 Every time we shoot a video in our new workshop, we run up against the same problem. Every time I talk, you can hear an echo. Echo, echo, echo. Okay, it's not quite an echo. What it actually is is reverb, and it's caused by a standing sound wave that is bouncing back and forth inside the room. Now, it is something that you can address in post, but as you guys can hear right now, sometimes the solution is worse than the problem. Unless of course, you go right to the source. We, with the help of Elgato, are going to be deploying a literal mountain of their wave panels. These are mostly designed for streamers, but the thing is, if you've got a good high quality acoustic panel, ready, Nicholas? You can use it for pretty much anything. So we're gonna go one stage at a time with each of these boxes costing about a hundred US dollars, and see, do they do anything? And if they do anything, how much do you need before you get some kind of measurable impact? And how far can you go before I tell you about our sponsor? Thanks, Jackery, for sponsoring this video. From September 20th to October 11th, Jackery is celebrating their ninth anniversary with a photo contest to win some of their products. Click the link in the video description to learn more. Having a great那 So, here's my first product. Get ready to do online. Let's look at what's in it. Hey, earlier this week, I've had, this scene made and archived a copy of printable an original So, you know what you're looking at? Shell that stove pot that actually works best with a projector, a Flashlight? There we go. Something looks as instructions and everything you will need to mount them. Before we can mount anything though, we need to get a baseline reading of the current state of the room. Now there are two main ways we record audio for our videos. Either with a lavalier microphone under my shirt, or with a shotgun microphone that's mounted out of the frame. And you guys can hear the difference in how those sound. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. Then in order to science it up a little bit, we're gonna switch over to this puppy right here. This is the Umic One, an omnidirectional condenser microphone from Mini DSP that is specifically designed for taking room measurements like this. The software we're gonna use is called REW or RU. We just click measure, rename it to control, no panels, and start. You guys are gonna wanna plug ears. Wow, it's no wonder the audio is so bad in here. Even with all the stuff that we have in the room now, I mean, it was worse before. We are still seeing standing waves that are lasting as long as about 0.9 of a second. That's hard to listen to. Now the goal isn't to turn this place into an anechoic chamber, Elgato wave panels would not be the way to do that. We just wanna cut down on reverb. So the first thing we need to know is how much actual wall and ceiling area there is in this room. So we've got 1023 times two, that's the ceiling in the floor. And then you wanna give me those wall measurements we got? 13, carry the one. I don't think I have ever carried the one on camera. Ah, yes, there, 35, 13. I remembered to carry the one, forgot all the other basics. Why don't we target 5% coverage and see what happens. Stage two, 10%, stage three, I mean, that better do it. Profit. Seven. We have one small problem. My control, I said it was with no panels in the room. I had these ones sitting here. So nobody touched these. We have to, I wanna keep this scientific boys. So these are off limits. This pack though, this wasn't in here, James. These are a little bit finicky, but given that it's something you're only gonna do once, not bad actually, Elgato, not bad. Full disclosure, the reason we have that omnidirectional speaker and the reason we already know how to use the software is because it is our intention to make our own acoustic panel product. But that doesn't mean that I'm gonna say this is anything, but damn, looking pretty good. Of course, the performance is ultimately what matters more. So these aren't the thickest acoustic panels in the world. They cause me some concern. The thinner they are, the lower the band of frequencies they will absorb. Thinner meaning higher frequencies only, but it is two different materials. That's cool because you've got a low density foam here and a higher density foam here. Plus, anytime that sound goes through a medium change, that's pretty good for absorption. Then the setup, you don't have to read the instructions at all, at least I hope so, because I didn't. They're really easy to put together and then they just friction out into the holes that are already on the foam. Not the most secure. I might put some adhesive in there if it was mission critical, but eh. If I was gonna ceiling mount it, I would. On the wall, it's probably fine. Now, what are you thinking in terms of placement? Do we wanna put individual panels just kind of around? Do we wanna clip them together in kind of geometric shapes and go for large flat surfaces? Are we targeting the walls, the corners? I think that you wanna have big contiguous patches where possible. Like look between those two blue pipes over there or right there. But then because there are so many different gadgets and machines in here, there's some spots where you don't have much room, just do what you can in those spots. So a mix. Okay, the clips go in the front. Just two, kind of flimsy, honestly. But as soon as you add a third, you've tripled the joints. So it's quite a bit more rigid. It's still, I mean, it's not structural, but. We're climbing it. Can you hold this for me, please? I'm just gonna climus. Climus. Climus, Sebastian. I mean, if the laser level can't support my weight, it's not a good laser level. Don't go in the lid. Yeah. Climus stick tips. Yeah, there is absolutely no reason to put the foamies on before you hang it on the wall. So now we know. It's a tech tip. Does it look level? Yeah, it looks good. Just lean. Just thrust. I love your wall. You're awesome. Now that we've seen how much space, even one pack takes up on the wall, we're rethinking our strategy for laying them out a little bit. So what we're gonna try to do is in each area we wanna put panels, we're gonna put half as many as would fit now. So that one, we're gonna expand by adding another six. And then this one here, we're gonna lean a little low so we can go one, two, three, four more kind of thing when it's time for the second round of testing. Ba-doop, ba-doop, ba-doop. Ah! Ba-doop, ba-doop, ba-doop. I'm good. Everything's good. Quick thought, James. Before we assemble a full frame for the ceiling, why don't we just try sticking one to the ceiling and see if this tape actually holds? I think the frame will hold, but what about the foam? Isn't it just gonna fall off? Only one way to find out. Do you mind passing me just one of those single frames? There's some right there. Nope, thanks, David. It's like how to do it. Yeah. There you go. Okay. There you go. There you go, bud. Stretch! The tape is on that side. Yeah, I see it. There's no way this works. I am not super hopeful. I don't think you got that one corner closest to you. Eh? Eh? Eh? Eh? No, not really. Here, just dirty dancing into my hands. I guess you're ready to double down now. Yeah, let's do it. Okay, let's get the ladder. Does Elgato intend for these to go on the ceiling? I think this is outside their scope. Sorry, a little bit. Ceiling crap. You okay? Feels like I inhaled a feather or something. Do you have a water bottle here? Unfortunately, no. My lttstore.com water bottle is not here. Otherwise I'd be fine. The idea is to distribute our 5% as though that's all we have. So we're gonna try and get some paneling on pretty much every surface. Bell over there is mounting three above the eye wash station, for example. Now obviously before we roll out a bunch of these next to something like a welding station, we wanna make sure they have at least some level of fire resistance. See if I can actually. There you go. Okay. We have a fire extinguisher, don't worry. It's right there. That's a lot of heat. Okay. Wow. I'm convinced. Should be fine. This was one we cut up for a different deployment over on the podcast set. So it's a sacrificial one. Oh, it stinks. Yeah. What could go wrong? He sings this while he's holding things over expensive equipment. Yeah. What could go wrong? They definitely work better on the wall than they do on the ceiling. Although so far everything we put up has stayed. But you know what's more impressive is everything we've got up here so far is still cheaper than, yeah, this thing. This kit from Auralex. $660 for like, honestly, I'd be surprised if that single foam type one even performs as well as this. We'll see. They're thicker though, I think. Not really. Fair enough. You know what guys, we've got 19 more panels to put up. And I don't know about you guys, but I'm already noticing a huge difference. We're back on both my 416 as well as my Lavalier microphone. You guys can hear the differences between those. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. Now, I'm just gonna come around here and we're gonna do a second sweep. Okay, approximately 5% coverage and start. We retested last time, I moved away. So. Whoa! Dang! That's actually, I mean, it's not that I can't hear the difference. I can totally hear the difference. I believe it. But still, that's really impressive. 5% coverage with these things. And we went from a peak of 0.9 seconds at sort of around the range of my speaking voice, all the way to about 0.6, 0.6 and change. I mean, you can tell Elgada clearly targeted human speech frequencies because that's what this product is designed for because that's where we see the biggest improvement, right in that 400 to approximately 1500 hertz range. Wow! Even up to around three kilohertz, it's like pretty darn good. Like, how does it sound better to you? If I'm hosting a video, okay, David, we're building this computer. This is a super cool build, by the way. Make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss this one. It sounds way better. Sounds way better? Wow, that's awesome! Let's put up a few more. Let's get that big flat spot there dealt with. I don't know, maybe like, you know, a strip down there and then we'll call it. Yeah. Everything's been going really well so far, but David, I just noticed something. I thought I was kind of imagining it before, but look at this. There's some inconsistency in the color of the foam. So if this was a major aesthetic thing for you, just be aware, like this one's basically silver compared to this one, which is more like black. Do you see that? Yeah. I didn't, I wasn't sure until I saw these two next to each other. Like, they're a little all over the place, but if you buy one pack, I would imagine they're closer, at least. Without any clear objective, we kind of put some more on until it looked nice. I think it looks pretty nice in here. And we ended up with a total of 210 square feet, which is kind of looking dangerously close to 69%. Hold on, let's check it. 10 divided by 35, 35.9. 5.9, one short, but that's okay. Let's go ahead and run our second, or third rather, our third sweep. Actually, wait, I forgot to do this again. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. All right, okay. Now let's do our sweep. I think it's actually better again. I could be wrong. I could be imagining it. That is why we have objective measurements. We added another six boxes, giving us approximately 5.9% coverage. And let's go ahead and start it. You guys ready? Wow. Big improvement again. Check this out, guys. We just shaved off another anywhere from 0.1 to 0.2 of a second in the range that we care about. Which is kinda in here. This is honestly way better than I expected. Like this is completely usable now. We could keep putting on panels, but honestly I just don't really feel like it's necessary. We can take these panels, we can treat other areas in the studio. You know what? You guys might look at the cost of this, $2,100, and you might think, whoa, that's a lot of money. And it is. But compared to what normal acoustic treatment panels cost from specialty vendors, they are darn freaking reasonable. Remember, this is a big room. Now, obviously you could save a lot of money doing it yourself with Rockwool or UltraTouch batting and a wooden frame. Absolutely. But considering the overall package here, I think Corsair has got, excuse me, Elgato, has a winner on their hands. Just like our sponsor's a winner. Thanks to Skylum for sponsoring today's video. Coming this winter, Skylum is releasing their newest creative photo editing software, Luminar Neo. It's made by the team behind Luminar AI, and Luminar Neo was created on a brand new engine for increased performance and comes with some brand new features. There are new relighting options, have Luminar Neo analyzing your image to recognize depth and allowing for precise control over exposure and tone. You can remove blemishes and artifacts left by a dirty camera sensor, or remove those power lines interrupting your photo with ease. There are also new powerful background replacement features to quickly swap out your background for different scenes. The new engine also allows for complex layering of several raw images without significant performance loss. So don't wait, reserve your copy of Luminar Neo today to ensure that you get a copy at their limited early bird pricing using the link in the video description. If you guys are looking for another video to watch, by the way, Elgato provided panels for this one, but they actually sponsored a full Elgato streaming setup video where we're gonna have literally all Elgato and have a look at what the complete package looks like. So we'll have that linked down below. Do a backflip. Do a backflip. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let me get right on that. I'm gonna get down real careful. Oh God, oh God, oh God! No, no, I'm kidding, I'm fine. I'm not honest.