[Scott Dorsey]

Glennbo wrote:
In the killer robot
"Here In Oregon" grabbed the controls of the
spaceship cakewalk.audio and pressed these buttons...

My question is how long should it take to EQ a room that has been
sonically treated and is fundamentally a good room to begin with?

If you've got a hand held spectrum analyzer to *see* what the un-EQ'd
pink noise looks like, you should be able to make some quick EQ
adjustments to make what wasn't a flat line on the analyzer become a flat
line, at which point you have pretty flat response, and you obviously
want the most accurate spot in the room to be the point where you will be
mixing. An hour of pink noise and EQing would be starting to be
excessive IMO. I mean, if the spectrum display shows a 1k peak, duck the
1k band on the EQ until it doesn't. How long can that take?

It can take years, because all of those peaks and dips move around as you
move the analyzer. Do you want the room flat HERE, or do you want it flat
six inches away?

This is the problem with equalization. There are some low end issues you
can effectively fix with EQ in large rooms, and of course there are some
speaker problems that you can effectively fix with EQ, but room problems
can't be fixed with EQ at all.

The problem is to look at the pattern on the FFT analyzer and tell where
each one of those peaks and dips is coming from; ie. which of them might
be fixable with EQ and which ones can't. And of the ones that can't, how
can they be fixed by changing the room arrangement and setup?

I have known studios that have slowly been going through the process for
decades, one artifact at a time, and have progressively been getting
better as they add some diffusion here to deal with one issue and some
absorption there to deal with another issue and cock the speakers in a little
bit to deal with one problem and move the console an inch to the right
to deal with another problem.

Acoustics is really the hard part of the whole studio setup.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."