It's been a while since I posted something not related to finance or to photography. I used to write a lot about personal stuff but I think it's been a couple of years since I drifted away from that kind of content, but since I got my office some needed upgrades, and since I did them all by myself I thought I'd share a short DIY guide on how to improve a room's acoustic
I've been doing a lot of videos lately. These videos are usually about my face playing chess, but I've also done several tutorial videos for the Leo Finance ecosystem as well as some proof of selection for picking up the winners for several contests organized by 
Anyway, a few days ago 
This is how my office looked before the changes. I actually don't have a curtain - yeah, I need to get one, I'm just too lazy to do it myself and too proud to hire someone, but since I need to lower the echo in the room as much as possible, I will get a curtain on Monday.
Why am I sharing these pics with you? I already share part of my background on every chess video I make, so I don't see the issue on sharing these pics. As you can see, there's not much in the office, because I don't really need much, all I need is my desk, two screens and I'm good to go. I actually had to put some other stuff in the room because my girlfriend convinced me that I had to have a pretty office with plants and all that shit, I agreed because it didn't seem an important argument to win, but yeah, I didn't think of the echo in the room back then, and apparently an empty room cause a lot more echo. You learn something new every day I guess.
Anyway, the first step for improving a room's acoustics is to actually research what the hell I want to achieve, how I want to achieve it, and how much it is going to cost me.
I found some kickass deals on Amazon but the shipping took too long - I live in buttfuck nowhere in Mexico so it's not that easy to get stuff delivered one or two days after you click buy, and I wanted to record the first episode of the Cryptoholics that very same day. I went to the nearest city's downtown area where you can get anything for a cheap price.
I got this package for 100 bucks:
It's around 5 square meters of acoustic foam. It's not a lot, I actually need to get more in a few weeks once I start making higher quality videos and I understand perfectly what else do I need.
As a starting step this was a great purchase and the sounds quality and reduction of echo was incredible.
Anyway, I then had to research how the hell I had to set them up and prepare everything.
I bought some cardboard, adhesive glue and double face velcro to paste the panels to the wall.
I could've installed the panels directly to the wall using the adhesive foam I bought for 10 bucks, but it is better to glue the foam panels to cardboard or something similar because the more space you have between the panels and the wall, the more sound absorption you'll get and the fewer echo waves will bounce back to your microphone, so I decided to do it that way.
After around 1 hour of measuring, cutting with a simple cutter I began the gluing part, the one that proved to be the most challenging because I had never worked with spray glue before and I found it quite complicated.
After spraying the glue you have like 2 seconds to set the foam panel in place before the glue starts drying up, and you have to press constantly for about 30 seconds, then let it rest for and dry for 5 minutes, and then press again for another 30 seconds.
Oh right, you have to put the foam in the washing machine and then dry it out in the drying machine to improve results. I didn't because I don't have a drying machine - I don't need one, I live in sunny Mexico where any piece of clothing dries at the sun in 10 minutes lol.
I used my dinning room as workshop because I don't have a workshop. My four dogs stayed with me during the whole process keeping me company, they snapped some pics of me doing the actual work.
That's my current microphone. Once my vids take off and I get some decent views and all that stuff maybe I'll improve my setting even more. Right now the noise cancelling screen, the echo cancelling back and the microphone are all worth like 80 bucks. That's not a lot of money spent in this kind of thing, these are more on the cheap side of the spectrum but they do their job just fine.
This is how the home office ended up looking after the upgrades. It doesn't look amazing and it actually feels kind of empty, but the sounds improvement and the echo reduction proved to be simply amazing. This was a great decision and I think I will add some of these panels some day in the very near future if I consider it necessary.
