diffuser

[lazarus]

Do I need a diffuser in a vocal booth or are acoustic foam and bass traps enough? the booth is 8x7x7.

[danbronson]

Depends what you want the room to sound like.

[avare]

Originally Posted by lazarus

Do I need a diffuser in a vocal booth or are acoustic foam and bass traps enough? the booth is 8x7x7.

In a room that small, as absorption as you can fit.

Andre

[themikesonata]

obviously you need to shape the room as you see fit.
However, I was always taught vocal booths should be pretty dead to be able to seat the vocals in the mix and recreating the space you are trying to achieve within the mix.
does that make sense?

[Ethan Winer]

Originally Posted by lazarus

Do I need a diffuser in a vocal booth or are acoustic foam and bass traps enough? the booth is 8x7x7.

Small rooms do better with absorption IMO, but some people like diffusion. I made a short video to show what diffusion sounds like when it's very close. It's listed near the bottom of this page:

RealTraps - Videos

--Ethan

[bpape]

I would agree. If it's a small booth, pretty much kill it.

Bryan

[gainstages]

I know i go a bit against the grain, but i tend to like diffuse a bit. I'm not a big fan of competely dead vocal booths unless they are the size of a phone booth (remember those?!)

Your's sounds big enough that in my opinion, I'd probably add a little diffusion, just don't get carried away with it.

[lazarus]

Thanks everyone! I notice the common answer here is as much absorbtion as possible. Does that mean pack it full of foam, because I was under the impression that I should leave at least some reflective surface?

[Ethan Winer]

Reflections from nearby surfaces are best avoided. The closer the surface, the more you need to absorb rather than allow reflections into the microphone. Hence gs's comment above about phone booth size booths.

--Ethan

[lazarus]

If I cover the whole room with foam won't that result in a dead booth?

[Ethan Winer]

Originally Posted by lazarus

If I cover the whole room with foam won't that result in a dead booth?

Yes, and that's what you want. Unless you like the boxy affected sound of a very small room.

One of my customers is "the voice" for WABC-TV promos. He lives only 20 minutes from me, and sends his work to the TV studio in NYC via ISDN phone lines. This guy has a very expensive booth that cost $12,000 or some crazy amount like that. But even after all that money it was not completely dead, and also had some mid-bass boominess issues. The station complained they could still hear a small amount of room tone in his recordings. So we sold him four HF MiniTraps to make the room even more dead and reduce the boominess. Now everyone is happy.

The point being that small rooms need to be as dead sounding as possible. It's easy to add reverb and ambience electronically, but it's impossible to remove room tone.

--Ethan

[lazarus]

Thanks Ethan you've been a big help!