How to build a simple open-back broadband sound absorption panel

A step-by-step guide

Tools
+ Drill with small drill bits (for pilot holes)
+ Cloth shears / scissors
+ Screwdriver set
+ Staple gun
If you plan to cut the timber yourself:
+ An appropriate wood saw
+ Measuring tape
+ Sand paper

Materials
These materials are a guide only, but they have proven to be quite effective. Quantities given per panel:
2 x pine PAR 64x19mm cut to 600mm lengths (for short sides)
2 x skirting pine 65x15mm cut to 1250mm lengths (for long sides)
1 x fibreglass / rockwool 600 x 1200 x 50mm batt (see section on ‘Cloth & Filler’)
3 x cloth pieces of at least 750 x 1350mm each (see section on ‘Cloth & Filler’)
4 x metal corner braces (optional, but helps to make panel sturdy, if you don’t get braces, get more screws)
4 x wood screws (3.5x40mm)
many many staple gun staples (we used No.3 / 6mm staples)

All the materials for the frames are available from Chamberlains. If you want to buy larger quantities of the timber,
Esstee Timbers supply these items to Chamberlains and you can purchase directly from Esstee (based on Joburg). Some
Chamberlains branches will cut the timber to the desired lengths, but others won’t. The timber comes in various lengths.
I’ve usually bought the 1.8m skirting pine (which cuts into 3 x 600mm lengths) and 3m skirting pine1(cut into 2 x
1250mm pieces with useful off-cuts). These off-cuts let you make nice mini panels. We bought cloth from Metro, and the
Rockwool from Aeroinsul.

2019 Chamberlain Prices (these have definitely gone up)

50x50mm flat metal corner braces pack of 4 (Mackie MAK04345)item code 1047968 @ R17.30
Skirting pine 65x15mm 3m (code 1060850) @ R47.20
Pine PAR 64x19mm 1.8m (code 1017866) @ R42.70
Eureka 3.5x40mm screws (code 1GH50U) pack of 75 @ R37

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3m timber pieces can be tricky to transport if you don’t have an appropriate vehicle.

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Cloth & Filler
The purpose of this guide is not to become an acoustics textbook. I would highly advise that you go watch and read some
further sources on acoustic design. This type of panel is only one of the tools used in treating a critical listening space
(hint: you’ll probably need bass traps and diffusion too). For commercial builds, you will need to take fire safety
regulations into consideration too.

Cloth Considerations
It needs to be acoustically transparent. Make sure you can blow through the cloth with relative ease.
Professional studio builds will often use specialised cloth (speaker cloth, micro-suede, burlap, muslin, or various Guildford
of Maine products designed for this purpose.) For the type of panel you’ll be building, just ensure that air can flow
through the cloth. You can test this by blowing through it. The less resistance, the better for the panel’s acoustic response.
The cloth needs to let the air pressure displacement (sound waves) through for the material inside to absorb the sound,
but the cloth should also keep loose fibres inside the panel.

Absorbent Material
Most of the panels we’ve built at OW contains 60kg/m3 Rockwool, and some have 80kg/m3, but see what is the most
cost effective for the quantities you want to buy that is in the 45‑80kg/m3 range. (Unfortunately this will not include
products like Aerolite - Think Pink, which is typically closer to 10kg/m3.) The basic principle2 is that the denser this type of
material, the more it will absorb lower frequencies, but at some point it will start to reflect higher frequencies. That’s why
many people will use 100kg/m3 material in bass traps rather than broadband absorbers.
+ Avoid material that has a layer of foil on one side.
+ Avoid non-rigid material for this particular design
NB: Please be careful when handling these materials. You don’t want to get them in your eyes or breath them in
(Rockwool and Glass Wool panels can shed a lot of fibres) They can also make your skin itch a lot! Please make use of
the appropriate PPE when building, and also take care when transporting the raw materials.

Panel thickness
This panel design caters specifically for the 600x1200x50mm rockwool / fibreglass batts that are commonly available in
SA. You can usually get 600x1200x10mm batts too. A 10cm thick panel will absorb more than a 5cm panel, but we went
with an open-back 5cm panel to keep costs down, and performs well when spaced away from the wall. A 5cm panel with
a 5cm gap behind still won’t perform as well as a 10cm panel, but will perform much better than a 5cm panel mounted
flush to a surface, or a panel with a closed back. You’ll also notice that this thickness and design gives a much lighter
overall panel which helps when wall or ceiling mounting.

Make sure you adapt the materials for the frame if you want to build a thicker panel / or have filler material with different
dimensions. The frame also does not have to be wood - I’ve seen some very nice design with aluminium frames, or CNC cut
frames from other materials. This design specifically uses common and easy to use materials.

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It is not quite that simple. Panels are not created the same. You can have foam/ rockwool / other material at exactly the same densities but with quite
different absorption coefficients due to other reasons like the way the fibrous cells are shaped and linked. But for the purpose of this type of panel, you’ll
be fine with glass wool or rockwool in that density range.

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Part 1 - Building the Frame
Please refer to the pictures on the following pages as a visual supplement to these instructions. When referring to a
picture, I will say something like p7.4. That refers to page 7 picture 4. The pictures aren’t numbered, just count left to right
top to bottom.

Step 1
Assemble the (longer) skirting pine and (shorter) pine PAR pieces as shown in p5.1 - 5.3. Make sure that the pine PAR is on
the inside of the skirting pine as shown in p5.2

Step 2
Put a metal brace on each of the back corners of the frame (p6.1). Make sure that the rounded edge of the skirting pine is
facing outwards, and that you have the frame turned upside down before affixing the corner braces. I usually mark the
holes of the brace on the wood using a pencil, and then drill some shallow pilot holes before attaching the screws. Don’t
worry if the brace is not straight (as in p6.1), as long as the metal does not stick over the edges too much.

Step 3
Drill some pilot holes on the skirting pine pieces, above the metal braces, about 10mm from the corner. Make sure the
pilot hole goes all the way through the skirting pine and into the pine PAR piece. This pilot hole is for your wood screws.
You could do more than one per corner, but I’ve found one to be enough if you use the metal braces. (I’ve also built a
panel without the metal braces, using only the wood screws. It works, but is a bit more prone to a buckled panel.) You can
also use braces on the inside of the frame rather than the back.

Step 4
Put a wood screw into the pilot holes on each corner. It doesn’t make a big difference if that screw is in the middle of the
skirting pine, or closer to the front of the panel (compare p7.4 with p7.5), as long as it goes into the middle of the pine
PAR piece.

Step 5 (optional)
Sand any rough edges (or obvious splinters) of the frame. Eventually it will be entirely covered by cloth, but rough edges
or splinters might catch on and tear the fabric as you tension and staple it.

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Part 2 - Adding the cloth and filler
As mentioned already, please take care when working with rockwool or fibreglass. Loose fibers can make bear skin
incredibly itchy, and you also don’t want to inhale them. I usually use long kitchen gloves, a mask, and goggles when
bringing the rockwool batts from their storage bags and placing them into the frame. Once placed, I usually only keep the
gloves on until the second piece of cloth is in place. [2022 edit: see last page for money saving tips for this section]

Step 1
Place the frame face down (metal braces up) on a flat surface as shown in p9.1. You’ll notice that this picture has an
additional pine PAR piece in the middle. Important: this piece will not be part of the frame. It is just there to keep the
skirting pine from bending too much when the first cloth piece is tensioned, and it gives a nice spacing indication for the
position of the first cloth piece.

Step 2
Place the first cloth piece over the frame, and start stapling it to the inside of the frame, approximately 15mm from the
front edge. (That is what the spacer piece of pine PAR is for.) You can also use inner ridges of the skirting pine (p9.2) as a
guide for this spacing. Staple this piece just above the bottom ridge. Make sure that excess cloth goes towards the back of
the panel (as in p9.3 & p9.4). Also refer to p9.5 for the amount of spacing from the front of the panel (it is turned around
here compared to the other pictures on this page.) The reason for this spacing is that this first piece of cloth holds the
filler in place, but slightly away from the front of the panel. This allows you to do ceiling mounted panels without the
front of the panel starting to bulge. You could use different cloth for this first piece, as long as air can still pass through.
Note: it doesn’t matter if these staples are uneven, this layer will not be visible. Make sure that the cloth has enough tension to hold the
filler, but not so much tension that it makes the side skirting pine buckle. If you tension this too much, it is possible to get an hour-glass
shaped frame, which is not ideal for a rectangular filler.

Step 3
Place the filler batt inside the frame (from the back) as shown in p10.1 Now secure it in place by stapling the second piece
of cloth to the back of the panel. This should also have enough tension. Doesn’t matter if it compresses the edges of the
filler a bit. Also doesn’t matter if this layer doesn’t look perfectly even as you will rarely see the back of these panels.
P10.4 shows how both these cloth pieces hold the filler in place. Trim off any excess cloth when you’re done stapling as
shown in p11.1.

Step 4
[Now comes the two trickiest things - getting even tension on the front cloth layer, and getting neat corner folds.]
Take your time over this step. Place the last piece of cloth on the flat surface, and centre the panel (face-down) on top of
the cloth (as shown in p11.3). Wrap this cloth all around the outside of the panel, and start stapling all round. Don’t start
in a corner and just staple from there. First get basic tension on opposite sides of the middle of each frame side, and keep
expanding from there. Make sure this cloth panel is properly tensioned. Don’t worry if the wrinkles in the cloth don’t
disappear until you’ve put in almost all of the staples. You could staple first on cut off extra cloth, but I find it is neater if
you roll the excess cloth up before stapling it at the back. Leave the corners for last, and practice a few times how to fold
neat corners as shown in p11.2 and p12.1.

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You now have a light-weight, open-back broadband absorber. Please experiment with this design and report back your
findings. You could combine more than one of these and add some sort of a stand to create a movable gobo. You could
experiment with cloth printing or stencils and paint to create something prettier (just make sure you don’t make the front
cloth too air-flow resistant in the process.)

If you buy longer pieces of timber, keep the off-cuts of the pine PAR. I’ve made quite a few off-cut panels (roughly
600x500mm) using extra timber and a larger rockwool batt cut into pieces. These have come in very handy.

Mounting tips:

+ These panels are light enough to hang on simple picture hooks / nails, but to get the most out of the open-back
design, you want to mount them away from your walls.

+ Diagonal mounting across corners works quite well for this if you don’t have the budget to do ‘super-chunk’ style
corner traps.

+ I usually put brass hooks at the back of the panel, and then hooks in the ceiling or wall. This already spaces it to
some extent, but you can always add extra spacers to change this spacing.

+ Although the filler is fairly fire resistant, please be careful where you place these panels (e.g. not right next to a
very hot lightbulb!) as the wood is definitely flammable, and the cloth might be, depending on what you use.

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Saving money on cloth
When constructing these in any quantity, the cloth becomes the most expensive item when you follow the instructions of
this document (basically three layers per panel). You can save a fair amount of money by only using the cloth you see in
these pictures as the front, outside layer.

For the cloth that holds the batt away from the front (page 9 picture) - replace with hessian

For the cloth that covers the back of the batt (page 10 picture) - replace with Weed Guard

Thanks to Louwrens Ferreira for these updates to the design. This remains a lightweight, open-back panel that can be
mounted easily.

Document v1.5 June 2022 by Jozua Loots

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