Audimute sheets vs moving blankets?

[charmingtedious]

I found some second-hand audimute blankets on craigslist, and I'm wondering if anyone has compared them to general-purpose moving blankets.

I'd just be using them to hang on some parallel walls in a small corner of the basement studio that we want to use for tracking vocals, just to cut out any echoes and room sound. Not for isolation, in other words.

The company hasn't done itself any favors by spamming the internet with arguments that they're different from moving blankets because "moving blankets haven't had NRC levels tested".

[JWL]

never worked with the audiomute blankets. Just remember that high frequency absorption is pretty easy to achieve.... the question is how low will they absorb? As long as they go down to 300Hz-ish then they will get rid of much of the "room tone."

Of course real acoustic panels are better performers, but I've definitely used moving blankets when budgets have been tight.

[charmingtedious]

Here are the specs.

freq absorption coefficient
160.0 .07
200.0 .12
250.0 .30
315.0 .38
400.0 .49
500.0 .64
630.0 .79
800.0 0.89
1000.0 0.97
1250.0 1.01
1600.0 0.98
2000.0 0.94
2500.0 0.89
3150.0 0.87
4000.0 0.89
5000.0 0.88

Wondering if you think that rolloff is too steep for it to be worth the $100 i'd end up paying for 144 square feet of coverage? I like the blanket idea conceptually because our space is so packed with instruments that hanging things from the ceiling when needed seems easier than moving panels about on the floor as I used to do in my older, larger space.

I guess something I'm not totally sure I understand is the relationship between bass traps and mid-hi absorption treatment. Like, if I treat my room with some DIY traps and then curtain off an area for a deader sound for vocals, will the traps in the room help compensate for the lack of absorption in the lows provided by the curtains and leave me with a relatively even response?

[JWL]

Yeah, those blankets begin to roll off below about 1200Hz. Contrast this to, for instance, a 1" thick rigid fiberglass panel which won't roll off until about 250Hz (ie, 2+ octaves lower).

Also, keep in mind that a lot of "room tone" generally lives from 250-800Hz or so. So you'll get some improvement with the blankets, but will likely want more. By the time you get enough blankets up to fix the room tone range, the high end will be completely dead.

For a DIY bass trap -- or more accurately a broadband absorber, ie, something like a 4" thick slab of straight-up rigid fiberglass or rockwool covered in cloth -- it will definitely absorb high frequencies as well. So for straight up traps like this, the thicker the trap, the lower a frequency to which it will absorb. A 4" thick trap will give good performance under 80Hz. 6" thick is even better.