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mfreak
 
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Default What makes a good room?

How do you treat a room to make it ideal for mixing and listening? Do
you ideally want to stop ALL reflection and reverberation? Ie a
completely dead room, or do you just want to tone it down a little?

I have a room in my basement that has 2 poured concrete walls on the
left and back, drywall on the front, and wide open to a large rec-room
on the right. The floor is concrete, and the ceiling is about 9 feet
high, with exposed floor joists supporting the 1st floor.

What are some simple things I can do to make this room as good as
possible? Carpet? Frame/drywall over the concrete walls? Put in a
drop ceiling, drywall ceiling, other? I heard parallel walls are bad,
they bounce sound back and forth or something? I am planning on
finishing the basement, so any suggestions would be great. Thanks,

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dnafe
 
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Default What makes a good room?

Why don't you post this at John Sayers forum or at the acoustics forum at
recording.org.

http://www.johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/in...7f16cb1417c80f

http://www.recording.org/forum-34.html

Don


"mfreak" wrote in message
oups.com...
How do you treat a room to make it ideal for mixing and listening? Do
you ideally want to stop ALL reflection and reverberation? Ie a
completely dead room, or do you just want to tone it down a little?

I have a room in my basement that has 2 poured concrete walls on the
left and back, drywall on the front, and wide open to a large rec-room
on the right. The floor is concrete, and the ceiling is about 9 feet
high, with exposed floor joists supporting the 1st floor.

What are some simple things I can do to make this room as good as
possible? Carpet? Frame/drywall over the concrete walls? Put in a
drop ceiling, drywall ceiling, other? I heard parallel walls are bad,
they bounce sound back and forth or something? I am planning on
finishing the basement, so any suggestions would be great. Thanks,



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Walt
 
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Default What makes a good room?

mfreak wrote:

How do you treat a room to make it ideal for mixing and listening? Do
you ideally want to stop ALL reflection and reverberation? Ie a
completely dead room, or do you just want to tone it down a little?


This question has a very complicated answer. It's sort of like asking
how do you write a really good song - there is no perfect answer, but
the world is awash in bad examples.

No, you don't want to completely eliminate all reflection and
reverberation. You do want to have a "neutral" listening space so that
you can be confident that what you hear upon mixdown is transferrable to
other listening spaces. Get rid of early reflections, eliminate
resonant nodes and you'll be on the way. If you don't know what those
terms mean, Google is your friend.

//Walt
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Scott Dorsey
 
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Default What makes a good room?

mfreak wrote:
How do you treat a room to make it ideal for mixing and listening? Do
you ideally want to stop ALL reflection and reverberation? Ie a
completely dead room, or do you just want to tone it down a little?


You don't want it dead. You might want it more dead or more live, depending
on the music and tastes.

You don't want discrete reflections. When you clap your hands, the sound
should die out gradually and you should never hear discrete slapback. And
you want the sound to die out at about the same rate for all frequencies.

I have a room in my basement that has 2 poured concrete walls on the
left and back, drywall on the front, and wide open to a large rec-room
on the right. The floor is concrete, and the ceiling is about 9 feet
high, with exposed floor joists supporting the 1st floor.

What are some simple things I can do to make this room as good as
possible? Carpet? Frame/drywall over the concrete walls? Put in a
drop ceiling, drywall ceiling, other? I heard parallel walls are bad,
they bounce sound back and forth or something? I am planning on
finishing the basement, so any suggestions would be great. Thanks,


Run out right now and get a copy of F. Alton Everest's book on small
studio acoustics. There is an awful lot you can do.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."
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anahata
 
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Default What makes a good room?

mfreak wrote:
How do you treat a room to make it ideal for mixing and listening? Do
you ideally want to stop ALL reflection and reverberation? Ie a
completely dead room, or do you just want to tone it down a little?


(1) The right amount of reverberation - how much depends of what you are
using it for, e.g. what type of music your are recording or whether
it's your control room.

(2) The reverberation time has to be even over the whole audio frequency
range. This is the part that's hard to get right. It's easy to deaden
the room at high frequencies but much more difficult to absorb bass.

I have a room in my basement that has 2 poured concrete walls on the
left and back, drywall on the front, and wide open to a large rec-room
on the right. The floor is concrete, and the ceiling is about 9 feet
high, with exposed floor joists supporting the 1st floor.

What are some simple things I can do to make this room as good as
possible?


Filling the ceiling with high density glass fibre or acoustic grade
rockwool between those joists could be a good start. It needs to be
really thick: 3-4 inches ideally, and if you can lower it so there's an
air gap between it and the ceiling so much the better. Then some of the
same across the corners or on the walls.

Carpet?


Carpets give you HF absorbtion only. Musicians with acoustic instruments
love hard floors and if you can get the ceiling to mop up enough sound
you can leave the floor hard and have a good sounding room. You can
always add carpets or rugs to have some control of the final room.

I heard parallel walls are bad,


Yes, you need to put some more of that thick glass fibre or rockwool on
at least one of them or you'll get flutter echoes betwen the walls.

There are further considerations where it's a control room with monitor
speakers.

You'll find many answers at http://www.ethanwiner.com/acoustics.html

--
Anahata
-+- http://www.treewind.co.uk
Home: 01638 720444 Mob: 07976 263827


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Posted to rec.audio.pro
 
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Default What makes a good room?

Scott Dorsey wrote:
mfreak wrote:
How do you treat a room to make it ideal for mixing and listening? Do


I am planning on
finishing the basement, so any suggestions would be great. Thanks,


Run out right now and get a copy of F. Alton Everest's book on small
studio acoustics. There is an awful lot you can do.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."


Run out right now and get a copy of F. Alton Everest & Mike Shea's
book:

How to Build a Small Budget Recording Studio from scratch with 12
tested designs.
ISBN 0-8306-2966-1 (pbk)

as Scott suggests. Best $25 you will ever spend if sound quality
matters to you. The room is 95% of the equation, neglecting talent and
their respective instruments for the moment. Then spend a lot of time
at Ethan Winer's RealTraps website:

http://www.realtraps.com

bobs

Bob Smith
BS Studios
we organize chaos
http://www.bsstudios.com

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