OK, Folks - this is what I'd like to see happen now:
One of you guys with a real project post your specs up here. It'd go something like "I have a basement corner with a so-and-so ceiling height, which is fixed. I can put up two walls, but for one of them I have to get somewhere between a beam and a pipe, so it has to be located between this and that distance from the opposing fixed wall. The other dimension should be somewhere between thirteen and nineteen-or-so feet. It'll be for band rehearsals, some jamming, and a little personal recording - but we go to a pro studio for serious tracking..."
What would be more exciting would be a situation where you have a certain long space that has to be divided-up into the the best TWO rooms that could be (studio and control room; studio and isolation room...). This gets exciting because of all the variables and optimizations that can be done (like: we'll be mixing near-field and headphones, but we want to use some distant-miking in the studio, so we'll make the control room small-and-dead, and the studio big...). Picture what I mean? -you have to optimize TWO spaces, but when you increase the dimention of one room, you're DECREASING the corresponding dimention of the other one! Oh yeah - I'm chompin' at the bit now...
...So one of you puts out your requirements and limits, and all of us who feel like playing with our apps can peck-away, and submit back to the forum our best results. Powerfull, Man; powerful - we'll be like a distributed supercomputer. One, big throbbing brain.
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OK - another short tutorial installment: The reason 'big' went with 'distant miking', and 'small' went with 'dead' in the second-to-last paragraph may not be why you think. The reason large room volume goes with distant miking is NOT that you need physical space for 'distance', it's that with distant miking (speaking maybe only two feet, even) you necessarily get much more of the ROOM-sound on your recordings - so it has to be a better sounding room; modal problems get worse and worse with smaller volumes. Making a room deader and deader (shorter reverb time) partially solves small-room-associated modal problems (assuming it's LOW-FREQ absorbtion, not just two-inch sonex!) because wide-spaced modal distribution troubles the LOW response of the room, and in a deader room the 'cutoff frequency' (frequency above-which modes aren't much of a problem) goes lower - leaving you with less of a 'troubled' region. Remember that broadband absorbtion 'looks' to a soundwave like an 'open window', so broadband absorbtion effectively 'makes the room bigger' - or at least takes-away from the walls that are there building modes up. ..So generally-speaking, the smaller you have to make a room, the deader you have to make it.
Joe
One of you guys with a real project post your specs up here. It'd go something like "I have a basement corner with a so-and-so ceiling height, which is fixed. I can put up two walls, but for one of them I have to get somewhere between a beam and a pipe, so it has to be located between this and that distance from the opposing fixed wall. The other dimension should be somewhere between thirteen and nineteen-or-so feet. It'll be for band rehearsals, some jamming, and a little personal recording - but we go to a pro studio for serious tracking..."
What would be more exciting would be a situation where you have a certain long space that has to be divided-up into the the best TWO rooms that could be (studio and control room; studio and isolation room...). This gets exciting because of all the variables and optimizations that can be done (like: we'll be mixing near-field and headphones, but we want to use some distant-miking in the studio, so we'll make the control room small-and-dead, and the studio big...). Picture what I mean? -you have to optimize TWO spaces, but when you increase the dimention of one room, you're DECREASING the corresponding dimention of the other one! Oh yeah - I'm chompin' at the bit now...
...So one of you puts out your requirements and limits, and all of us who feel like playing with our apps can peck-away, and submit back to the forum our best results. Powerfull, Man; powerful - we'll be like a distributed supercomputer. One, big throbbing brain.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
OK - another short tutorial installment: The reason 'big' went with 'distant miking', and 'small' went with 'dead' in the second-to-last paragraph may not be why you think. The reason large room volume goes with distant miking is NOT that you need physical space for 'distance', it's that with distant miking (speaking maybe only two feet, even) you necessarily get much more of the ROOM-sound on your recordings - so it has to be a better sounding room; modal problems get worse and worse with smaller volumes. Making a room deader and deader (shorter reverb time) partially solves small-room-associated modal problems (assuming it's LOW-FREQ absorbtion, not just two-inch sonex!) because wide-spaced modal distribution troubles the LOW response of the room, and in a deader room the 'cutoff frequency' (frequency above-which modes aren't much of a problem) goes lower - leaving you with less of a 'troubled' region. Remember that broadband absorbtion 'looks' to a soundwave like an 'open window', so broadband absorbtion effectively 'makes the room bigger' - or at least takes-away from the walls that are there building modes up. ..So generally-speaking, the smaller you have to make a room, the deader you have to make it.
Joe
