Acoustical Cotton Pad Source/Price?

[tbryanh]

You do know that a reduction to 3% is only 15dB of attenuation, right?

Yeah, I am thinking I need to use 4 or 5 thicknesses. I am probably going to use used clothes because 4 or 5 thicknesses of acoustical cotton (about 200-250 lbs) is getting expensive. I found a source for bulk raw cotton used for stuffing couches. I think this might be equivalent to the acoustical cotton, and it costs about 1/3 of the price. (Shipping costs are still the same.)

This is getting a little out of hand as far as the quantity of sound absorbing material goes, but since I want to be able to have speaker distortion, I am forced to use high wattage. Power scaling does not appear useful if speaker distortion is desired. (There are not any miliwatt guitar speakers.)

I am going to continue pursuing this. It does appear to be the ultimate solution to practicing at home without disturbing neighbors and housemates and still being able to get any sound desired from clean tone to cranked PA or speaker distortion.

Of course room reverberation acoustics are eliminated by the isolation cabinet, and I have heard that the isolation cabinet gives a bit of a boxed-in sound. I have also heard the isolation cabinet tends to flatten out the frequency response of the speaker which eliminates some of the character the speaker was intended to have.

All of this aside, I have heard that Rush uses isolation cabinets on stage, so good sound should be possible with isolation cabinets.

I have heard that alot of EQ and a little bit of reverb is required to get the isolation cabinet to sound good.