With acoustic treatment potentially costing producers a lot of money, cheap alternatives have become popular. However, a lot of these common acoustic treatments don’t work well in studios. Here’s a list of alternatives you should avoid.

Egg Carton diffusers

Not only does it make your home recording studio look ghetto, it just doesn’t work. All these pyramids and different shapes you see in studios have their own purpose and while egg cartons may kind of look like them, it doesn’t work the same way. In fact, they absorb more than they diffuse and even as absorbers they’re bad.

Foam Panels

Yes they’re cheap and easy to find, but they’re practically useless. They do help a little bit taming the really high frequencies but anything lower than that, they do nothing.

Books/Albums as Diffusers

This doesn’t work and for it to be somewhat effective, you’d have to spend a lot of money. You’d need to buy a lot of books and big bookcases. With the same amount of money, you actually can buy real acoustic treatment for your studio.

Heavy Rugs on Walls

First off, they look extremely bad. If you want to make your studio visually unappealing then go ahead with it. The only thing you’ll be taming with rugs are the very high frequencies, but that’s basically it.

As you start to build your home studio, be sure to avoid these cheap alternatives because they’re worthless.