I actually tried that since I have a pair of diy stands floating around unused. I moved my speakers to several symmetrical positions in my room and had myself a good listen. Believe it or not, I didn't really appreciate a significant difference. Maybe it's because I didn't spend any money on it

Ethan Winer seems to think rigid fiberglas is best at absorbing high and mid frequencies just as I have observed. Don't ask me about the science involved,I have no idea. When my panels were up I had the foam panels on a wall adjacent to my speakers, bass traps in the corners and the glass panels on the wall facing the speakers,closest my my listening position. I initially had a reflection problem in my room. It was large(27'x22) and had many hard,rigid surfaces,including wood floors and plaster walls. Speaker placement in this room was a horrific and when I had Magnepan speakers in that room the treble splash was almost unbearable. Ideal placement of the panels was accomplished through much experimentation and frustration but seemed to work out well. I decided to construct my own panels after seeing how poorly constructed the expensive bass traps I purchased were. I was able to calm down the "echo" effect and kill the treble splash completely. When I added a sub later,I found I had to alter speaker placement to aid in the frequency transistion to the lower mids to the upper bass. This also required repositioning the side wall foam panels a bit further back along the walls. Things worked out nicely and proved to me how effective room treaments really are.

My new room is smaller(19x18), has softer surfaces and less rigid walls and will likely require a different application of acoustic treatments.

This is a cool thread for us speaker guys,thanks.

Yeah, Ethan sells a combination panel trap for bass + fiberglass and sells them. Though he never talks about his own products in his articles, so I'm not sure exactly what he does with his own. The rigid fiberglass itself is best for mids and highs, and not best for lows because you still need a lot of it to get down low. That's why those bass traps are so big, right? Lots of fiberglass stuffed inside? You can't stuff rigid fiberglass. That's what I see in the DIY bass traps, at least. I'm not clear on panel trapping bass yet. It seems far beyond my poor diy skills though

Front panels mounted:

I used cheap eggcrate style foam and blade tiles from Markertek.

They are mostly for absorbing and refracting high and mid end sound. Bass would not have much trouble going right through. I guess that's where rigid fiberglass would come in. Seriously, hanging a rug on the walls makes a huge difference, but sometimes may not be the best looking solution.

ALthough they would look better than standard blade tiles. Heheh.

-Ed

you know ooheadsoo... your panels before using the cloth finish look pretty good and flat. perhaps you can do the cloth thing a little better?--maybe stretch it a bit more? then it'll look pretty good. maybe use different color cloth?--black will look nice i think.

I see the fiberglass as a replacement for foam, not just for lower frequencies, unless the numbers drop off sharply past 4khz. No one posts those 4khz numbers, I think, because no facilities are rated to be accurate that high. At least I know why they don't post numbers below 125hz is because the precision isn't rated to go that low. I think Ethan Winer has done some relative testing of the lows and fiberglass kicks the crap out of foam, but I don't know about the highs. What's shown on paper so far is that fiberglass wins in the highs too, or at least it's as good

Orpheus, I may redo the cloth because I just got my hands on a bunch of thumbtacks for free I was running out of tacks, which was why I started to pace myself. I don't know if you can tell, but the wrinkles and puffiness is gone (I mean...gone,) as it is, except for that center crease. The sides aren't nearly as lumpy as they seem in that finished picture. And I haven't redone it yet with more thumbtacks I don't know if anything will get rid of that center crease short of ironing though, and it's hard to remove these thumbtacks...I hammered them in to give them better surface area grip around the head.