How Much Studiofoam® should I use on my walls?

Never 100%. Well, almost never. If you are building an anechoic chamber or a really tight vocal booth, we can talk about 100% coverage. Any other room usually falls in the 25% to 75% range for coverage. And this is only for walls and ceiling.

Some general guidelines we’ve come up with over the years include:

• Control Rooms for rock, pop, rap, hip-hop, r&b, country, techno, MIDI music, etc. usually benefit from 50% to 75% coverage and mostly absorption.
• Control Rooms for jazz, art (classical), choral, acoustic, world and other forms of ensemble music usually benefit from 35% to 50% coverage. The only catch is that the Control Room be a little more ”dead” than the main recording or ”Live Room.” Diffusion is usually used more generously in these types of Control Rooms.
• Control Rooms where ”anything goes,” well, either a very ”neutral” room ala Tom Hidley would be appropriate, a ”LEDE™” room, or even something variable to tailor the acoustics to the needs of users.
• Live Rooms will vary a lot. Some well-designed Live Rooms can get by with 20% coverage (or even less!). Most fall into the 25% to 50% range. And this is usually a healthy mix of absorption and diffusion. The most successful Live Rooms usually have some degree of variability.
• Home Theaters? Usually more dead with a diffusive ceiling. This style tends to recreate the Movie Theater experience best.
• Your room? Well, we could go on and on describing every situation we’ve come across. But that might just take us to the next millennium! Instead, you should absolutely check out our new Room Layout eXpress, or other Room Analysis Services. The RLX will determine up to three different treatment recommendations for your room based on your input. This is great if you’re the ”instant gratification” type!

In addition to the Consultation Form, the Featured Installations page is dedicated to photographs and renderings showing different patterns and layouts of our products in different rooms. While these should not be construed as specific design recommendations – we don’t know exactly how these would work in your room – feel free to borrow patterns and layout concepts!