Plaidophile

I've been pretty cheesed off at the acoustics in my studio for a while, so I decided to finally make some deflection panels, which I'd been planning for a while but hadn't gotten around to finishing.

I built three, though when I finished the first one I hung it right away, and alone it made a HUGE difference in my studio, reducing the echos significantly (there's still some but it's not nearly as bad as it was before).

Materials (for each one):

• 2x2' MDF panel from Home Depot
• 2x2' feet of foam from a mattress pad (a full-size pad makes four panels easily, and the leftover scraps could be used to make probably two more)
• A cheap fleece blanket from Walgreen's (the ones which are 3/$10). Plaid preferred.
• Picture hanging wire
• A staple gun, with staples (I made the mistake of getting 9/16"s which are probably too thick but anything 1/4" or bigger should be fine)
• Spray adhesive

Construction should be pretty obvious, but:

1. Cut a 2x2' square of foam out. Use the spray adhesive to stick its flat side to the MDF
2. Place the square, foam-side down, on top of a blanket. Pull the blanket over tight, and staple it to the backing
3. Pull the wire taut about 1/2 way across two edges (adjacent ones for a diagonal hang, opposite ones for a square hang), staple the wire to the back, then fold the wire over the staples and tie a "noose," then staple the noose to the backing too
4. Hang it on the wall using any ordinary picture hanger

Pictures of the wall-hung ones, with bonus clutter: I also have two ceiling-mounted ones (which I started on first, actually) made with some leftover foam. I took one of the 2x2 sheets of MDF and cut it in half to 1x2, then attached two small wooden blocks to the corners along a long edge (using hotglue and a wood screw), and put eye-hooks into those blocks parallel to the MDF. Then I attached some foam to both sides of the panel, and put matching eye-hooks in the ceiling to hang them. (This one's a bit harder to describe in words so if requested I can post photos of their salient points to give people a better idea.) These help to break up the reflections via the ceiling, though they don't look as good and have a tendency to block the light in the room since of course the light is exactly where a deflection panel should be and for reasons which should be obvious, anything which does a good job of stopping sound from bouncing around the room would also do a good job of stopping light from bouncing around the room.