Auralex Studiofoam Products
How Auralex Studiofoam-based products are made.
How Auralex Studiofoam–based products are made.
The Short Version Of How Auralex Acoustic Foam Is Made
Over the last 21 years we’ve been asked hundreds of times how foam is actually produced, so we
thought we’d put down on paper some of the high points.
Foam begins life as a bunch of different, mostly imported chemicals which are scientifically blended
to an exacting formula. The various chemicals are slowly and continuously released onto a moving,
sloped conveyor belt that’s about 7 feet wide by 300 feet long and that moves at a slow, controlled
rate of speed.
By the time the chemicals have blended and the belt has moved 6 feet, a chemical reaction has
occurred and the liquid chemicals have turned into solid foam that’s grown to about 30" high. By
the time the belt has travelled 12 feet, the foam has grown to nearly 4 feet high and its internal
temperature is nearly 500 degrees. A star is born.
When the conveyor belt has moved the foam 300 feet down the line, a large machine chops the
foam into what we call buns, large blocks of foam that measure about 9 feet long by 4 feet high by
6.5 feet wide. Further down the line a large crane picks up the buns and moves them into the
storage room, which is about as big as 3 football fields and about 50 feet high.
From there, the buns are moved to the fabrication department where the top, sides and bottom of
each bun are cut off in a process called blocking, thus yielding buns that are all consistently sized.
These buns are then slit into smaller slabs from which the nested pairs of Studiofoam, SonoMatt and
other Auralex products are produced.
In the case of Studiofoam and other wedge–cut Auralex products, the slabs are carefully and precisely
loaded onto the German–made computer–controlled saw, which then cuts the special shapes
that give our products their industry–leading performance. In the case of SonoMatt, the slabs are
loaded one at a time into a German–made convoluter, a machine with large solid iron, precisely
engineered rollers that compress the foam slab while a fast–moving blade in between them slits the
slab in two.
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| One of the Auralex folks relaxing next to buns of foam that have come off the production line. |
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This is a bun that’s been
blocked and is being moved
over to the slitter. |
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The slitting machine cutting a bun down into smaller blocks that’ll then be cut into finished Auralex products. |
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| The computer control panel of our German–made saw. This machine can measure cuts to thousandths of an inch! |
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A close up of the iron rollers
on the convoluting machine
that’s used to produce
SonoMatt acoustic foam. |
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