I've got the Small Square Room Mid-range Buildup Blues

[Seashore]

Not a bass-specific problem, but I figured I would ask here. We recently moved apartments, and my new studio room sounds terrible. It's 10'4" x 11'8" and the ceilings are 8'6". I've had my studio in small rooms before, but none so nearly cubical, and this is my first time with plaster walls and ceiling. The door is in one corner and there's a large closet with a door in the opposite corner, about half full of stuff. Even with curtains on both windows, a rug, some soft furniture, and 50 square feet of somewhat strategically placed acoustic foam tiles, it sounds like crap - boxy midrange resonance that I think is somewhere in the 400-800 Hz range pretty much everywhere I stand, which makes my monitor speakers sound hollow and muddy, and a weirdly "smeared", undefined stereo image. I've tried my setup in a couple different locations with similar results.

My gear is no great shakes, but I've been recording and mixing with it for around 15 years under a variety of conditions and I know it pretty well. I've never encountered this before. I won't be able to turn out a decent mix unless I get it resolved. My only thought right now is to make some mineral wool panels to beef up the wall treatment, and maybe get a larger rug to further minimize floor to ceiling reflections. Should that help? Are there any other room treatments I should consider? I can only afford a couple hundred bucks right now, and we're renting - I can hang up anything I want, but can't make permanent alterations. Any suggestions keeping those limitations in mind would be very welcome.

 

[And I]

Foam/rock wool panels absorb a broad range of frequencies and lessen reverberation. They won't stop the standing waves that come with all parallel walls. A diffuser may help.

 

[WebJunk]

Not a bass-specific problem, but I figured I would ask here. We recently moved apartments, and my new studio room sounds terrible. It's 10'4" x 11'8" and the ceilings are 8'6". I've had my studio in small rooms before, but none so nearly cubical, and this is my first time with plaster walls and ceiling. The door is in one corner and there's a large closet with a door in the opposite corner, about half full of stuff. Even with curtains on both windows, a rug, some soft furniture, and 50 square feet of somewhat strategically placed acoustic foam tiles, it sounds like crap - boxy midrange resonance that I think is

Do you have any bass traps? That should have been the FIRST thing you added. You can purchase foam bass traps or buy some rockwool insulation and make some. Regular acoustic panels do nothing for bass frequencies. You need several layers of thickness which is why foam bass traps are usually at least 12" thick. And you would want to put those mainly where the walls meet the ceiling plus the corners of the rooms if you need more. And you will need a number of them (at least 8) or more for your room. packs of 4 or less will do little noticeable.

 

[Seashore]

Do you have any bass traps? That should have been the FIRST thing you added. You can purchase foam bass traps or buy some rockwool insulation and make some. Regular acoustic panels do nothing for bass frequencies. You need several layers of thickness which is why foam bass traps are usually at least 12" thick. And you would want to put those mainly where the walls meet the ceiling plus the corners of the rooms if you need more. And you will need a number of them (at least 8) or more for your room. packs of 4 or less will do little noticeable.

Thank you! I may have room to put some of these up. I'll look into it. If I use mineral wool, can the traps be shallower - like, 4 or 6 inches deep rather than 12? And is it ok to have airspace behind them if they're angled in the corner, or should the material fill all the space back to the wall?

 

[WebJunk]

Thank you! I may have room to put some of these up. I'll look into it. If I use mineral wool, can the traps be shallower - like, 4 or 6 inches deep rather than 12? And is it ok to have airspace behind them if they're angled in the corner, or should the material fill all the space back to the wall?

Yes. Foam bass traps need to be deeper because of how they work. Rockwool or mineral wool is much denser. It normally comes 2" thick and you want at least two layers, so 4". The thicker the lower the frequency they effect. Beyond 6" is a waste tho. Normally it is best to have them angled in corners. Bass frequencies are long so bend around rooms. That is why bass traps work best in the corners. You can have air space behind them if angled as the waves will hit the panels which s all that matters. If flat against a wall, no more than 2" from wall.

 

[seamonkey]

room treatment first
But then look at some software, IK Multimedia ARC is good.
It can help EQ for the room, and help with Mic placement for the room.

This is going to sound totally counter-intuitive but also try AMBEO Orbit
Instead of fighting the room you may be able to leverage it.

 

[Frenchy-Lefty]

In your situation, I would fill all the upper corners with foam bass traps. (I use Acoustimac bass traps. More expensive but definitely pro stuff. Might be a problem in a rental apartment as you need to drill holes to install them). The issue with most small square rooms are standing waves so bass traps are what you need. Anything else, including foam tiles on the walls is totally useless.

Combined that with hi-quality headphones and your good for mixing.

On the tracking side, in the meantime you can record your bass with a good DI and guitar or voice with dynamic mics instead of condensors so that it does not pickup the acoustic.

 

[WebJunk]

In your situation, I would fill all the upper corners with foam bass traps. Might be a problem in a rental apartment as you need to drill holes to install them). The issue with most small square rooms are standing waves so bass traps are what you need. Anything else, including foam tiles on the walls is totally useless.

1) With foam bass traps & panels, no holes have to be drilled. Use T-pins (found where sewing supplies or sold or craft stores) Make a very small hole that can be filled in later with a drop if paint or I've even used typewriter white-out.
2) Foam tiles or some other acoustic treatment on a wall is extremely important although not as important as bass traps. Reflections on walls, ceiling & floor (even some objects) cause major issues for recording and mixing if using monitors. Phasing issues itself will be huge. But just the natural reverb & delay you will have no control whatsoever. The biggest issue is some frequencies will be attenuated or diminished thru the mic. So you most definitely want to treat the rest of the room. You don't necessarily want it dead (unless its a vocal only room) but if you only treat with bass traps, I would not want to record or mix in that room.

 

[Frenchy-Lefty]

- That was my point, you don't need holes with foam bass traps but you need to drill for Acoustimac panels.
- If you use the same small room for mixing and tracking, a dead room will sound terribly dull in a recording. I often see this as a compromise. To prevent reflections I much prefer shelves with books or home-made wood reflection absorbers (easy to make) than foam because foam tends to totally kill the room (e,g NPR Tiny Desk concerts)

 

[WebJunk]

-
- If you use the same small room for mixing and tracking, a dead room will sound terribly dull in a recording. I often see this as a compromise. To prevent reflections I much prefer shelves with books or home-made wood reflection absorbers (easy to make) than foam because foam tends to totally kill the room (e,g NPR Tiny Desk concerts)

Foam does not kill a room. Covering an entire room, kills the room. Foam (or other treatment) panels only stop (use up the acoustical energy) of the sound waves that hit them specifically. They can not effect another area of the room. An untreated surface will still reflect sound!

If you have monitors on a desk in front of you and the walls & ceiling are untreated (I'll even include that bass traps are in the corners for this example) when you sit in front of the desk, you will get reflections from the side walls. You can find the exact location by having someone hold a mirror against the walls while you it at the desk and where you see the monitors in the mirror is the (straight-line) acoustic reflection points and these need to be treated. The same applies to the ceiling above you although of course its difficult to hold a mirror up there Obviously the wall directly opposite the monitors will also reflect the sound back to you & need to be treated. To a lesser effect the wall (you are facing) in back of the monitors will also reflect audio. That is why you treat all (side walls, back wall, ceiling, front wall, in order) these surfaces first. You really do not need a program or device to make these decisions. Those are more for fine-tuning frequencies, determining specific room modes, which can increase cost & time significantly beyond most home studios.
These reflections are unwanted. First, they will be delayed from the direct sound from the monitors causing time, that is reverb, delay & related phaser/flanger sounds which are time delay effects. Multiples of these type of reflections also will cause phase issues. As walls will reflect certain frequencies over others, this also means they are coloring your sound. So these specific reflection points will all effect your mix and any EQ, reverb, phase, etc. adjustments in sound you make. That is why these I mention in this example are all unwanted reflections and should be treated. Realizing the adjustments you make in one room that is not properly treated will not transfer identically to listening in a different acoustical room even if using identical monitors. So how will your mix in a room not properly treated ever translate to the general public for listening in their rooms, on their speakers? The entire point of using Studio Monitors and not just quality stereo speakers is because stereo speakers are designed to color the sound to a personal preference like boosting bass or mids. Monitors (while none are completely flat) are designed to avoid coloration as much as possible.
In this example it effects the sounds & audio you are mixing but any sounds you are recording will be effected similarly although the reflection points may move. So if we have say a bass or guitar amp we are micing, the mic (taking into account the pickup pattern of that mic) will not only pick up the sounds directly from the mic, but reflections in the room and also of course can cause similar issues. Now in this case, you may not want to eliminate all reflections. The reflections are what make something like an amp sound like its playing in a large room. No reflections (like a totally dead room) and a mic directly in front of the cabinet/speaker tends to not sound like what people are used to hearing at a concert. Although reverb is sometimes added later if the reflected sound in a room has undesirable effects. That is why vocals are normally recorded in a vocal booth or an isolation panel is used & reverb added later. With vocals, reflections especially if it causes phase issues often makes the words, emotional details or phrasing of the singer more difficult to understand. Voice-over work is normally done in a room that is completely dead acoustically for this reason. For some acoustic instruments you may have a highly treated room but use an Ambiance mic a distance away.
There is no single way to treat a room for recording/tracking, mixing, vocals, acoustic instruments, amplifiers. Normally if the room is multi-function (notice a professional studio has separate rooms, treated differently for each) you will need a trade-off. But its important to notice that often the studio monitors are often the single largest purchase for any studio, home or professional. So if you use a room untreated for those monitors you are in essence defeating the reason for the studio monitors.

I have a home studio. My main room is treated specifically for mixing & tracking although I do some recording. I have a closet that is heavily treated, nearly dead, I use as a vocal booth. My Bedroom is treated specifically to deal with micing amp & since I mainly practice there My Living room is treated mainly for my drums. I have movable panels I made (basically sheetrock & rockwool) that I use to isolate such things as guitar amps & acoustic instruments. I also have some panels made to reflect sound for those times (especially some percussion & some acoustic instruments) when I want to "Liven up" my sound a bit.

 

[hbarcat]

Let me qualify this post by stating that I've actually done some real study on this in college taught by a recognized expert in the field and have since done installations of acoustic treatment in several practice rooms, recording studios and even a couple of live venues. My own home studio is a horrific 15' x 15' with 9' ceiling and I have it treated so it sounds fantastic.

There is really only one solution to your problem and that is to spend some money on proper sound treatment.

-- Get at least 4 good bass traps. Get 6 or 8 if you can afford them.

-- Lots of wideband absorbers. Enough to cover most of the entire wall behind your speakers and also the opposite wall. Partial coverage on the side walls and a few spots on the ceiling.

-- Get at least 3 diffusers. Good quality quadratic equation panels are best. place one in the center of the wall opposite your speakers and one on each side wall.

-- Carpet the floor.

This won't be cheap. But substitution with cheap alternatives just wont work. Acoustic science has the physics worked out and if you want to fix a room with terrible acoustic problems then there's only one way to fix it.

I know that a lot of people swear that hanging curtains and placing packing foam everywhere works great but it really doesn't. At best, it makes a noticeable improvement at some specific frequencues, but it can't come to the great results you'll get by using proper quality sound treatment.

 

[Seashore]

All this information and discussion is great, thanks for everyone's input. Putting bass traps in the corners and around ceiling edges first makes the most sense, right? There's a chance I can sink more money into it down the road, but it'll have to be piecemeal. My first priority is to get it usable for mixing, and the other area where I anticipate having a problem is vocal recording - I can just imagine the fun I'll have if these boxy mids wind up all over a vocal track.

In any case, I've rearranged my monitor speakers and tightened up the foam I already have to try and keep the sound in my mix position focused, and it's an improvement over what it was. I'll update with some pics once I get the bass traps in place, if anyone's curious.

 

[hbarcat]

. Putting bass traps in the corners and around ceiling edges first makes the most sense, right? There's a chance I can sink more money into it down the road, but it'll have to be piecemeal.

The reality is proper sound treatment is expensive and if you don't have the money then you don't have the money.

That being the case, I'd recommend getting 2 bass traps and 2 absorbers right away and add more when funds allow.

Place the 2 bass traps in the corners close to the ceiling on the wall opposite your speakers.

Place the 2 absorbers on the wall behind the speakers.

Get a sofa. The biggest, cushiest sofa you can find and place it in front of the wall opposite your speakers.

Get a big bookcase and fill it with books. Get two of them. These make great diffusers, which randomize sound reflections. Put them in front of the side walls.

Put a rug on the floor. Even a small one is better than an entire hard, bare floor.

Any other furniture you can get to fill up your space will help. The softer and squishier, the better.

 

[Seashore]

The reality is proper sound treatment is expensive and if you don't have the money then you don't have the money.

That being the case, I'd recommend getting 2 bass traps and 2 absorbers right away and add more when funds allow.

Place the 2 bass traps in the corners close to the ceiling on the wall opposite your speakers.

Place the 2 absorbers on the wall behind the speakers.

Get a sofa. The biggest, cushiest sofa you can find and place it in front of the wall opposite your speakers.

Get a big bookcase and fill it with books. Get two of them. These make great diffusers, which randomize sound reflections. Put them in front of the side walls.

Put a rug on the floor. Even a small one is better than an entire hard, bare floor.

Any other furniture you can get to fill up your space will help. The softer and squishier, the better.

Thanks again. The money to really do this right just isn't there, and the room has to be somewhat multi-purpose, so I'm just shooting for as much improvement as possible. I've got a medium size couch, a rug which I'm planning to swap out for something bigger, and I built a bookshelf in the only place it could fit. Most of the foam is tightened up behind my computer and speakers, the rest is in the rear corners, I've got some heavy curtains over the windows, and there are a few coats hanging on the doors. I also have a bunch of paper and canvases leaning in the corner behind my mix station. I'll start with mineral wool traps and panels placed as you suggest.

I have at least four paintings that have to hang in that room - no storage space for them and the subject matter keeps them out of the family areas. They're between 24" - 30" wide by around 48" high. I can place them to minimize reflections; would it also be helpful to have sound-absorbing material behind them?

 

[hbarcat]

Seashore, this is tricky coming up with a response because it involves some real physics and math and I want to explain the best I can in everyday language.

The music that you're dealing with occurs on a broad spectrum of sound from about 20 Hz -- 20,000 Hz. Ultra low to ultra high. All of it is bouncing around inside your studio with the sound waves crashing into each other in complex ways creating all sorts of distortions and sonic artifacts.

Controlling this chaos involves both absorbing some of this sound and diffusing or scattering some of it as well. This needs to be accomplished more or less equally across the entire frequency band from low to high.

The problem is that it's relatively easy to absorb high frequencies and increasingly difficult to absorb lower frequencies. Carefully designed and built (and expensive) bass traps are a necessity below 100 Hz.

Ideally, you'd have the budget to treat the entire room properly so that you tame all the frequencues evenly to maintain a tonal balance. But in the real world, lack of money means you resort to floor rugs, thick drapes, pieces of furniture, and wool insulation.

Unfortunately, the inevitable result is you absorb much more high frequencies while allowing the low bass tones to run rampant in your room and you have a boomy, muddy sound.

The bottom line is you really need to place at least 4 properly built bass traps in your room to have a chance at achieving a balanced sound. At least this will cost $200 ($50 x 4) possibly more. After that, you can add diffusers and mid and high frequency absorbers at minimal cost (especially if you DIY).

You might see information on the internet about making your own bass traps out of wool insulation. This will work, theoretically, but only if you know exactly what you're doing. The trap will need to be constructed so that it's tuned to a specific narrow frequency range and then you'll need to calculate exactly where the room nodes are so that you know where to place the traps. The bass traps will also need to be spaced a precise distance away from the wall in order to be effective.

This might sound pedantic, but it isn't. Getting these details wrong will make your sound treatment ineffective. The best case scenario is you have a friend who is an expert help you install this stuff. Aside from that, do a lot of research on your own and become as educated as possible. There are resources online that can help.

 

[silky smoove]

You might see information on the internet about making your own bass traps out of wool insulation. This will work, theoretically, but only if you know exactly what you're doing. The trap will need to be constructed so that it's tuned to a specific narrow frequency range and then you'll need to calculate exactly where the room nodes are so that you know where to place the traps. The bass traps will also need to be spaced a precise distance away from the wall in order to be effective.

Clarification: What you're describing is a Helmholz Resonator, which is a highly effective narrow band absorber that is frequently used to treat specific frequencies at the lower end of the spectrum. That said, what I see most for online DIY bass trap plans is either construction of a typical OC703 or Knaff Ecose broadband absorber placed so that it straddles a corner, or construction of a filled Superchunk style corner trap. Neither of these require much in the way of measurement or understanding of how room modes function, and they are not narrow band absorbers. Mostly they work on frequencies as low as midbass through lower midrange, but that's often where most rooms this size have problems anyway.

 

[WebJunk]

Seashore, this is tricky coming up with a response because it involves some real physics and math and I want to explain the best I can in everyday language.

The music that you're dealing with occurs on a broad spectrum of sound from about 20 Hz -- 20,000 Hz. Ultra low to ultra high. All of it is bouncing around inside your studio with the sound waves crashing into each other in complex ways creating all sorts of distortions and sonic artifacts.

While I can appreciate the depth of what you are advising, it is probably way overkill in cost, complexity & time for this & similar situations.

My gear is no great shakes, but I've been recording and mixing with it for around 15 years under a variety of conditions and I know it pretty well.

This indicates to me and am sure it applies to most here on TB, that while I will be the first to say the room is most important, if using lower-end gear, there is definitely a point of diminishing returns. and if after 15 years they do not see a need to upgrade gear, they (I apply this to the bulk of TB'ers) only want to invest so much in the room. That is why I gave an order of importance on what to treat. Not everyone wants or needs to treat the entire room to every nuance.

We recently moved apartments, and my new studio room sounds terrible.
Even with curtains on both windows, a rug, some soft furniture, and 50 square feet of somewhat strategically placed acoustic foam tiles, it sounds like crap

A room that sounds like crap will produce crap recordings. No way around that. If they treat too minimally, the recordings will probably still sound like crap.
But I've recorded in rooms poorly treated or using things like egg crates or baby mattresses as acoustic treatment and gotten decent tho I admit not fantastic recordings. I recorded a band's album a long time ago in a room that used grey cardboard beverage holders and the label thought it good enough to be released.
Everyone especially on here has a budget both in time, space and money (most seem to have a full-time job outside of music) and can appreciate they must work within those limitations.

 

[hbarcat]

I appreciate the budget limitations that are in place where, which is why I recommended the purchase of about $200 worth of commercially made bass traps and then suggested that diffusers and other absorbers could be fabricated at very little cost or substituted with furniture.

My main point is that I've seen more than a few studios that improvised with egg cartons and foam in the windows and carpeting on the floor and insulation filled boxes on the walls and it sounded absolutely horrible. Even worse than the bare room sounded because they still had all the low frequencies bouncing around but they lost any clarity and definition because they sucked all the mids and highs out of the room.

My top priority in any room is to make sure the lows are under control and that means bass traps. They can be either commercially made and bought for a few hundred bucks or homemade for cheap. But they need to be properly made and installed. Just throwing some insulation in a frame and hanging it on the wall isn't going to do much.

 

[silky smoove]

My top priority in any room is to make sure the lows are under control and that means bass traps.

100%

 

[seamonkey]

Don't miss the opportunity to record the room before and after treatment.
REW - Room EQ Wizard Room Acoustics Software
It can help you decide if there more room treatment or EQ you could use.