Understand your room before you spend on treatment.
This is the acoustics side of Studio Music Tools — the free calculators, the paid spreadsheet toolkits, and the guides, all built on the same calculation engine so the numbers stay consistent whether you're using a free tool or a paid product.
Plan your home studio acoustics
A starting-point layout for monitors and listening position
Every standing wave in your room, up to 300 Hz
Free calculators
Absorption, diffusion, and bass trapping
Three different jobs, not three names for the same foam panel. Most rooms need some of each — the calculators above tell you where and how much.
Absorption
Porous panels (mineral wool, open-cell foam) that turn reflected sound energy into a small amount of heat instead of letting it bounce back. Use it at first- reflection points on the side walls and ceiling, and on the front/rear walls to shorten a too-long RT60.
Size it with the RT60 Calculator → · What absorption actually does →
Diffusion
Scatters reflections in many directions instead of removing their energy, so a surface stays acoustically "alive" without a sharp slap-back echo. Best on a rear wall or any surface you don't want to go completely dead — over-absorbing a small room usually sounds worse, not better.
Bass trapping
Thick, dense absorption (or a tuned membrane/panel trap) aimed at low-frequency buildup — the room modes a thin foam panel physically can't touch. Most effective floor-to-ceiling in the room's corners, where every axial mode has a pressure peak.
Acoustics products
Editable spreadsheets and written guides you own — not locked PDFs, not one-off templates.
RT60 Workbook
Reverberation time by octave band, current room versus proposed treatment, in a file you keep.
An editable Sabine-equation RT60 workbook: up to 20 surfaces with your own materials and coverage, a proposed-treatment scenario, reference target ranges by use, and current-versus-proposed RT60 by octave band with a chart. It uses the same Sabine calculation as the free RT60 Calculator on this site. What the workbook adds is an offline file you keep and edit, your own absorption coefficients, and a before/after scenario.
- Sabine RT60 per octave band (125 Hz to 4 kHz): RT60 = 0.161 x V / A
- Up to 20 surfaces, each with its own material and coverage percentage
- Editable materials library: 14 generic materials supplied, 16 empty rows for your own manufacturer's coefficients
- Current room versus proposed treatment by band (up to 8 treatment rows, modelled as covering existing surface)
Acoustic Treatment Planner
Turn your room's numbers into a starting-point shopping list.
Room size to a starting-point treatment plan: editable panel size and wall-coverage target, quantities by group (first-reflection panels, side-wall panels, rear-wall panels, corner bass traps, ceiling cloud) with where each goes, and a priority-ordered shopping list where you enter your own unit costs to get a total. No prices are built in.
- Wall area and volume from your dimensions
- Editable panel width and height and target wall coverage
- Quantities by group: first-reflection panels, side-wall panels, rear-wall panels, corner bass traps, ceiling cloud
- Where each group goes, with a rear-wall fit check and a ceiling-height check
Home Studio Acoustic Guide
A concise, illustrated introduction to planning your home studio acoustics.
A 7-page illustrated PDF covering room modes, reflections, reverberation, speaker placement and a practical treatment sequence. A compact starting guide, not a personalized room report or workbook.
- Why small rooms sound problematic
- Room modes explained without the math-class tone
- Speaker Boundary Interference Response (SBIR)
- First reflections and the mirror trick
Studio Acoustic Toolkit
One room, entered once: modes, speaker placement, RT60 and a treatment plan in a single editable workbook, with the guides to use it.
The flagship Studio Music Tools acoustic product. The Studio Project Workbook carries one room through room-mode analysis, a comparison of two speaker layouts, an RT60 estimate before and after treatment, and a treatment plan with your own costs, ending in a printable summary. Also included: the RT60 Workbook, the Acoustic Treatment Planner, the Home Studio Acoustic Guide, a Measurement Guide, a Studio Setup Checklist and a worked example. The free browser tools give quick answers; the Toolkit is the reusable planning file.
- Studio Project Workbook: enter the room once, and it flows through every sheet
- Room mode analysis with gap, coincident-axial and cluster flags (not limited to a fixed mode order)
- Speaker placement: Layout A versus Layout B, speaker-to-speaker and speaker-to-listener distances, first reflections, boundary cancellation (SBIR) table and practical checks
- RT60 before and after treatment by octave band, against a target range, with your own materials and up to 20 surfaces
Want a specific answer for your specific room?
The free tools and products above are built to be genuinely useful on their own — a Studio Analysis report goes further with a person reviewing your specific situation.
See Studio Analysis