Reducing echos...

[hucker]

We just finished our house a few months ago. The main living space is a great room (kitchen, dining, family room). The floor is all bamboo, lots of windows and much of it has high ceilings. An unanticipated problem has been the loud echos... you just haven't lived life until you've heard a 2, 4 and 6 year old screaming at each other in this room! Besides carpeting are there any tricks I can do to reduce the noise.

 

[DavidL]

hucker, the problem you will find is not that there aren't ways to reduce echo, they just typically are tough to get WAF approval.

There is a Home Theater construction area in AVSForum that has many sound deadening, echo reduction products and techniques.

For living areas, decorative things that are soft - pillows, on wall fabric, etc.

I live in same issues (37 ft ceiling, wall o windows, oak floors) and have learnt to accept :blink:

 

[samgreco]

DavidL nailed it. Most of the highly effective pro stuff will never get WAF.

The softer and thicker it is, the better it will absorb high frequencies. Which is where most of the "echo" (it's actually reverb) is coming from.

I work alot in recording and have built a couple of rooms. One of the best things you can do, but it's really tough in a home, is to have an absorbant material with air space behind it. Like a false wall made of acoustic material 3 or 4 inches in front of a regular wall. Probably won't be able to do that.

If you can hang decorative cloth items (rugs, banners, etc.) from the ceiling if it's super high, that will break up sound waves as well. But that is tough to make it look good.

Good luck

 

[CollinR]

If you can hang decorative cloth items (rugs, banners, etc.) from the ceiling if it's super high, that will break up sound waves as well. But that is tough to make it look good.

Thats a winner, and not too tough to make it look good.

Unfortunately the rugs with high WAF also have a high $.

 

[samgreco]

Unfortunately the rugs with high WAF also have a high $.

This makes me realize how lucky I am. My wife is a film/video person. So she realizes the importance of audio. I can push the WAF thing quite a bit

 

[huggy59]

The best way is to have designed it not to have the echo... sounds like you created a very "live" room witht all the hard surfaces to reflect sound, but that's moot now... hehe

Seriously, you need some way to break up or absorb the sound waves. Use of sound-deadening materials or cloth-covered screens with sound-absorbant material behind is good, heavy curtains would help but block light, and filling the space with something that reflects the sound waves differently, like a large sculpture, hanging mobile, etc. would also help. Even thick area rugs would help. You can probably get some decent acoustic wall and ceiling treatments that can be used that may have a pleasing appearance in the appropriate places, which is probably your best bet at this point - just don't paint them!