why should i treat my room

[theblackpage]

ok, so my room is decently big. it has a flutter echo to it when i clap my hands. nothing too serious. what i want to know is what kind of improvement will happen with a properly treated room? i mean i just cant see how it could make that much of a difference.

enlighten me?

[gearaddict]

oh oh..prepare to be overwhelmed and over loaded...just do a search for:

WHY TREAT ROOM...there is a sh*T load of questions that have already been answered!!

[theblackpage]

ive done my share of searches. its not that i dont know if it will make a difference. my questions is in what way does it improve the sound. im not recording drums. just guitar and vocals

[John Suitcase]

It really comes down the whether you're happy with the sounds you're getting. If the flutter bothers you, try treating one wall a bit. Hanging a packing blanket from a mic stand in a 'T' formation works well.

It's more important to treat smaller rooms, in most cases, unless we're talking about a gymnasium. Funny things start to happen in spaces smaller than 1500 cubic feet or so.

There are lots of intelligent people who believe that every room should be analyzed and treated, and there are lots of other people who believe most any room can work, and only the most heinous acoustical problems really need treatment.

In the end, it's your room, your music. If you're getting what you want, why mess with it?

[Heartfelt]

I am not an expert... just another user.


2 reasons:

1. Anything you record will have the ambience of the room it is recorded in. A room in a house doesn't usually have a great sound and everything will have THAT sound. When you try to add verb and delay... or ambience... you will always have the problem of the annoying captured ambience.

2. Your room is grossly inaccurate (not designed for recording). Therefore what you hear in that room will be grossly inaccurate, even with the best of monitors. What that means is you cannot make sound judgments when recording or mixing because you are not hearing what is really there... you are hearing what is there PLUS the the magnification of some frequencies and the reduction of others coloring the sound coming from your monitors.

[Bhang]

Do you want to be able to hear what's in your mix?

[Glenn Kuras]

Originally Posted by theblackpage

ok, so my room is decently big. it has a flutter echo to it when i clap my hands. nothing too serious. what i want to know is what kind of improvement will happen with a properly treated room? i mean i just cant see how it could make that much of a difference.

enlighten me?

Every room is going to have nulls and peaks throughout the room. When you are mixing you want to hear what is coming out of the monitors NOT with the room sound. Basically if the room is treated well you should be able to make our mixes translate (NO GUESSING).
Take a read here to see if this helps you understand the influence of a room. GIK Acoustics presents Acoustics Primer: Some Basics on Acoustics.


Glenn

[Glenn Kuras]

Originally Posted by Bhang

Do you want to be able to hear what's in your mix?

Anyone that as worked in a well treated room will TOTALLY understand what you mean. The rest will not.

Glenn

[dft3670]

Why clean the windshield on your car?

If you can't see what's really in front of you, when your driving your going to make poor decisions and eventually your going to need some serious body work.

If you can't really hear what your listening to, your going to make poor mixing decisions and eventually your music is going to need some serious musical body work.

Room treatment is the best investment you will ever make to your studio. Better than any piece of equipment you will buy.

[Mr.HOLMES]

Originally Posted by dft3670

Why clean the windshield on your car?

If you can't see what's really in front of you, when your driving your going to make poor decisions and eventually your going to need some serious body work.

If you can't really hear what your listening to, your going to make poor mixing decisions and eventually your music is going to need some serious musical body work.

Room treatment is the best investment you will ever make to your studio. Better than any piece of equipment you will buy.

--
I am so happy that my room is treated by an expert.
I mean we talk all day long about equipment at GS.
But if you have already good equipment but a shit room it would take you a hard time to get professional mixes ....

So even in Home-Recording should come first the room treatment before you buy expensive GEAR.

To not make yourself crazy and to have the biggest effort form it build yourself the Dope Traps and place them behind the monitors. A friend of mine did it last week without any measurement and yes maybe it is very dry in his room but his mixes went up 200% just thorough the fact that he is not hearing the room-answer so much but more the direct-sonic from the near-fields.

In my room where we can do also some overdubbing I advised the acoustical-expert to make it for mixing RT 60 / 300-400 ms so if I record something it is very dry...so I have all options with reverb.
Traditional sound enginners would complain taht recording and mixing in the same room with the same RT 60 is not good. I do not care ....


PS:
I even myself I worked 2 years with dope traps before we did it with a professional.
It is a great room treatment for home-recoding and is not costing too much money.

[Audiop]

There's no question apout the huge impact a room has on the sound, wether it's recorded and played back or if it's live.

Do you record and/or mix in that room?


/Peter

[D. Rumble]

Check this out:

Steve Lipson record producer video interview

Check the video.
Lipson is the man behind many hit records. He works from a big attic studio with a triangle-shaped ceiling, without much treatment. When he's asked about treatment of his room, he says he doesn't care much. When you're close to your near field speakers and learn to know your room, it's no big deal, he says.

d.

[norman_nomad]

Everyone is answering but no one has asked if he's using his room as a control room or as a live room... or maybe the room will serve both purposes?

[narcoman]

Originally Posted by norman_nomad

Everyone is answering but no one has asked if he's using his room as a control room or as a live room... or maybe the room will serve both purposes?

Either way - the answer is pretty much the same.

[Heartfelt]

Interesting interview

[alexgrignon]

I dunno, even being close to the nearfields....I downloaded the test tones from ethan's site and set up an SPL meter in my mix spot using nearfields. I played the test tones and plotted the dB reading for each frequency. I was stunned when I saw the swings in certain frequency ranges (it also is audibly quieter or louder). When playing music, you may not be able to easily pick out the peaks and nulls....but they are there and affecting what you can or can't hear at specific frequencies.

Here's a link to what I plotted:
http://homepage.mac.com/alexgrignon/SPL2.png

If you look at the range between 80hz and 110hz, you can see that huge dip followed by a peak. That's almost a 40db swing in that small (and critical) range! No wonder I thought my speakers lacked bass.

I'm still trying to fix the issues.....but i'm out in a two car garage that i'm using a portion of for music. It's not feasible to treat the whole room, so i'm trying to create a smaller space that would be easier to control....or buy a house with more room. :)

- alex

[John Suitcase]

Originally Posted by alexgrignon

I dunno, even being close to the nearfields....I downloaded the test tones from ethan's site and set up an SPL meter in my mix spot using nearfields. I played the test tones and plotted the dB reading for each frequency. I was stunned when I saw the swings in certain frequency ranges (it also is audibly quieter or louder). When playing music, you may not be able to easily pick out the peaks and nulls....but they are there and affecting what you can or can't hear at specific frequencies.

Here's a link to what I plotted:
http://homepage.mac.com/alexgrignon/SPL2.png

If you look at the range between 80hz and 110hz, you can see that huge dip followed by a peak. That's almost a 40db swing in that small (and critical) range! No wonder I thought my speakers lacked bass.

I'm still trying to fix the issues.....but i'm out in a two car garage that i'm using a portion of for music. It's not feasible to treat the whole room, so i'm trying to create a smaller space that would be easier to control....or buy a house with more room. :)

- alex

I agree that nulls and peaks occur, but your ears don't react to them the way a microphone does. A mic will 'hear' comb filtering from your monitors if at all to one side or the other (so the delay is slightly different.) Your ears and brain make the calculation that you've moved your head, so the location of the speakers moves (relative to your head) but the frequency response stays the same. Otherwise you'd be hearing huge nulls and peaks every time you moved at all.

Comb-filtering is a bigger issue when tracking, since a mic does have peaks and nulls when two(or more, as on a drum kit) versions of the same or similar material are combined. But again, in a large room, comb filtering is less of an issue, since the walls are far enough away that the delays are longer and the falloff of the volume is enough that the reflected sound sin't having a big effect. Especially above about 200 hz. Bass issues are a bigger problem when tracking in a smallish room, ad treatment is really the only way to solve that, except to use a DI for bass guitar. Kick drum is easier to deal with, since it's playing the same note over and over, and not moving around. You can position the mic in such a way as to get the low end frequencies you want, most of the time.

If you're using near field monitors, listening at reasonable volumes, in the sweet spot, the room is pretty irrelevant. If it's a bathroom or closet, it'll do weird things, but any normal sized room with some furniture and carpet will be fine, 90% of the time.

I work on location all the time, and mix on location quite often. If you're careful and aware of what's going on, you can do good work in any room, treated or not.

I just wanted to point out the often cited peaks and nulls at the listening position using a microphone, and that they aren't relevant to your ears.

Here's an article that explains it better than I can:

Moulton Laboratories :: About Comb Filtering, Phase Shift and Polarity Reversal

[Wayne]

For tracking space? Here's another theoretical yet very practice 'why'. Consider the Haas' or precedence' effect- Any duplicates of a signal within the first 20 ms or so are considerer by the ear to be the same event.
Unless your walls are 30' out -this is your first line of not only 'room tone and level control, but also 'smear'.

[rumblefuzz]

This is some cool stuff guys...

I've never realised before that this comb filtering thing isn't actually that obvious to your ears, but is audible big time once picked up by a mic and played back. This actually answers a lot of my personal questions! And to think is was that straight forward... (it is right?)

[norman_nomad]

Originally Posted by narcoman

Either way - the answer is pretty much the same.

Not at all.

You'd want a control room to sound clinical.

You'd want a live room to sound flattering.

[Audiop]

Originally Posted by norman_nomad

Everyone is answering but no one has asked if he's using his room as a control room or as a live room... or maybe the room will serve both purposes?

Originally Posted by Audiop

There's no question apout the huge impact a room has on the sound, wether it's recorded and played back or if it's live.

Do you record and/or mix in that room?

/Peter

[Ethan Winer]

Originally Posted by theblackpage

my questions is in what way does it improve the sound. im not recording drums. just guitar and vocals

Room treatment removes the coloration added by the room. So instead of getting a boxy off-mike sound, you capture a clear and neutral recording that sounds more like the instrument or voice.

--Ethan