The Drought
On Sunday, April 6, 2014 1:07:28 PM UTC-7, ScottW wrote:
"Scott" wrote in message=20
=20
...
=20
On Saturday, April 5, 2014 10:13:30 AM UTC-7, ScottW wrote:
=20
"Scott" wrote in message
=20
=20
...
=20
=20
=20
I'd be interested to know if you employed the services of an acoustic e=
ngineer
=20
=20
or design service.
=20
=20
I see lots of home studio information and services but I've always been=
=20
=20
inclined
=20
=20
to believe
=20
=20
a great recording environment may not be the greatest listening environ=
ment.
=20
=20
=20
=20
ScottW
=20
=20
=20
Are you talking about the space where the music is happening or the spac=
e where=20
=20
the monitoring is happening?
=20
=20
=20
All the above, the space where the instrument is played and recorded, the=
space=20
=20
where the recording is tweaked and mixed (monitoring environment) and the=
space=20
=20
where we sit and relax.
=20
=20
=20
Acoustic spaces that are great for listening to live unamplified music a=
re=20
=20
generally good for recording live unamplified music.
=20
=20
=20
But are they good for playback?
No. They are terrible for playback.
Often much larger than a typical listening room=20
=20
and a typical system gets engulfed like in open field playback. Even so,=
they=20
=20
are usually overdamped to tame the dynamics of live instruments that a ty=
pical=20
=20
system cannot reproduce and wouldn't provide any pop in.
In a concert hall you would simply have way too much reverb. It would sound=
like crap.
=20
=20
=20
For playback I am of the opinion that you want very little if any listen=
ing=20
=20
room sound.
=20
=20
=20
FWIW, I've worked in RF anechoic chambers (which were also highly effecti=
ve=20
=20
acoustic anechoic chambers) and I put in a small system to listen to whil=
e=20
=20
setting up but the sound was distant, dead, and lifeless. Unless you're=
going=20
=20
to sit in extreme near field, a completely dead room is far from ideal.
I can't speak for a "completely" dead room but IME the less listening room =
sound the better. There may very well be a threshold where this ceases to b=
e true. I haven't found it yet. And I do listen in a nearfield setup.=20
=20
=20
=20
Live unamplified simple recordings in a nice environment are great. But =
few=20
=20
studios are setup for that. They're acoustically dead with isolation bet=
ween=20
=20
instruments, close mic'd with ambience added later etc. Acoustic engine=
ering=20
And unfortunately many studio recordings don't really sound all that great.=
But there are plenty of studio recordings with spaces that have decent rev=
erb and a lot of control over just how much.=20
=20
for large halls is obviously done, but very little on the web for a relat=
ively=20
=20
small room listening environment.
=20
It's kind of trial and error.
Yes there is a fair amount of trial and error in room acoustics. Especially=
for hobbyists like us. For the design of concert halls there is a lot less=
trial and error. A great deal of the design is done with computer modellin=
g. Studies have come up with a series of measurements of concert halls that=
pretty well determine the quality of the acoustics. That is why we have so=
many new halls that are acoustically superior to the old guard.=20
But something very important to note is the profound difference between ide=
al concert hall acoustics and listening room acoustics. The goals of each a=
re extremely different.=20
|