New Studio: Is my room too small to get good sound? - AcousticsInsider.com

hey what's up it's cesco from acousticsinsider.com where i teach home studio acoustic treatment techniques for audio professionals but without all the voodoo now one of the questions i often get is is my room too small to really get good sound like is it worth it actually turning this into my studio like for example if you bought a new house or for some reason you have to move rooms and your new room is pretty small and you're wondering is it actually worth me investing in this room is it worth me putting some effort into treating the room and setting up properly or is it really a lost cause that's what i want to get into with you today so first of all let's talk about what a small room is in the first place because we're not talking about how we view the room what we're talking about is an acoustically small room so it's all in relation to sound and there are two main sort of markers let's say that categorize a room as small and the first one of those is that the reverberant field in a small room can't be classified as diffuse anymore so that means that energy at any point in the room kind of comes from all directions right the reverberant field is completely random if you will for for a lack of a bitter description right the sound comes to a certain point from all directions with equal energy and that's a perfectly diffused sound field so the the thing here is that if a room's decay if a room's reverberant field isn't diffuse anymore that means that both calculations and measurements that rely on a diffuse sound field don't work anymore and what that means is that any measurements and calculations that rely on a diffuse sound field don't really work anymore you can't trust them anymore and that's one of the reasons for example why it's so difficult to answer the question how many bass traps do i need if you're working in a small room because the assumptions the calculations that you need to make to figure out how much treatment you need rely on a diffuse reverberant field a diffuse rt60 measurement but you can't get a proper rt60 measurement in a small room and that's why you can't really accurately make any kind of predictions that rely on it including how much treatment you need interestingly this problem also gets worse the more treatment you put in the room because obviously the more absorption you have the less energy is reflected and the less diffuse the reverberant field is gonna get so actually though the more you treat your room the harder it becomes to get an accurate reverb time measurement and in the harder it gets to verify for example whether the amount of treatment that you put in actually did what you set out to do in the first place but that's not what i want to focus on right now because the second thing that i find more important that classifies a small room is the fact that a small room has standing waves in the audible range right so the dimensions of the room the width the length and the height are small enough so that the lowest wavelengths of the audible spectrum fit in between them and they build up these resonances these standing waves and as the room gets smaller and smaller the the more standing waves get packed together into the same kind of bracket in the frequency spectrum in particular the base range and that's what makes small rooms small rooms and also what makes them so difficult to treat because you get those insane variations in volume in the low end because of these standing waves as an example let me show you what that looks like in practice so what i've got here is a very arbitrary simulation of the standing wave pattern in a room right so we've got a room that is nine meters long six meters wide and four meters high just for argument's sake this isn't actually a good room in any sense but i just want to show you what happens as we decrease the room size just as a reminder what we're looking at here is a calculator that calculates where the standing waves sit in the spectrum that's this middle graph here and for each standing wave that we potentially get in this room we we see a a line in this little chunk of the spectrum right so this goes from 16 hertz up to 120 hertz at the moment and that's the spectrum the sorry that's the bracket we're looking at right now and as we can see like there's there are a few standing waves in the very low end and they kind of get more and more as we go up in frequency there are more and more packed together now watch what happens to these lines as i decrease the room size so starting off by just messing around with the length and shortening the width and shortening the height and let's go even further and even further see how the the low end gets more and more cramped with standing waves obviously they kind of move asymmetrically but in general what we're going to see is that we get more and more standing waves in these very very low frequencies they sort of move down in frequency and that's and that's really the the problem right that the low end gets more and more cramped in terms of standing waves for for lack of a better word and that in turn means obviously that the smaller the room gets them the more you have to deal with these issues but that's just to show you what kind of goes on as you shrink the room in general i would say any room that is smaller than your average school classroom should be considered an acoustically small room so then at what point could we say that the room is too small well the unvery unsatisfying answer i guess is once you don't have any more space to do any useful treatment right so ideally you want something around 50 centimeters or at least two feet of treatment space or like yeah space for treatment around the perimeter of the room including the ceiling and this is because in a small room if you're working on a budget if you're just treating your home studio the best bang for your buck is always going to be porous absorption at the right depth and you just need a certain amount of space to make that happen obviously as the room gets smaller that might not be the case everywhere anymore up to the point where it's really so small that you really don't have any space for any deep treatment anymore and all you can really put up is maybe some cheap like thin foam but as you should know now foam doesn't do anything in the low end and as i just showed you the majority of your problems in a small room are gonna come from low end standing wave issues right so you have this conundrum where the majority of the problems are in a frequency range that you don't have the space to treat anymore and that's really when the room is too small to be useful of course usually we're kind of stuck with what we've got right we're kind of we have an option for one room maybe two rooms and we just got to deal with what we have and so you just got to remember that you can improve any room the question is how far can you take it right and especially in these very very small rooms you can you can improve it you just shouldn't expect any miracles especially in terms of the low end you just don't have the space to do anything about it so as you can tell the answer to the question is my room too small isn't really a black and white question it's more of a what kind of expectations do i have for the room and how close to that can i get and usually the smaller the room is the less far you can take it but to give you some kind of metric to go with i would probably say at the absolute limit no dimension should be smaller than around 1 meter 80 or maybe 6 feet that is tiny and if if your room is has any dimension smaller than that you should probably go and look for something else so that being said if you are working from a rather small room what are the things that you should really be paying attention to and the answer is that your primary focus absolutely needs to be on placing your speakers correctly and placing your listening position correctly right because we just saw that you don't really have space for a serious amount of treatment and that means that the biggest lever you have to get good sound or in this case mainly get a balanced sound at your listening position is going to be determined by your placement of your listening position and your speakers right you can kind of see speaker placement like eq'ing the mids and highs sort of but that's kind of how you want to see it and you can see placing your listening position sort of like eq'ing the low end right so by getting your listening position right you're starting off with a roughly balanced low end or rather a low end that is as balanced as you can get it and you'll then place your speakers in order to balance out your mids and highs right so it's all about frequency balance at that point and so you really need to prioritize these two aspects of setting up your studio you shouldn't for example compromise on either those by arbitrarily picking a desk that you think looks good but in the end is way too big for that small room and makes you have to move your listening position or restricts you in terms of where you place your speakers that's just a no-go you're basically setting yourself up for failure even before you do anything else right so speaker positioning and listener positioning has to be the absolute priority the smaller the room gets obviously it's also important in larger rooms but it's even more important in very small rooms right so what i want you to take away here is that if you're looking at setting up a new room first of all be aware of that of the fact that you are going to be setting up in an acoustically small room right any room smaller than about a school classroom your average school classroom and what kind of consequences that have in terms of the problems you'll face there's no way around this you just have to be aware of that and the smaller the room gets the less space you'll have for treatment and there is sort of an absolute lower limit at around maybe 180 180 centimeters or about six feet where in my opinion the compromise is so huge that you really want to be looking for something else and if you are going to be setting up in a room like that make sure you prioritize speaker placement and listener placement above everything else and don't compromise on it just because you have a certain desk that you want to use or you want you feel like setting up facing a certain direction you gotta make sure you really nail down your your sweet spot position and your speaker placement and obviously the first step to do that is to figure out where your listening position needs to be right because you don't get to pick where that is the room and its standing waves that we just talked about determines where your listening position needs to be it's going to be the what i call low end sweet spot of your room that's the position in the room the place in the room where all these standing waves roughly balance out or rather balance out as best as possible another way to see this is that you're trying to find the the least bad spot in terms of low end in your room and that's where you need to place your listening position right now you can do this with a whole bunch of difficult measurements you can obviously try a whole a bunch of different positions but in my opinion a much more strategic and quick way and painless way to find that low end sweet spot in your room is to use a structured listening test and i developed a technique for this particular purpose that i call the bass hunter technique it's pretty simple you can do it in about an hour all it requires is a single speaker and a chair preferably with wheels on it so that you can sit at the exact height that you'll be sitting at once you're listening to your speakers and then you simply go through testing the low end response of your room by playing some music that you like all right it's pretty simple stuff so i've collected all this in a simple guide that you can download at the link in the description and so if you are just setting up a new room if you or if you're having trouble with the low end at your listening position this is the thing that you need to focus on first right so make sure you download my guide to the base hunter technique and go through the process to find out where your room's low end sweet spot actually is and then just make sure that once everything is set up that that's where you're sitting that's where your listening position is going to be but for now that's all i really want to cover in this video i hope that helps you figure out whether the room that you're looking at is too small thanks for watching i'll see you in the next video

Channel: Acoustics Insider

Views: 77,063

Keywords: New Studio: Is my room too small to get good sound?, new studio, new room, too small, good sound, home, project, studio, acoustics, mixing, recording acoustic treatment, sound proofing, room treatment, music studio, recording studio, mix room, garage studio, attic studio, bedroom studio, recording room, drum room, room acoustics, DIY acoustics, DIY, acoustics insider, acousticsinsider

Id: mm2YlmMRC6w

Length: 14min 44sec (884 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 25 2020