Low Frequency Control

Basic broadband bass traps rely on thick porous absorption, with an air gap between the absorber and the wall. However, for very low frequencies this is an inefficient use of space. This is because porous absorbers act on the particle velocity of a sound wave, which is zero right against the wall and maximum at ¼ of a wavelength away from the wall. That means for porous absorption to be efficient at 80 Hz (wavelength of 14 feet), you would need absorbent material 3 ½ feet from your wall.

In contrast, Vicoustic’s Super Bass Extreme has excellent absorption at 80 Hz, and it fits snug in the corner of your room. It achieves this because unlike porous absorbers (which act on the particle velocity), it uses a membrane that responds to the sound pressure, which is maximum in the corners of the room.

The membrane (or diaphragm) is tuned to 75-85 Hz and vibrates over that frequency range, converting pressure fluctuations into air motion. The moving air is forced to pass through high-density acoustic foam inside the Super Bass Extreme. This resistance causes acoustic energy to be absorbed and converted to heat. The system behaves like a damped spring, absorbing low frequencies down to 60 Hz.

But, Super Base Extreme traps are not simply membrane / diaphragmatic absorbers. To further take advantage of the high pressure in the corners of your room they integrate another method of absorption: The panel at the back of the bass trap is micro-perforated with 1 mm holes, making it behave as a tuned Helmholtz resonator. Through testing, Vicoustic found that these perforations caused a 20% increase in low frequency absorption efficiency. The back panel Helmholtz resonator in the Super Bass Extreme is a simple enhancement that makes a big payoff in performance.

Mid-High Frequency Control

The Wavewood panel front of the Vicoustic Super Bass Extreme features a sequence of cavities with absorption underneath. This patterned wood surface (which looks like an audio wave form) functions as a hybrid absorber / diffuser. As the frequency increases, the front surface acts less like an absorber and more like a diffuser, scattering mid-to-high frequencies to improve the sense of spaciousness in your room. This way, low frequencies are absorbed while precious high frequency energy is preserved. In other words, these bass traps help retain liveliness so your room does not sound overly dead.

Optional Super Bass Extreme Stackers (Sold Seperately)

The modular design of Vicoustic Super Bass Extreme traps allows mounting flexibility and portability. The default mounting method for permanent installations is to use adhesive flexi glue. For non-glue installation, consider the optional Stacker Levels and Stacker Bases (sold separately). The Stacker Base anchors to the bottom bass trap, giving a stable platform for building the stack, while Stacker Levels sit between traps so they can be stacked on top of each other.

This system lets you safely stack multiple Super Bass Extreme traps in the corner without the need to permanently fix them to the walls.

Why do I need Bass Traps?

Small and midsize rooms such as control rooms, mastering rooms, tracking rooms, listening rooms and home theaters naturally have a problematic, uneven low frequency response. This is caused by resonant room modes, standing waves, random wave interference and speaker boundary interference response (SBIR).

Room modes are natural resonances caused by the geometry of your room. They cause problematic peaks and nulls (dips) in the frequency response. In other words, the loudness at a particular modal frequency will vary depending where you are in the room. At locations in your room where sound waves are in phase with each other at a specific frequency, a peak occurs in the response (this is what causes the infamous “one note bass”). At locations where bass waves are out of phase (called nodes), you’ll get a null in the response.

Speaker boundary interference response (SBIR) causes deep dips in the bass response below a certain frequency. This is caused by destructive interference between the source sound wave coming out of your speaker, and the reflected sound wave bouncing off a nearby boundary (such as a wall). When the direct and reflected sound waves are out of phase with one another, cancellation occurs, causing a dip, or null.

The simplest way to tackle these problems is to mount bass traps, like the Super Bass Extreme by Vicoustic, in as many corners of your room as possible. Then, you’ll be able to clearly hear the frequency balance in your music and enjoy numerous benefits: You will be able to make better mixes, trust your ears when mastering or critical listening, hear nuances you never new existed and enhance the pleasure of your listening experience.

Applications for Vicoustic Bass Traps

Any domestic-sized room used for music will benefit hugely from bass traps. In general, start with broadband control, then use tuned bass traps like the Vicoustic Super Bass Extreme to target problematic low frequencies where broadband absorption is inefficient. Use in small to medium sized rooms including control / mixing rooms, post production rooms, mastering rooms, live recording rooms, hi-fi listening rooms, home cinema rooms and small rehearsal spaces.

If you’re looking to treat your whole room, click here for your personalized Vicoustic room treatment plan. We can assess your room and design a custom-fit acoustic treatment kit just for you.

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Room modes distort your low frequency response. Modes cause peaks at some frequencies (making them sound louder), nulls or dips at other frequencies (making them sound quieter), and modal ringing (where some frequencies take much longer to decay than others). This reduces listening clarity and creates problems like “one note bass”, where all bass frequencies sound basically the same regardless of pitch.

Room modes and other bass problems below 100 Hz require special tuned bass traps to treat effectively. Unless you want to dramatically shrink your room, you can’t treat a 50 Hz room mode using only porous broadband absorption (like fiberglass, rockwool or acoustic foam). To treat these deep bass problems you need tuned bass traps. These include tuned membrane / panel absorbers, and Helmholtz resonators like the Vicoustic Vari Bass.

But most tuned bass traps have a fatal flaw. Because room modes are governed by the geometry of your room, tuned bass traps usually have to be custom specified to target a modal frequency with maximum efficiency.

The tunable Vari Bass trap solves this problem.

How to use the Vari Bass Helmholtz resonator

The simplest way to treat a problematic low frequency in your room is to place a Vari Bass in the corner, then rotate the wooden top until you hear it start to affect the frequency you’re targeting.

If you want to be more scientific, you can use acoustic measurements to find the exact frequency that’s causing you grief. Then, tune the Vari Bass to target it. You can accurately target frequencies from 50 Hz to 100 Hz.

A visual scale is included so you can see which frequencies the Vari Bass trap is absorbing as you tune it.

Unlike broadband porous absorbers, which need to be placed a distance from the wall to absorb low frequencies, Helmholtz resonators act on the pressure component of the sound wave. This means you should place Vicoustic Vari Bass traps where the sound pressure is maximum (right against the edges of your room). Corner placement is ideal, especially in the tri-corners where your floor and walls (or ceiling and walls) meet.

How the Vari Bass trap works

The Vari Bass Helmholtz trap operates using three main principles:

1. Variable frequency absorption by Helmholtz resonance (tunable).
2. Absorption by a piston system through the interaction of the air chamber and rubber isolation in the device.
3. Porous absorption (broadband acoustic foam) to widen the bandwidth and absorb harmonic frequencies.

Helmholtz resonance simply means air resonance in a cavity. It’s the same thing that happens when you blow across the opening of an empty bottle.

Like all Helmholtz resonator absorbers, the basic form of the Vari Bass is a resonant air cavity with narrow openings. During resonance, energy is absorbed through friction when high velocity sound particles are forced through the openings (the five tubes in the Vari Bass).

The top section of the Vari Bass contains five tube cavities surrounded by absorption (high density acoustic foam). Connected to the tubes is a larger air cavity, which shrinks or expands as you tune the resonant bass trap.

The cavity of a Helmholtz resonator can be accurately tuned to a specific resonance. While most Helmholtz traps are built with a fixed resonant frequency, the Vari Bass lets you tune it by adjusting the size of the resonant cavity.

Helmholtz resonators provide high efficiency absorption over a relatively narrow frequency range, so they are ideal for targeting low frequencies that are impractical to tame using porous absorption.

However, the bandwidth of a Helmholtz resonator can be widened by adding porous absorption inside the resonant air chamber. This is the purpose of the sound absorbing foam in the Vari Bass. The acoustic foam is also important for absorbing frequencies over 100 Hz, helping reduce the energy of harmonic modes. While the fundamental frequency of the Vari Bass (which you can tune) is absorbed by Helmholtz resonance, the harmonics of the fundamental frequency are absorbed by the acoustic foam.

The combination of these absorption methods means the Vari Bass does not only absorb energy of the acoustic mode it’s targeting. Acoustic testing done by Vicoustic and Salford University demonstrated that the Vari Bass actually distributes low frequency energy to other frequencies nearby, modifying the Q factor of the room mode it’s tuned to [1]. Vicoustic found that the amplitude (sound pressure) difference between peaks and nulls was reduced when the Vari Bass was added to a test room, resulting in an overall flatter low frequency response (a tighter, more even sound in the low end).

Vicoustic Vari Bass traps are especially useful in critical listening rooms where the low frequency response affects your ability to accurately monitor and mix. This applies to mixing rooms, mastering studios and recording studio control rooms.

The Vari Bass Helmholtz resonator can also be put to great use in your hi-fi room or home theater. If your goal is to optimize your room for high fidelity audio playback, targeted bass absorption is often the critical finishing touch. If certain room modes are causing your grief, tunable bass traps like the Vari Bass can take your listening experience to the next level.

If you’re looking to treat your whole room, click here for your personalized Vicoustic room treatment plan. We can assess your room and design a custom-fit acoustic treatment kit just for you.

[1] J. Castro, T. Silva, B. Fazenda, “Vari Bass – Vicoustic Research & Development”, Vicoustic press article, 2012

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At 5 ⅞ inch deep, the Multifuser Wood 64 is a dramatic looking diffuser that does not simply provide acoustic diffusion. Used as a functional centerpiece to your recording studio, performance space, listening room or home theater, the Multifuser makes a bold design statement. It says “this room is made for music”.

Musicians, recording engineers, hi-fi heads and interior designers love this diffuser because it’s intuitive how it works. Form follows function. The Vicoustic Multifuser looks like it’s designed to diffuse sound, giving it a sense of purpose and place in a music room. A nice bonus is that even to the uniformed it looks interesting, giving a modern yet natural vibe to your room.

While the Vicoustic Multifuser Wood 64 was inspired by the RPG Skyline diffuser, it’s designed differently. The Skyline is a 2D primitive root diffuser (PRD), while the Vicoustic Multifuser is based on a QRD sequence.

Another difference is that the RPG Skyline is made from expanded polystyrene. Wood is a greener material than polystyrene, and the Multifuser’s wood construction makes it durable and beautiful, with a sophisticated look.

The Vicoustic Multifuser is a two-dimensional diffuser. This means it scatters sound both horizontally and vertically to treat problematic reflections and give your room a more neutral acoustic response. Unlike absorption, which removes sound energy from your room and reduces the reverberation time, diffusion disperses acoustical energy. This way liveliness is preserved and your room can actually be made to sound larger than it is.

2D diffusion is often used on the ceiling, on the front wall between speakers, and on the rear wall to improve listening transparency in cases where back wall absorption would render the room too dead.

If you want a lower profile diffuser, the Multifuser Wood 36 is another option. However, the Wood 64 provides provides better diffusion below 500 Hz.

The Multifuser Wood 64 is made in Portugal, where Vicoustic makes all their acoustic treatments. For efficient transport each diffuser ships as two interlocking pieces packed together, face-to-face.

If you’re looking to treat your whole room, click here for your personalized Vicoustic room treatment plan. We can assess your room and design a custom-fit acoustic treatment kit just for you.

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Vicoustic developed the Wave Wood using their Absorption and Reflection Control System (ARCS). The design is based on a modified Maximum Length Sequence (MLS) diffuser. An MLS diffuser uses slats of reflective material (wood) and absorptive material (in this case, acoustic foam), creating a pseudo-random binary pattern based on a Maximum Length Sequence. Vicoustic then optimized this pattern to give the Wave Wood panel a desirable absorption curve with respect to frequency.

In the Wave Wood, the patterned surface provides absorption at mid frequencies (maximum absorption between 400 Hz and 1 kHz), and a combination of absorption and diffusion at higher frequencies.

Sound Absorption Coefficient Graph

But the Wave Wood acoustic panel is more than just an MSL diffuser. Instead of making all the absorptive strips the same length, the cavities in the Wave Wood’s surface vary in length to provide additional scattering and achieve an optimal balance of reflection vs absorption.

This makes the Wave Wood instantly recognizable. Many audio professionals, audiophiles and musicians love the look of these unique acoustic panels. As a result, the Wave Wood can be found decorating the walls and ceilings of recording studios, hi-fi listening rooms, home theaters and music venues around the world.

As a hybrid absorber-diffuser (or diffsorber), the Vicoustic Wave Wood is an ideal treatment for creating a controlled sound in your room while keeping it bright, airy and ambient. It lets you balance the frequency response and reverberation times in your room, without killing the liveliness.

The hybrid Wave Wood surface is primarily designed for treating mid to high frequencies.

High frequencies are precious because they decay fastest and get absorbed easily — not just by acoustic treatment, but by furniture, carpet, drapes and fabric surfaces. As a result, most rooms have much longer reverberation times at low and mid frequencies. This can make a room sound imbalanced.

Over emphasis of the low end makes a room sound muddy and boomy, while too much energy in the mids can make a room sound cheap and lo-fi.

The solution: Wave Wood panels provide more absorption at mid frequencies, and more scattering / reflection at high frequencies. This helps you correct the imbalance so you can achieve a rich, high fidelity sound in your room.

With proper application, the Wave Wood can also help you achieve a neutral sound for critical listening in your mixing, mastering or control room. In this case the goal is a relatively flat frequency response and relatively even decay times across the audible spectrum. This requires extensive bass trapping and broadband absorption, which can over-damp the high frequencies in your room. To solve this problem you can use Wave Wood panels to tame mids while retaining some high frequency liveliness in your critical listening room.

The Wave Wood is a great alternative to broadband absorption for treating problems like flutter echo and comb filtering caused by early reflections. Unlike broadband absorption panels, which remove energy at mid and high frequencies, the Wave Wood absorbs harsh mids while dispersing precious high frequency energy throughout your room.

This way you can treat problematic reflections while simultaneously creating a musical ambience and sense of spaciousness in your room.

Vicoustic Wave Wood panels can be mounted a variety of ways. They can be mounted flat on the wall, on the ceiling as acoustic tiles, or straddling a corner to achieve lower frequency absorption. However, we recommend purpose build bass traps for low frequency treatment, like the Vicoustic Super Bass Extreme. The Super Bass Extreme is surfaced with a Wave Wood panel, making it a perfect aesthetic fit for a Wave Wood themed room treatment project.

The Wave Wood is available in five attractive wood finishes: cherry, light Brown, nordik, wenge and white.

If you’re looking to treat your whole room, click here for your personalized Vicoustic room treatment plan. We can assess your room and design a custom-fit acoustic treatment kit just for you.

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