Do egg cartons work for soundproofing & acoustic home studio treatment?
Conclusions and Recommendations
According to the study “Measurement of the sound-absorption coefficient on egg cartons using the Tone Burst Method”; the egg carton absorbs sound very well above 2 KHz. This means to say that egg cartons is not completely worthless as absorption materials. You can use egg cartons as:
a.) A cheap sound absorber in front of your nearfield monitors. This will do a great job in absorbing mid to high frequencies (starting at 2000Hz and beyond) which travels in line of sight. Bear in mind that this is not a perfect solution and based on the research, egg cartons are poor diffusers so you cannot use them for diffusion purposes. See screenshot below:
But in a very small control room (used for audio mixing), diffusion is not critical and not needed, so you can use egg cartons as a cheap solution to deal with middle frequencies sound absorption.
b.) But take note that egg cartons won’t do good in absorbing bass frequencies at all and it is NOT advisable to entirely rely on egg cartons for both treating bass, mid and high frequencies in your recording studio.
In this case, you should still be using a rigid fiber glass to absorb these frequencies and to use them as bass traps. Thicker fiber glass such as 2 inches absorbs these frequencies very well. You can put this fiber glass in the corners of your room such as this one: