Mar 17 Listener Review: Sam's Club Acoustic Panels
Editor Note: Amazon.com has a wide selection of Acoustic panels in different sizes and various price points. Check them out! (Acoustic Panels at Amazon.com)
Reference: Podcast #517
By: Henry Menke
Sam’s Club 24” x 40” “MyTheater” Acoustic Panels
MyTheater Acoustic Panels
Like many HT Guys listeners, I have long wanted to upgrade my home theater with acoustic treatments to improve the sound quality of music and movies. However, I have been reluctant to spend the kind of money that is usually required to buy pre-made panels and I have been too busy with work and family to make my own panels from scratch. That’s why I was very interested when the HT Guys mentioned that Sam’s Club is offering budget-minded acoustic panels on samsclub.com. The HT Guys really helped me out by also providing links to these items on the podcast page. It turned out that the cost is only about $125 per four-pack. With shipping, my total outlay for three packs / twelve panels was just $375 plus about $50 shipping. That comes to around $35 per panel delivered – not bad!
Description of My Home Theater
I have a relatively compact home theater, 12 ft. wide x 15 ft. long with a 103” diagonal 21:9 front projection screen on one of the short walls and five theater-style seats facing it (three across the front and two in the second row). The two rear seats are elevated on a carpeted 12” high platform to provide an unobstructed view of the screen. My surround sound system is 7.1 featuring two Paradigm Mini-Mk III left and right speakers, a Paradigm CC-300 center channel speaker, and four Paradigm ADP-370 adaptive dipole surround sound speakers, all powered by a Yamaha RX-V1900 AVR.
My subwoofer is a do-it-yourself 300-liter ported “sonosub” made from a 24” diameter cardboard concrete forming tube, MDF end caps, and 8” tuned port, and a high-excursion 15” SoundSplinter RL-p15 dual-coil driver. Each coil of the driver is powered by one channel of a Samson S700 350W/channel pro amp (700W total). I am using a Behringer Feedback Destroyer Pro DSP 1124P as a subwoofer equalizer to reduce subwoofer room modes. The DSP1124P was tuned with Room EQ Wizard for a flat response down to 17.5 Hz with full output.
Planning
My approach was more seat-of-the-pants than it was scientific. There are only so many places to put panels in my small theater! Really it was not too hard to figure out where they needed to be. I decided that I wanted to reduce unwanted sound reflections from the side walls, the ceiling, and the front wall under the screen. The Sam’s Club 24” x 40” acoustic panels seemed to offer a lot of flexibility because they could be mounted either horizontally or vertically.
Given the locations that I wanted to install the panels, I figured I would need to order three of the four-packs for a total of twelve acoustic panels. I decided on four for the front half of the ceiling, three along each side wall, and two under the front screen. I decided to leave the rear half of the ceiling and the rear wall untreated, to aid in creating a more diffused surround sound field towards the back of the theater.
After consulting with my very color-savvy daughter, I chose black because my home theater is painted a rich dark purple color and all of the furniture and equipment is black. The idea of putting black panels on the ceiling did make my wife wonder if I had lost my mind. To give her an impression of what it would look like with the panels installed as I planned, using PowerPoint I made a crude model of what the room would look like:
Crude Model of Wall and Ceiling Panels Screen-Captured from PowerPoint
First Impression / Unboxing
Upon opening the boxes, it was immediately clear that these are budget panels. They are very lightly constructed, with a lightweight frame and cardboard backing material. The “stuffing” is about one inch of fiberglass insulation. The four panels are crammed into the box very tightly together, making them somewhat hard to extract because there is a serrated picture hanger attached to the back along one of the 24” ends, and these hangers dig into the fabric of the panels packed directly behind them. In fact, one of the hangers was actually bent wildly out of shape during packing. Fortunately, the impression it left in the fabric of the adjacent panel was temporary. None of the fabric was permanently damaged or distorted, and the imprints worked themselves out relatively quickly.
Despite my initial misgivings, I soon realized that once these panels were safely mounted to the ceiling and walls, they would look perfectly fine. I even decided that I liked the “mytheater” logos on all the panels…they give the impression that expensive custom treatments were installed.
Mounting / Installation
I decided that the serrated picture hanger was not a secure and professional means of panel installation. Also, it would never work for ceiling installation. So, I thought about a better way to mount them.
I decided that it would be best to drive four mounting screws through the frames of the panels. I chose to use 2” long #6 Phillips flat head screws driven through the panel and into #6 self-tapping drywall anchors.
Self-Tapping #6 Drywall Anchor
It’s not possible to drill through the fabric covering the front of the frames, because the fabric will try to wrap itself around the drill bit. Fortunately, the fabric is synthetic and can be spot-melted with a soldering iron. I pre-melted the screw locations on all of the panels, then pre-drilled all of the holes. I selected a drill bit that was just a hair larger than the outside of the screw threads. Next I installed four screws in each panel and held them up to the wall or ceiling in the desired position. Then I tapped on each screw with a small hammer to leave four light impressions on the drywall. Although this kind of anchor is supposedly “self-tapping”, I pre-drilled the drywall with a bit sized to match the inner shank of the drywall anchor to ease installation of them and reduce the risk of cracking the drywall or breaking off the anchor in the wall.
To cover the screw heads, I found a cool product in the Specialty Fastener area of my local Lowe’s home center. It is a Hillman #881025 black PVC screw cover for #4 & #6 screws. You snap the cover over the screw head once it is installed for a nice finished look. They come two to a bag so I needed a total of (12) * (4) = (48) or (24) bags. That’s far more than they had on hand so I ordered the rest from lowes.com.
Hillman #881025 Black PVC Screw Cover
Close-up of Hillman Screw Covers as Installed
First Ceiling Panel Installed
All Four Panels Attached to Ceiling with #6 Screws and Drywall Anchors
Panels Located Horizontally Under the Front Projection Screen
Two Vertical Side Panels and One Horizontal Panel Control Wall Reflections
Rear Panel Located at Ear Level for Rear-Seat Viewers
The nameplate is attached with a re-usable adhesive, so I was able to relocate and rotate them ninety degrees so that they were also in the lower right hand corner of the horizontally mounted panels.
Listening Impressions
First order of business was to re-run my AVR’s room correction routine. I am a fan of the Yamaha YPAO automatic calibration algorithm. My previous AVR was a Pioneer with MCACC, which I found resulted in a rather bright equalization. YPAO seems more neutral and it also leaves my bass equalization intact. In my subjective opinion, YPAO takes away what is bad and leaves all that is good.
I wrote down my initial impressions the first time I listened to music with the new panels installed and the AVR re-calibrated:
- Better clarity of voices and individual instruments
- Richer harmonics…can hear the decay of notes more clearly
- Lower distortion, less “small room sound”…it sounds like the room got larger
- More detail, more audible resolution. Can hear faint sounds in the background of live acoustic recordings that I’ve never heard before…
I can’t say that I heard better stereo imaging…my system already images pretty well.
For movies, the effect is simply awesome and by that I mean it is SIMPLE yet AWESOME.
I watched one of my favorite Blu-rays, "Broken Trail." In a scene between two cowboys near the beginning, their dialog is mumbled and hard to understand. Now, after installation of these panels, they can be clearly understood.
One unexpected benefit of clearer dialog: you can keep the volume at a lower level and still understand the spoken parts, so that when the music or action comes up you and your guests are not blasted out of your seats. Gone are the days of "riding the volume control"…constantly taking it up to understand dialog and then right back down for music and action. Now I can put down the remote and just relax and enjoy the movie.
What's also cool is the way the home theater looks now…it’s been taken to a whole new level of professional appearance. Now it seems completely obvious that something was missing that prevented it from being a true home theater as opposed to just a “movie room in the basement”.
Another side benefit: the black panels on the ceiling improve my on-screen black levels by reducing reflected glare off the white painted ceiling.
Conclusion
This is the most “bang for the buck” that I have yet received for any sound upgrade in my home theater. I am truly amazed and pleased that such a seemingly basic (and cheap!) thing can yield so many sonic and visual benefits. Thanks, HT Guys, for putting out the shopping tip on your podcast!
Reader Comments (1)
Funny, after I this review was posted Google stared serving up ads for acoustic panels to me! Here's one that looks pretty cool, especially for bass traps: http://www.acoustimac.com/?pid=4&gclid=CIzlsMGa-a4CFQfCKgodOilo1Q