I had this nice long post typed out, and somehow lost it when I went to post.
Short version - I'm going to chime in on Pal's thread rather than start my own for now, since our Audio Projects are often paralleled, if not entwined.
I'm getting back to my never ending (and never finished) diffuser designing and building. I seem to spend more time making room in the garage to work, then adjusting/tuning tools and building jigs than actual building of anything!
To start, I took a pair of CNC Hot-Wire cut Styro diffusers and framed them up tightly in a poplar box. It's only 6" deep as that's what I was able to get inexpensively. I was originally planning on making them 8" boxes and lining the back with acoustic blankets recovered from my 15 year old CWAL bass absorbers I recently retired....but that extra couple inches added quite a bit of cost and I'm pretty damn broke right now, trying to work with what I have around rather than buy more wood if I can. I'm a believer in that sound reflecting off an object takes some of it's sound with it. Sound bouncing off glass has a high frequency enhancement that I don't care for, and something similar with Styrofoam diffusers.
That said, these are some of the diffusers that I dragged out to Palomino's listening room as well as ProgRobs listening room, where we had some amazing CDApS listening sessions where simply placing these styro diffusers in key places aided in PRaT and made the music really *involving*. I employed a lesson I learned from Steve, where you don't simply listen to the music, but watch the body language of the listeners - and it was clear how much involving the music was with just these four lightweight panels leaned up against the walls.
So I bound them together in this frame in hopes of using them more effectively either in my "listening room"/theater and/or my spare bedroom which has become sort of a home office. I figure my 18 year old original Zen amp, some efficient speakers, and walls covered in diffusers might make computer building and whatnot more enjoyable.
So much for this being a short post.
More pics of diffuser projects to come. My next one, an all poplar 24" X 24" X 6" QRD is coming along nicely. I'm going to slowly build up to my ultimate design which will be these HUGELY complex QRD diffusers that will help scatter and diffuse between 350Hz and 6880Hz.
The more I build, the more I appreciate how well thought out the Decware diffusers are. They do exactly what they need, at a great price, and shippable package.