Hey guys, what's up? It’s Seth here from retipster.com.
And in this video, I'm going to do a review on sound insulation,
sound dampening product from a company called Audimute.
The product is called Strata.
The reason that I wanted to make this review is
really for no other reason than
I couldn't find another review on it on the internet
when I was searching for this.
And I just kind of explain what this is and why I'm even using it.
So in this office here, I do a lot of things that require good acoustics,
which basically means not a whole lot of echo.
Like when I clap my hands, I shouldn't hear it
like reverberating off the walls.
When I talk there shouldn't be a lot of echo within the room.
This is important whenever I am recording episodes of the REtipster podcast
or anytime I'm making videos like this.
And this particular room that I'm in here is absolutely terrible at this.
This was previously a storage closet when we first bought this house
and I ended up dry walling it.
So I could make kind of a makeshift office for me,
because I didn't have another place in this house.
And as soon as I got the drywall up and I came in here,
I was just like, "Whoa, this is really, really bad".
I don't know if it's because of the angles of the room or how it's set up.
Like there's this part of the ceiling that bumps down.
So I don’t know if it's the angle of the ceiling
and how it makes sound bounce off the walls,
but it's really, really bad.
And because of that, I ended up buying a bunch of these things right here.
It might look like decorations and they sort of are,
but really the primary purpose of them is to stop that sound from bouncing off the walls.
So just to give you an idea for what I'm talking about,
so this is what it sounds like when I clap in this room.
So not too bad. You don't really hear a whole lot of echo.
But watch what happens when I remove these acoustic panels
from the room and do the same thing.
I don’t know if you can tell through this video, but it's awful.
Like I almost can't even hear myself think
because the echoes are just bombarding me
every time I try to talk.
I'm going to put these panels back up and over some of the video.
Okay. We're back. I just put them back up.
And I actually just listened to the audio on that little clip
that I just recorded a few seconds ago.
And you actually can't tell this mic that I'm using doesn't pick up all the echo
as bad as it actually is in this room.
Like it's pretty bad.
And I don't know if this really does it justice, but just trust me.
It's not good.
So these acoustic panels that I'm using here are also from the company Audimute
and they really work well.
But for some reason, this corner, which actually you can't see it's behind the camera,
but this corner, it's still doesn't quite do the job.
There's still a little bit of echo that gets picked up whenever I'm recording audio.
And I was trying to think of ways to make it go away.
I even bought some of that egg crate stuff to stick up on the ceiling to help dampen it.
But those things kept falling down.
I couldn't find the right way to use the right adhesive to get them to stick up there.
And so I started thinking more about this
and something I always wanted in this room is a wooden wall,
but the problem with a wooden wall is that it doesn't necessarily help
that whole echo situation.
It certainly looks better aesthetically,
but like sound still reverberates off that.
And I started looking into other wall options that might actually dampen sound
and look cool at the same time.
I did notice that Audimute did have this product,
which can look like a Stonewall or it can look like a wooden wall
or even other random textures
that look kind of cool.
If you're ever looking for something like this in any room of your house
that sort of serves a dual purpose of not only looking kind of cool as a decorative wall,
but also dampening sound
and getting rid of some of that reverb you get in rooms like this
that are pretty bad.
So first and foremost, let's talk about price.
The cost of one box and keep in mind, one box is enough to cover an area of four by six feet.
So it's not a whole lot.
If you have a huge wall, this is going to take a lot of material to cover it.
But the cost of one box is $420.
And keep in mind, I actually do have a link you can use to get a 10% discount on that.
So it'll save you a little bit of money. I'll have that link beneath this video.
By the way, I do not make any money for that.
And there are a lot of different colors you can choose from and even different styles
in terms of the texture and how you want it to look.
So they've actually got a bunch of different like pre-packaged colors you can get,
or if you really want to go nuts, like I did,
you can go to the Sherwin Williams website and they can color match anything
you can find from Sherwin Williams.
So just because I could, I ended up going with
two different colors from my wall.
One of them was the Artifact color
and the other one was called Netsuke.
I'm not really sure how to pronounce that,
but you don't have to be weird like me.
If you wanted to keep it simple, you could just choose from the options they have available.
And I honestly had a hard time to setting on the style to go with.
I sort of went back and forth between that stone look,
there were a couple other options
that were actually pretty similar to each other.
One of them was called Curb.
The other one was called Slant
that I thought was kind of neat.
But ultimately, I decided to land on the flat option
and go with colors that sort of looked like the color of wood.
And I'll show you what the end result looks like
in just a couple seconds.
And you can let me know what you think in the comments below.
So I think most people, when they install this kind of product,
what they're doing is they're putting it over existing drywall.
And in order to do that, you have to first put down this double-sided adhesive tape.
But even that is not enough to keep it in place.
You have to also use a construction adhesive.
They recommended the Loctite Power Grab Heavy Duty,
kind of a mouthful,
but you can buy it through them or you can pick it up at a place like Lowe's.
And that will be enough to very firmly hold it in place.
So that it's a permanent fixture of your wall.
And this kind of got me that I wasn't super excited about.
If you ever want to take this stuff down,
you should basically plan on totally redoing your drywall
because chunks of this product are going to stick to the wall
as part of that adhesive.
And I've not gotten to the point where I would ever have to chip that adhesive off,
but I would imagine it's going to be pretty hard to do that.
So if you do go this route, you should plan on this being
pretty much like how you want it for a good long time,
because it's not going to be easy to take this down.
I think for me, that was kind of a mental obstacle
because I didn't have any visual examples
other than these pictures to know how this would look in my space.
And I kind of had to like commit to it,
knowing that there's really a price to pay
if I ever want to take this stuff down.
So that was kind of hard for me, but eventually I got over it.
All right. Now we're fast forwarding a little bit.
It is now a week later.
I spent a couple days putting this wall up.
You can see what it looks like right here.
The product is really cool. I mean, you can see for yourself what it looks like.
Even when I'm sitting right here in the room,
if I didn't know any better,
I would totally think this is all wood.
The product is lightweight. It's easy to work with.
Whenever you want to make cuts, it's pretty easy to do that.
You don't need a table saw or anything.
You can just take a razor blade and do it that way.
It takes a little bit of sawing action to get through it, but it's not too bad.
And I love the staggered look to it, how some of them are sort of inset
and some of them stick out.
Just kind of makes for an interesting backdrop.
And that's all just the aesthetics of it.
In terms of how it works for dampening that echo in a room,
it does a phenomenal job.
And it's really not surprising when you think about like layering in this kind of acoustic
panel material over an entire wall.
I mean, normally just a few panels in a room will make a big difference.
But when you're talking about changing the material of an entire wall,
that's a huge surface area to absorb sound
instead of bouncing the sound off the wall.
Needless to say it does make a huge difference and it does look great.
And I actually never even priced out
what it would have been to buy
reclaimed wood to put up here,
like how much it would cost for a carpenter to do that
with the time it would take for me to do it.
So I'm not really sure what the cost comparison would be,
but again, this was a little over $1500
and that's not cheap,
but considering what a huge difference it makes for the sound
and just the overall visual aesthetic of this room,
which does kind of matter because I shoot a lot of videos in here.
Like I honestly think that's money well spent for something like this.
And I might do like a different kind of material over here.
Like maybe that rock wall version.
So if I want a different backdrop,
I can just turn the camera and have a totally different background.
So, I don't know, it's something we're thinking about.
But the installation, while it took me a little bit of time,
because it was the first time I'd ever done this and I had no idea what I was doing,
but once I've got the hang of it, it was pretty easy.
And if I had to do this exact same job again,
it would probably take me half as much time
just because I kind of understand what I'm doing now.
But overall it was not a bad experience.
It's definitely a commitment because if I ever want to take the step down,
I have to basically re drywall the whole thing.
I have heard maybe as an alternative to that,
you could take like plywood and screw it into the drywall
and then put this stuff over it so that if you ever do want to take it down,
you can just take the plywood down
and just have a bunch of holes in your drywall
that are a lot easier to spackle over.
Whereas when you put this directly on the drywall,
there's pretty much no way to make that wall look good after you try to rip this off.
So that's another thing worth considering.
If you're not sure whether or not you really want to commit to this,
there are potential ways you can get more comfortable with that.
I just decided I'm going to commit.
And I took the risk and I'm glad I did
because it turned out pretty well as you can see.
I hope that was helpful.
Again, if you ever want to check this product out
and get a discount on it,
I'll have a link beneath this video.
And yeah, I wish you all the best with fixing any unwanted echo in your room.
So thanks again for watching. Talk to you later.