 Hz, music in the key of A will sound flat in that room as the music excites those resonant modes. Once bass traps are added, the response becomes fuller, tighter, clearer, and more accurate. After adding absorption at the side-wall and ceiling reflection points, the sound stage also becomes larger and wider because the small-room "early" reflections from those nearby surfaces no longer drown out the reverb and ambience already present in the music. These improvements in sound quality are easily shown using high resolution frequency response graphs, waterfall plots, and RT60 measurements. The first graph below shows the low frequency response of a bedroom size space before (red) and after (blue) adding a number of bass traps:
The next two graphs below show the reduction in modal ringing, using the same measurement data as above. In this type of graph the "mountains" come forward over time showing for how long certain bass frequencies continue to ring after the initial sound stops. Ringing peaks is the main cause of the common problem known as "one-note bass," where every bass note sounds the same no matter what is actually played.
One important goal of room treatment is to achieve a uniform decay time versus frequency. If some frequencies take longer to decay than others, the effect is similar to having a skewed frequency response. This next graph shows the reduction in decay time, and the huge improvement in decay uniformity, after adding bass traps and diffusors. This is the same room as was used for the graphs above:
Finally, the graph below shows the reduction in comb filtering after adding absorbers to the side-wall reflection points:
There's a huge amount of educational information on these pages of the RealTraps web site: Acoustic Basics Also see our Dealers page for dealer terms. Note that these dealer pages are hidden on our web site, and are not visible to customers, so please do not share them with others. Top |
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