Questions for you:
1. We're saying that front and back are UNsealed, yes?
For a plain old broad-band absorber? Yes. You might want to put a back on ceiling cloud, for other reasons, but the only time you'd put a front on is if you don't want it to be an absorber but rather some kind of membrane or panel trap, or if it is part of another device, such as a Helmholtz resonator of some sort. Panel traps MUST be sealed airtight: that's part of how they work. Since they are tuned systems (tuned to a specific frequency) part of the tuning is due to the air gap inside. It works on the principle of physics where you have a weight oscillating on the end of a spring, and you damp the spring to extract energy. This is the very similar to the principle used for the shock absorbers on your car: it's a damped spring. In a panel trap, the "oscillating mass" is the front panel itself, and the "damped spring" is the air plus the absorption. Air is an excellent spring, acoustically speaking. Absorption (fiberglass, mineral wool, some types of foam, etc.) are excellent dampers, acoustically speaking.
2. You know the 'thing' where you max up a balanced mix,
put it into an ipod, listen through headphones, then go to
the car and listen, then play it in the living room, then (in my experience)
scream "$!@&& !&@!!!!", and repeat all day?
Yup!
Only too well.... That is called "translation" in the world of studios. Meaning that the mixes do not "translate" well from your room to other places. The mix sounds fantastic in your room, but when you play it in your car it sounds like an old transistor radio from the 70's honking away inside a tin box, or otherwise like a boom box from the 80's at the other end of a 50 foot sewer pipe.... Yup. translation. Been there, done that! That's why most of us are here: to learn how to fix our rooms so that our mixes translate well.
That's the major purpose of designing, building and treating a studio correctly: to ensure that your mixes WILL translate well. You accomplish that by making the room as neutral and flat as you can, so that it does not add anything that wasn't there in the mix, and neither does it take anything away. You want a room and a set of speakers that tell you the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. You must be able to hear exactly what your mix sounds like all by itself, without the speakers or room interfering.
The reason why that doesn't happen in many home studios is due to ignorance of the principles of acoustics, and partly due to the huge amount of hype "acoustic" web sites all over the internet, that tell you what a wonderful idea it is to glue carpet to your ceiling and egg cartons to the walls... There are so many "experts" out there who once heard from their long lost friend's cousin Joe, who's son's girlfriend's father once worked in a place where the janitor told him that his uncle's first wife's brother's stepson was the trash collector for some big studio, "And they had egg crates on the walls and carpets on the ceiling....". Or some such... In other words, total hear-say with no actual acoustic understanding behind it.
The basic problem is that all rooms "color" the sound in them, in one way or another. The goal of studio design is to minimize that "coloring" to the point that it does not affect your mix, and therefore your mixes WILL translate well.
That's what we do here: help people to analyze their rooms correctly, and figure out how to treat them, based on the principles of physics, to minimize the effects of the room itself.
Right now the biggest psyche factor is that those Years of that
endless craziness might actually be coming to an end.
Yeah! They CAN come to an end! All you need to do is to treat your room correctly, so that it ends up as neutral as possible. There is a not-too-complex method that you can follow to first analyze your room, then design the correct treatment for it, then repeat as necessary until you get to the point where you are happy, or the point of diminished returns, where the "next step" in the process is going to cost you so much, for so little additional gain, that it is not worthwhile. That can happen with really small rooms, or rooms that are so oddly shaped as to be useless, but for most reasonably sized rectangular rooms in houses, it is possible to get them sounding pretty darn decent.
Are you finding that with your room properly situated and treated?
(don't want to make the place too dead and spooky also).
Exactly. A dead room is unpleasant to work in, and doesn't sound good. There are recommendations, based on years of research, on exactly how a room should sound (depending on size, purpose, etc.), and there are techniques you can follow to achieve that.
For example: all small rooms need a LOT of broadband bass trapping, so that's normally where you start. But broadband bass trapping also takes highs out of the room, so you can cover the bass traps with some type of thin material that reflects highs back into the room, but allows lows to pass through and be treated by the underlying absorption. Simple!
From what you say, it sounds like you have a room that is making you suffer big time, and you cannot get your mixes to translate well. That's what we are here for!
The best idea is to start your own thread in the "Design" section of this forum, and give us all the details of your room as it is right now: exact size, shape, dimensions, existing treatment, construction, etc. Then describe what your problems are (we can teach you how to do a full acoustic analysis that will reveal all the dirty secrets of what is wrong with your room), tell us about what you want to achieve with that room, how loud you are, how quite you need to be, what your goals are, what your budget it is, and we can guide you on the path to making it happen. You can either learn all about basic acoustics and treatment yourself here for free, and design your own solution to your problems (with guidance from the experts), or you can hire one of the experts here to do the design for you).
That's what this place is all about: no hype, no acoustic myths and legends, no snake-oil products for sale, no carpet on the ceiling, no egg crates on the walls: just free acoustic advice, based on science, for those are prepared to spend the the time to learn about it themselves, from those who already did.
So stick around and start your own thread in "Design", and I bet we can get your room sounding good, and your mixes translating well!
- Stuart -
Neither is meant for isolation (often incorrectly called "soundproofing"). These panels are acoustic treatment for the room, and do nothing at all to isolate the room.