I just shot my room

[twitchmonitor]

I sat with a radio shack SPL meter at head height in my listening position in my home studio and played a series of sine wave tones through my moniotrs and recorded 27 points, which i then plotted and graphed. O MY GOD. The graph looks like the stock market in the weeks leading up to the great depression. Now I realize that this is hardly an acurate measuring technique and the the RS SPL meter is not a precision tool, but stil....I think I can at least glean from this that my room need SOME kind of treatment.

at about 60 hz i'm reading 80 db, which makes a zig-zag ascent to 90 db at 5k, and then a jagged, erratic descent all the way down to about 50 db at 20k. It's all over the place. When I look at the graph, it kind of looks like a spikey porcupine.

I don't really even know where to begin. My room is an odd shape with very few parallel surfaces (a bit of wall, and the floor and ceiing). The floor is hardwood. the speakers (yorkville actives) are 6 inches in front of a wall.

No wonder I've had such a hard time getting my mixes to translate!

Can anybody offer any help?

[tiger vomitt]

put up bass traps

it wont even out the spiky stuff in the bass but at least the lows as a whole will be more even with the highs

other than that, make sure your room isnt too reverberant

between bass traps and hanging sound blankets for the mid and high reflections, i managed to make my room almost sort of ok. IOW, IMHO my stuff translates pretty well.

some of the crazy response is likely to be your monitors and their position in the room. every monitor in the world would do some weird stuff, it's not necessarily like "OMG you have shit monitors" expensive ones do it too...

[codashome]

My old business partner & I did that exercise in his control room. It was about 11 x 12 x 9. Really horrid dimensions. Our graph was all over the map, too. The bass was about 6 dB higher in the rear of the room. What we did was take 4 48" Sonotubes filled with fiberglass and move them around the room (well, the walls) until things evened out a bit. Since the floor was carpeted we didn't want to add any more high frequency sucking material.

So, yeah, bass traps or Helmholz-type units is the place to start. Most of the problems you will have with room modes is below 300 Hz anyway.

[stui]

[the speakers (yorkville actives) are 6 inches in front of a wall]

Do your monitors allow you to roll off bottom end to allow for proximity to walls/corners? This makes a big difference in my space.

Stui[/quote]

[rhythm ranch]

Check out Ethen Winer's Acoustics page.
And his forum.

[MoreSpaceEcho]

i just redid my control room/bedroom this week. finally got it all cleaned up and everything and i come to find i have some GNARLY comb filtering around 500hz right at my mix position. awesome. not sure what i'm gonna do yet...my short term solution (hopefully) is more shelves with tons of books on them along the side walls to break things up a bit. anyway, google 'acoustics in control rooms' or somesuch and you'll get tons of reading material. that's basically all i did at work yesterday...

what happens when you clap your hands in your room? can you hear any flutter echo or comb filtering? i dunno, i would say for starters, treat the ceiling over your mix area and pull the speakers out from the walls another foot if you can. and then figure out what kind of treatments you need on your walls. keep us posted. although i'm pretty terrified at what the results will be, i'm gonna try your experiment tonight.

cheers,
scott

[takeout]

Build the Winer traps. Seriously. You'll be amazed.

Also, pull your mix position away from that back wall. Use traps back there too.

[KennyLusk]

Rythm Ranch, nice link. Thanks

[Devlars]

"Here is a link to an acoustics site that I like. http://johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/index.php but most of the information that I got came from a book called "Master Handbook of Acoustics" a very good read."

I have a friend that acoustically treated a studio in the upper room of a church and it's great the mixes I hear from there always sound wonderful. He sent this along, hope it helps.

[twitchmonitor]

Build the Winer traps. Seriously. You'll be amazed.

Also, pull your mix position away from that back wall. Use traps back there too.

which traps? I'm reading throught the site and I'm a bit overwhelmed, what with the diffusers, deflectors, traps, and and the variations among them.

What exactly did you build? Those cloth covered sheets of fiberglass? Varying thicknesses? Across the corners of your room? Or did you use rolls of fluffy fiberglass in the corners? Did you build the slated traps? Etc....I don't even know where to begin.

Thanks for the link, btw. Now at least I'm confused about the solution, not the problem.

[dwelle]

http://www.ethanwiner.com/basstrap.html

everything you need to know...