The Importance of Placement of Auralex® Acoustical Products

while it's important to know what products to place in your studio for acoustical treatment it's equally important to know where to place them in the room the area of probably prime concern would be the mix area the area behind your mix position and so and the reason for this is because this is where most of your early reflections are going to be coming from and early reflections caused problems because as you can see from our mix position here the engineer would be seated roughly two to three feet from the loudspeakers and the loudspeakers are going to be reflecting sound off the wall so the sound is going to arrive at the ear of our engineer at roughly the same time as it is going to be arriving from the speakers and so this causes cancellation and filtering effects so if you the first place to start in your studio would be absorbing the area behind your monitors and so I would say you'd want to get the first panel dead center between the two monitors maybe work your way up a little bit and then if you don't have a lot of foam this is in a small studio like this in fact this would probably be enough if you didn't have a lot of panels to spread around your room if you have the luxury though of having quite a few panels to mount it's a good idea to largely dampen this entire wall you based rapping is probably the the best place to put your base trapping the place to start would be in the upper corners two reasons for that one that's where most of the low frequency energy tends to congregate in a room and secondly especially in a small studio we don't want to really want to try to avoid taking up a lot of our floor space with additional treatment so by putting the bass traps in the extreme upper corner we're not really wasting any of the floor space now if you do have a room that's perfectly square for example that may require more base trapping and so in that case feel free to add more bass traps on down all the way to the floor because that will certainly pay big benefits sonically in your room now the Leonard bass trap can also be installed horizontally for example let's say there's a doorway here we can turn it sideways if you have a tight spot to fit you in addition to determining the height of your panels on the sidewalls it's very important to determine how far back they need to be as well so one of the tricks you can use is a trick we call the mirror trick you can get a friend to hold a mirror on the wall on the side wall and while you're seated at the mix position have them move the mirror along the wall and the point at which you can see the reflection of the loudspeaker in the mirror right there that's where we want to put our foam panel the next place to turn our attention would be the sidewalls and the primary concern here would be the height on the wall where you should place the panels we don't want to waste our absorption by placing it too low on the on the wall near the floor nor do we want to waste any any treatment by going up very high the reason for this is because we want to keep most of the panels centered roughly at ear level because that will give you the the biggest perceived benefit if however once your room is finished you do notice some room ring maybe some flutter echo oftentimes that can be caused by untreated areas higher up on the wall but those can be easily remedied by just some spot treatment so typically you might want to start maybe one to two feet above the floor as the the place for your bottom panel and as we've done here we've left some space between the panels this has some some benefits besides aesthetic ones obviously it looks really nice you can create some good some interesting designs but also by spreading out the absorption you actually increase the amount of absorption you can get from a given number of panels so we could do a similar pattern to what we have here already and maybe leave four or five inches between a panel and then another panel up here you all right we've talked about where to place the studio foam and the bass traps in your room the final component that is often included in a room treatment is diffusion here we have an example of our the or lxt fuser diffuser which comes in the deluxe Plus kit and similar types of guidelines apply also to the diffuser when you're talking about placement again we're looking at not placing it too high or too low on the wall and in this case it's most often going to go on the back wall behind your mix position so a good place to start again is maybe two feet above the floor and as in as is common in many control rooms there's usually seating on the back wall and so that usually is kind of a built-in guide in terms of how high you'll place the diffusers so in a case like this we might start just a little left of center and then we'd place maybe an array of four or six diffusers on the back wall just like this with the t f-- user and with actually other orlick's diffusers they have a pattern built into them and so it's important to make sure that the diffusers are not placed identically with regard to the the pattern in the diffuser so in a case like this if we were going to install a second T fuser next to this one it would be good to rotate this T pattern like this this will increase your diffusion and increase the randomness of the surface on the back wall as far as some additional tips the t f-- user has a ridge around the back into which you can insert a semi-rigid absorber such as the orluk sauna fibre panel you can insert this you have to cut it but it fits perfectly into this lip and this will increase the range of diffusion and actually make your diffusers act as an absorber as well so you get some additional absorption from the device as far as the other the other placement consideration is how far back is this going to be from your mix position if you're in a really small studio where you may not have the luxury of of perhaps eight to ten feet or more behind your mix position then it might be a good idea to to go without diffusion and simply absorb the back wall with studio foam you

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Keywords: Acoustics, DAW, recording studio, project studio, microphones, drums, guitar, bass, keyboards, synthesizer, synth, rock, jazz, praise & worship, country & western, house, techno, electronic, electronica, hip-hop, funk, soul, electric guitar, classic rock, acoustic, acoustical foam, tips & tricks, how-to, informational, educational, home recording, traps, diffusion, absorptive material, acoustical treatment, instructional video, acoustical panels, acoustical solutions, acoustical engineer

Id: I3q5kQjMAbc

Length: 6min 50sec (410 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 08 2010