Active Bass Trap

[inverseroom]

via Music Thing. Brilliant, or bullshit?

http://www.bagend.com/bagend/ETrap.htm

[Nate Dort]

So it's basically a speaker that plays a reverse polarity signal to cancel out nodes? I'll believe it when I hear it.

That psychedelic graphic they have is ridiculous.

[Smitty]

that thing was featured in a WIRED article about shrinking studio spaces in metropolitan centers... here.

[Phiz]

First of all, the device is designed to reduce work at 2 tunable frequencies. So if it work perfectly you could kill your two lowest room modes, but not the higher harmonics. Secondly, even their test data isn't that wonderful looking, and I always would expect stuff to perform a bit worse than the test data in an ad.

[JWL]

I've seen this before, and I'm suspcious. Most likely I just don't understand how it works; John Storyk of WSDG has used it in small spaces where "real" bass trapping isn't an option, so there must be something to it.

However, with room modes, different parts of the room will see different effects, in other words in some parts of the room the mode frequencies cancel out, in other parts of the room the reinforce each other. So I don't see how "filtering out" the room mode frequencies could work... with acoustics the issue is not the room mode frequencies "going in" to the room, it's what happens to them once they're in the room.

So yeah, I recommend sticking with normal bass trap strategies.

[thethingwiththestuff]

if you go to musicthing.blogspot.com, you'll find a link to the walters-storyk PDF of how they used them.... looks pretty interesting to me.

[Ryan Silva]

How dependent on electronics do we need to get?

I can't imagine canceling a mixing session because the active bass trap blew up. What a hard thing to try to explain.