In a recent Google Hangout I got together a bunch of experienced and talented audio engineers to help bridge the gap between what you are hearing as an engineer and how the room is causing that problem. We tried to cut through some of the confusion between โmix soundโ and โroom soundโ. The following video and transcript comes from one particular section where we addressed the question โWhat’s The Best Way To Determine What The Deficiencies In Your Room?โ. If you would like to see the full hour and a half discussion you can see the video further down the page.
Joseph Baffy (JB): Whatโs the best way for a guy who is relatively experienced to determine what the deficiencies in his room are?
Joshua Wilson (JW): Well youโre going to do that once you make your first mix.
Brad Pierce (BP): On a technical level Joseph or are you saying more of a…
JB: No on a technical level. You know letโs just say Iโve reached that growth stage. You know where Iโve grown out of the workarounds and I donโt want go out to the car anymore at this time and I like that. So letโs just say weโre at that growth level and now I want to be able to provide Dennis with something that he can, something tangible, that he can use to help me with my room. What am I going to do?
BP: Have you tried a program called โRoom EQ Wizardโ?
JB: Well Iโll say yes I have but letโs say that I havenโt and then you can explain it to me. You understand where Iโm going with this?
BP: Yeah I gotcha.
JW: Well I think the thing is with Dennis is that heโs done this for so long that you can explain to him what it is that you feel and are hearing and he can give you some solutions to that. I think Dennis is pretty much on the ball enough to be able to pick-out things like that. So because he has his database with the room sizes anyway, heโs always going to know what problems in your room is before you actually even tell him so.
Dennis Foley (DF): I think two things we can do here to help the new guy out. Your room has a signature, you as an engineer have a signature sound. You have to know what your room sound is because your room sound and your sound as an engineer, you guys are married. Youโre married to your gear, youโre married to your room and youโre married to your sound as an engineer.
So you’ve got three people in this marriage and we all know that two is hard enough to get along with. Now we got a third one in the deal. Alright so how do we, we know ourselves, we know what our signature sound is or what weโre trying to achieve but I think the missing ingredient here is the room sound. We donโt quite know that yet, so we have to figure out that sound. How do we do that? First, we take a picture of the room sound.
How do we do that? We measure its frequency response and we take that and we put it up in front of us. I think if we have that visual reference of our room frequency response and EQ wizard is a good free software that will help you do that. So you take a picture of the room sound and I think if you put that up on your desk that will help you understand what your room sounds like.
The next most important thing to do is sweep the room for two reasons. One, you want to know if thereโs any vibrations in the room at certain frequencies because light fixtures vibrate, walls vibrate, everything moves and anything that moves causes sound aberration so we have to be really careful. So first I always do a sweep in the room to see if anything is rattling or shaking or moving and then walk around the room and find the pressure areas, put a little piece of tape where the pressure areas are. Those are the areas that need to be treated, you donโt even need an SBL meter.
When I walk into a room I can almost tell you just sitting in the listening chair where the pressure areas are because you just get used to feeling them because low-frequency issues are more about bone-conductance feeling than they are about hearing. So I sweep to see if the room is talking too loudly in terms of fixtures and anything thatโs involved in the room and then…
JB: Will you tell the new guy what a sweep is?
DF: Well the sound wave is the unit of measure we use to more closely resemble what music and sound is and thereโs a whole litany of issues involved with that comparison. But letโs just take it as fact for right now. So if we do a sound wave sweep in our room and we use all the frequencies from 20 to 20,000 that weโre capable of hearing and we realize how our room reacts to each one of those frequency, that reaction is expressed in the frequency response curve of the room.
If it likes certain frequencies itโs more balanced, if it doesnโt we get peaks and troughs and itโs those peaks and troughs that we have to be concerned with. If theyโre too great they need to be treated, if theyโre small which is normally not the case, then you know we donโt have to treat them. But the bottom-line here is, if you take a picture of your room by performing a few simple exercises and keep that response curve right next to your monitor when youโre mixing and I think maybe over time youโll start to see some patterns.
Youโll start to see that โWow I got a 10 DB dip at 60 cycles and itโs 60 cycles in my mixes, Iโm not hearing everything I need to hear.โ Maybe a visual aid would help engineers mix better, I donโt know. I donโt know how you guys do it, I mean I thought my job was hard but you guys, you’ve got to put all the music into the small space between two speakers and you’ve got to put all these tracks in this little space and most of the time half of the people canโt hear it because of their rooms, itโs got to be frustrating for you guys.
JB: Yeah, I kind of call it you know โ3 pounds of sh*t in a 2 pound bagโ and then it all gets converted into an mp3 you know. So itโs squashed even more. Yeah you got it and well through the, you know magic appleโs magic leveling thing you know that they have, their algorithms. I can feel your frustration and I kind of came to that spot several times this week trying to quantify certain things you know and the best that I can really do to try to help the translation issue is think of, I picked the note โAโ because it has a lot of drums in it, it also has guitar in it.
I play acoustic guitar a lot and I enjoy playing it but I donโt enjoy recording it often because the overtones are so incredible that if you donโt do it just right itโs worse than the piano for me at least. So using the note โAโ you know 55 hertz, 110 hertz Iโm getting all the way in my kick getting in that 175 and the 350 Iโm looking at that snare at the body of the snare, my toms all reside in there and I always like get that 350 mark at the 250 mark on toms so they go all the way up to the 400 range alright.
So when I hear terms like when I try to explain terms even like sweep a room and I understand what that means, Iโm going to turn the sound wave on at a hundred hertz I might start at 60 hertz and what the EQ wizard take a few minutes and it will give me a plot which is kind of like an EQ curve for that frequency and I think itโs hard for people to relate to the room as a tangible object thatโs interfering with what they hear.
I really do, I think itโs very hard for people to relate to that.
JW: I tend to think when people get into the studio and everything theyโre more focused on the gear than the actual room. The room kind of takes the backseat on the budget a bit so everybodyโs like โMan you know this person uses this piece of gear I want to get that sound to soundโ but the thing is you canโt. If your room isnโt right like you may not be getting the experience that you think youโre going to get with that piece of gear but what happens then is instead of treating the room we go and buy another piece of gear.
JB: Right
DF: So does that vicious cycle with chasing our tail with gear comes from not understanding how much the room imparts on what we hear?
JW: Yeah.
If you have any questions at any time I am always on hand to help answer them. Leave them in the comments section or email me at info@acousticfields.com. If you would like to learn more about room acoustics please sign up for my free videos and ebook by joining the mailing list here. I send room tuning tips and things for you to test in your room every Wednesday. They are easy to follow and really help you enjoy more of your music. And if you would like your room acoustic issues analysed for free by me then please fill in the form here and I will be happy to take a look for you.
Thanks and speak soon
Dennis
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Great build plans. thank you Denis