Recently I have bought 4 pieces of Hofa Natural basstraps from Germany and I decided to post my measurements here in ASR so everybody could see what these things can do in a living room in a real-life situation.
I got two of the 1 meter models and two of the 0.5 meter models - both are the "natural" ones, meaning they are stuffed with sheep wool. Please note that I have not disassembled them though.
My living room dimensions are 3.6 x 7.2 x 2.6 meters (=67m3 volume) and the listening area looks like this with the Hofas stacked in the front corners:
I used REW to measure the room in the listening position using a pre-calibrated UMIK-1 microphone before and after the basstraps. Let's see those measurements!
note: I use Dirac Live 2.5 as a room correction solution but the aim of this post is to see how the basstraps perform so I have switched Dirac off completely for all the below measurements
1. Frequency response
I was using 1/6 oct. smoothing and 5dB resolution on the graph
Surprisingly you can see a dip between 100 and 200Hz on both channels - when I saw this I was thinking to send them back to Germany...but then I quickly changed my mind, you will see further below why
Left channel (red w/o basstraps, blue with basstraps)
Right channel (green w/o, orange with)
2. Impulse response
There is no real difference so I am not commenting this
3. Excess Group Delay
Here things started to change, the basstraps clearly decreased the peaks
W/O:
With:
4. Waterfall
Again, frequencies decay faster with the basstraps and not even only in the bass region!
W/O:
With:
5. RT60
This graph will show the real power of these traps, just watch:
Left channel w/o
Left channel with
More than 1 sec of reduction btw. 60 and 70Hz!
Right w/o
Right with
500ms reduction at 70Hz
Interestingly you can see a small improvement already starting from 1500Hz and increasing down to 40Hz; overall keeping RT60 below 500ms until 150Hz on both channels
When listening to music/movies I can definitely hear the bass being tighter and more precise - there is clearly a noticeable difference!
I am certainly keeping these Hofa basstraps - they are not going anywhere
I hope you find this useful and will help the ASR community
I got two of the 1 meter models and two of the 0.5 meter models - both are the "natural" ones, meaning they are stuffed with sheep wool. Please note that I have not disassembled them though.
My living room dimensions are 3.6 x 7.2 x 2.6 meters (=67m3 volume) and the listening area looks like this with the Hofas stacked in the front corners:
I used REW to measure the room in the listening position using a pre-calibrated UMIK-1 microphone before and after the basstraps. Let's see those measurements!
note: I use Dirac Live 2.5 as a room correction solution but the aim of this post is to see how the basstraps perform so I have switched Dirac off completely for all the below measurements
1. Frequency response
I was using 1/6 oct. smoothing and 5dB resolution on the graph
Surprisingly you can see a dip between 100 and 200Hz on both channels - when I saw this I was thinking to send them back to Germany...but then I quickly changed my mind, you will see further below why
Left channel (red w/o basstraps, blue with basstraps)
Right channel (green w/o, orange with)
2. Impulse response
There is no real difference so I am not commenting this
3. Excess Group Delay
Here things started to change, the basstraps clearly decreased the peaks
W/O:
With:
4. Waterfall
Again, frequencies decay faster with the basstraps and not even only in the bass region!
W/O:
With:
5. RT60
This graph will show the real power of these traps, just watch:
Left channel w/o
Left channel with
More than 1 sec of reduction btw. 60 and 70Hz!
Right w/o
Right with
500ms reduction at 70Hz
Interestingly you can see a small improvement already starting from 1500Hz and increasing down to 40Hz; overall keeping RT60 below 500ms until 150Hz on both channels
When listening to music/movies I can definitely hear the bass being tighter and more precise - there is clearly a noticeable difference!
I am certainly keeping these Hofa basstraps - they are not going anywhere
I hope you find this useful and will help the ASR community