fortunately i'm in a quiet area - so sound proofing isn't necessary for my purposes.
Are you SURE about that? So it never rains in your area? No wind? No thunder? No planes / helicopters flying overhead? No cars ever arrive or leave at your place? No other people around? No phones, radios, TV's, lawnmowers, dogs? No birds singing in the trees? Nobody ever walks around your place, or opens / closes doors, or flushes the toilet, or drops something in the kitchen? Nobody ever talks in your place? Nothing around with electric motors in it, like fans, air conditioners, refrigerators, microwave ovens, etc?
:) There are NUMEROUS sources of sound that most people don't even think about, that can totally wreck your recording session. All you need is a plane flying over right in the middle of your very best take ever, or your neighbor firing up his lawnmower, or someone slamming a car door or turning on the TV.... You might want to double-check on your isolation requirements...
i use the room to mix projects and overdub guitars, vocals etc.
It sounds like we are talking about acoustic guitar here, right? So you will be tracking and mixing in the same room, and you are absolutely certain that this room will not need any isolation, even though you will be recording a relatively quite acoustical instrument, and vocals?
basically i'd like to know where to place my current panels and the console/monitors/speakers to get the best sound…
The basic layout for a control room is fairly simple. First key is symmetry. Total symmetry. If you don't have that, you cannot get a good stereo image, your sound stage will be distorted, and your mixes won't translate. So position your desk on the center line of your room, facing in whichever direction gives you the best symmetry. Symmetry means that the left side of the room is a mirror image of the right side, so if you have a closet on the left side, then you also want one on the right side, or you close up the closet and/or put something in front of it, to present the same type of surface as the other side of the room. symmetry means that the walls are at the distance and same angles. If the left wall is angled at 15°, then the right wall must also be angled at 15°. Symmetry means that if there is a fireplace on the right wall, then you need an identical one on the left wall, or you need to close up the fireplace / put something in front of it. If you have a window on the left with curtains, but only blank wall on the right, then either take down the curtains on the left, or put up identical curtains over your blank wall on the right
If you cannot find a place where the entire room is symmetrical, then at least the front half must be symmetrical. The rear half isn't so critical, but the front half is.
Don't forget to look up: the ceiling has to be symmetrical too. It's no use at all if the ceiling slopes upwards across the room, but great if it slopes upwards from front to rear. You should also aim to have your speakers firing down the longest dimension of the room, not across the shortest dimension.
So you found your symmetry. Now measure the distance from the front wall to the back wall, and place your chair on the room center line at a point of 38% of the room depth. So if your room is 4.5 m long, your chair would be 1.7 m from the front wall. The idea is that your EARS end up at this 38% location, not your nose, or eyes, or any other part of your anatomy. Now set up the desk in front of you, in a comfortable position. Now set up your speakers on very heavy, massive, decoupled stands so that they are at a height of 1.2 m above the floor. That height refers to the acoustic axis of the speaker, not the top or bottom of the speaker cabinet. Check your speaker manual to find out where that axis is. If the manual doesn't say, then you can use a point between the woofer and tweeter, but much closer to the tweeter than the woofer. Some people just use the tweeter itself.
Important note!!! The 38% and 1.2m measurements are not carved in stone! They are just starting points. You might change them later, but this is the point you start from. The reason for 1.2m is because that's roughly the height of your ears when seated for most people. Measure yours, because if you are very tall or very short, or like a very high or very low chair, it might be different. Use your own ear height for that measurement.
So now you have your chair and console in the correct location, and your speakers on stands at the right height. Now move the stands so that they are symmetrically set up on each side of the room center-line, and the speakers are about 1.5 to 2.5 m apart, and the same distance from your ears. So if you have them 1.8 m apart, then they should both be 1.8 m from your ears. If they are 2m apart, they need to be 2m from your ears. Etc.
Depending on the size of your room, you either want the speakers at least 1.5m away from all the walls (both side walls and the front wall), or if that isn't possible then you want them set up very close to the front wall. The reason for this is comb filtering and other phasing problems on first reflections. If your speakers are between about 20cm and 1.5 m from the front wall, then sound coming from the speaker and bouncing off the front wall back into the room will interfere with itself differently at different frequencies, causing comb filtering and phasing troubles: you won't ever be able to get flat response and a clear image. When the speakers are very close to the wall, those problems are all in the very high end of the spectrum, or beyond, where there isn't much musical energy anyway. Beyond 1.5m the problems move to the low end of the spectrum, where the human ear isn't so sensitive, sound isn't so directional, and the room modes are probably giving more trouble than the phasing. In the range between those two distances, you get problems.
However: if your speakers are close to the front wall, they will also be getting a free bass boost form the walls, so you will have to roll of the bass response accordingly. Most studio monitors have controls on the rear for exactly this purpose.
The speakers should be spread apart so they are roughly half the distance between the room center line and the side walls. NEVER put them in the corners!
OK, so your speakers are now set up on stands at the right place in the room, equidistant from each other and from your head. Now angle the speakers inwards so they are aiming at YOUR EARS (get someone else to sit in the chair while you do this so you know where to aim, or set up some kind of simulation of your head: Maybe a wig stand, or even just a ball).
Since the speakers are aimed at your EARS, not your nose, this means that the acoustic axes of your speakers will NOT meet over the chair: they will meet at a point many cm behind your head, and an angle of 60°. That point depends on things such as the dimensions of the room, the place where you set up the speakers, the size of your head, etc. and isn't important. You often find incorrect instructions for setting up speakers, saying "The speakers and your head should be at the vertices of a triangle". Wrong. That would only work for people who hear with their nose or their eyes, but for those of us who hear with our ears, the vertex will be BEHIND the head, not AT the head. What is important is that the distances to the speakers are correct, and the angle is correct.
This takes a bit of fiddling around with a tape measure, but it's very important to get it right. The distances are critical. Even a few cm difference between the "left-ear-to-left-speaker" and the "right-ear-to-right-speaker" distance will totally blow your stereo image. Accuracy is important.
So what happens if you can't make that geometry work out, due the size/shape of your room? You cannot find a location where you get the speakers far enough apart, at a good distance from the front and side walls, out of the corners, equidistant from each other and from your ears (which are at 38% of the room depth), and also angled so their axes meet at 60°? That's a lot of conditions to be met, all at once!
:shock: That's a common problem in most small rooms: You can't make everything fit. So compromise in the way that least affects the outcome! Just put the speakers in in the best compromise location for distances, and change the angle. You can angle them inwards more, so that the axis intersect is as much as 90°, if you have to. That just means that your sweet spot will be squashed up sideways and elongated lengthways, but that's the price you have to pay.
OK, so now you have your speakers set up correctly. To test if they really are in the correct location, turn them on, play excellently recorded commercial music, and close your eyes. You should clearly hear a third "phantom" speaker directly in front of you. Things that are centered in the mix will seem to come straight out of that non-existent center speaker, and things that are not centered in the mix will seem to be clearly spread out on the sound stage, between the left and right speaker. Where effects have been used to give greater than 90° phase angles to some sounds, they can even appear to come from points outside the sound stage: further left than the left speaker, and further right than the right speaker.
If you don't hear that, then you did something wrong: go back and start again.
Assuming that you are blown away by clear, precise, perfectly centered sound stage, and the phantom center speaker is performing flawlessly, now you need to set up your room treatment.
Place thick absorption at all of your first reflection points. 4" of 703, mineral wool or fiberglass insulation, at least 4" away from the walls, is what you need. To find the first reflection points, get an assistant and a mirror. Wwhile you sit in your chair, your assistant will hold the mirror flat against the side walls, the front wall, the ceiling and the floor, and all other solid surfaces in the room. As your assistant moves the mirror around, any place where you can see the speakers reflected in the mirror, is a first reflection point and needs treating. That includes the ceiling, and might also include other things in the room. You only need to worry about the front half of the room for this.
Front wall: Some people like to keep their front wall reflective: I prefer to have absorption at least on the center section, between the speakers. Your taste may vary, but I find it helps to tighten the image.
So now for the rest of the room: You WILL need very large bass traps in that room. The simplest and best is "superchunks" in the tow rear vertical corners, floor to ceiling, and also in the front vertical corners, if possible.
You will also need thick absorption on most of the rear wall, perhaps all of it. Once again, 4" of 703 spaced several inches away from the wall is ideal.
Rear side walls: (the half of the room behind your chair). Perhaps a couple of smaller absorption panels, set up "checkboard" style, such that the panels on the left wall faces empty wall on the right, and vice versa.
Now that you have basic treatment, download REW and measure the room response, to see what ACTUAL treatment the room requires. Everything so far is just the basic stuff that all rooms require. Now you need to figure out what is really wrong with your room, acoustically, and design specific treatment devices to fix those things.
Anyway, that's the basic idea....
- Stuart -