How to treat my room?

Hi, I'm needing to treat my room and would appreciate some advice. The room is a large room (30x35) with an 18' ceiling that drops to 9 feet in the back. The room has commercial carpeting and a medium pad underneath. The room is currently untreated and echos and flutters badly with hand claps. I would like to bring this up to pro quality acoustics if possible using DIY products. I track, mix and master rock and roll at about 95dB during recording and about 89dB during mixdown. Please advise me if I can provide more information or if I missed anything. Pictures can be seen here. http://e.imagehost.org/view/0106/studio http://img81.imageshack.us/img81/6091/studio003ie1.jpg http://img296.imageshack.us/my.php?imag ... 019ot0.jpg http://img389.imageshack.us/my.php?imag ... 020op6.jpg Thanks, John Bercik

Hi John, and welcome. Have you measured your room, with something like ETF? It's hard to know what to treat unless you know what to treat! But as a general rule of thumb, I'd start with abundant bass trapping in the corners. Search this forum for "bass trap" and you'll find plenty of examples of how to do that, most of which you can build yourself easily and cheaply. Then I'd measure the room, to see where the remaining problems are, and treat for that. Probably some diffusion, some absorption on the walls, slat resonators perhaps, maybe a cloud on the ceiling, and a few gobo's on wheels as the final touch, to deal with specific situations with specific instruments. But I'm sure the acoustic experts here can give you a lot better advise than that! That's just my opinion. - Stuart -

Just some thoughts. The first thing that I would consider would be getting the mix position out of the center of the room. I see an alcove area with an 8-9 foot ceiling that looks like a good place to move it to. Maybe even a wall at some point to separate the monitoring position from the tracking position. It isn't a requirement, as there are many purpose built one room builds. But as a start, that would be mine.

I have not done any electronic measurements because I'm not sure how to properly do them. I'm an electrical engineer and have no problems doing it if I know how. If I run sine waves from 40 to 300 and measure with my omni mic, i'm not sure if that would be valid because it could just be my speaker / mic response that is not flat. So, I'm looking for some advice on what my next step should be. Is John Sayer here to offer tips? Also, my room has a ceiling that drops 2/3 of the way in so I can't just do a simple mode calculation, so I'm really at a loss on what to do next. I'll get a quote on a dumptruck of Rock Wool in the meantime. Thanks.

If I run sine waves from 40 to 300 and measure with my omni mic, i'm not sure if that would be valid because it could just be my speaker / mic response that is not flat.

It would give you an idea, at least, assuming that you have fairly decent mic and speaker: To be more accurate, you could compensate your curves for the frequency response curves for your mic and speaker, or even beg/borrow/buy a cheap measurement mic: Behringer makes one that isn't too expensive, and is reasonably accurate. But overall, I'd expect that the nulls and peaks in your room would far exceed the response deviations of your equipment: I'm assuming that you are using reasonably accurate studio monitors and a reasonably decent omni mic? If you can treat your room well enough to get to the point where you really notice the response issues of a good mic and speaker, then you are doing well indeed! In any event, the issues with your room will be in the time domain, more than in the frequency domain, and you can't blame your mic/speaker for that! Think "waterfall plots". - Stuart -