Where do I put the near fields?

I assume this has been discussed before? Some background: This is my 1st post here. I've done sound reinforcement and played in bands for over 30 years. I did a short stint, maybe 4 years, as the Audio/Video Director in a local church a few years back as well. I've played in the same band for the last 15 years. We are not anyone famous. We all have day jobs but we do get some pretty sweet gigs. In the last 5 years we've had bass-player-extroidanaire, Mickey. Besides playing with everyone I've ever heard of in my area, Mickey also used to own a studio back in the 70's. So because of Mickey, we built a studio out of our rehersal space. Twice. We've been in operation for about 3 years. Our quality has improved greatly. Any way...we blew our Bluesky Monitors. Never liked them any way. Just got 2 Neumann KH 310's. We are wanting to either mount on walls or ceiling but our room is a weird shape. We need some help placing them. From Neumann's website I see a couple of possible solutions: http://www.neumann-kh-line.com/neumann-kh/home_en.nsf/HTMLProduct?ReadForm&path=prof-monitoring&accid=C39AA859B1B4740AC125746B00384930 or http://www.neumann-kh-line.com/neumann-kh/home_en.nsf/HTMLProduct?ReadForm&path=prof-monitoring&accid=56A7120407FF78C0C12573D9002BF800 I've attched 4 pics of our control room and a .doc for the description and measurements. I was NOT the finish carpenter. I did the electrical and some framing. Thanks

Hi there "joeybcdt", and welcome to the forum! :) OK, I know that you just came here to get help on positioning your speakers correctly, and I'll tell you how to do that if that's all you want, but there are a whole bunch of major issues with your control room that need attention, and they need it so badly that it doesn't really matter WHERE you put the speakers, since they are going to sound like garbage inside that room, no matter what... unless you take some action to fix the room as a whole. That's probably not the answer you wanted to get, but if there's one thing this forum is known for, it is just dumping the entire truth on you all at once: pure, harsh, unadulterated, no sugar-coating added.... We kind of don't hold things back around here, and tend to be brutally honest. Some folks can handle that, and even appreciate the bluntness, as it spurs them to action. Others don't like to hear the truth, and they never come back... and they never get good studios either! You have made a great choice in speakers: those 310's are among the very best in their class, and they can sound spectacular... when placed correctly in a room that is well designed and properly treated. Yours isn't. Not even close. They will sound lousy. OK so here it comes. Put on your hard-hat, safety eye-ware, and steel-toed boots, and fasten your seat-belt: Your room is oriented the wrong way, completely. It needs to be rotated 90° left, so that it is facing the top of the page in your diagram. That's the only orientation that makes any sense at all, acoustically and practically. Right now, your mix position (the spot where you sit while mixing) is located in the absolute worst possible position within the room: half way between the front and back walls, and probably with your head closer to the rear wall than the front wall. That's terrible. There really is no worse way to set up a room! That's the point in the room where all the first order modal nulls are, and the second order modal peaks, not to mention the biggest of the SBIR issues. It also means that you get reflections off the rear wall well within the Haas window, which means you get smeared perception of sound-stage positions and smeared response in practically every way. You need as much distance as possible between your head and the rear wall to avoid that, or at least to minimize it. But before you do rotate your room, you have to rip out the raised floor and get rid of the carpet! That is messing up your isolation and your room response unbelievably. It is also wasting very valuable room height, which you don't seem to have much of anyway. You'll gain back 7 inches of head room by doing that, not to mention many cubic feet of very necessary air volume (about 60 cubic feet, to be more precise: very useful!) So what's wrong with that? A 3/4” plywood sheet raised 6” means you have a resonant cavity down below that really, REALLY loves resonating at 47 Hz. so every time that Mickey hits a low G or f# on his bass guitar, or whenever anyone else hits those on a keyboard, or other instrument, that cavity sings right along with it, right there under your floor, distorting what you think you are hearing inside the room. The same is true all the way up the scale, for all harmonics of those notes... It doesn't matter how good Mickey is: the room itself is lying to you about how he is playing, because of your floor. It has to go. Next, the carpet is doing the exact opposite of what you need in a control room, so that has to go too! Carpet absorbs highs very well, high mids a bit, low mids hardly at all, and lows zilch. In reality, you need the reverse: huge amounts of low frequency absorption, some low-mids, just a touch of high mids, and most likely nothing in the highs. So your carpet is inverting your frequency response curve from where it should be, which is why your room sounds a bit "honkey" and "boomy" right now. Even if it were any use, it is also at the wrong end of the room: absorption should go on the ceiling, not the floor! Your ears and brain need to "hear" the floor, in order to get a good sense of perception of the 3D space around you. With a hard ceiling and soft floor (as you have now), your ears have no such reference, so you cant mix accurately. "Hard floor, soft ceiling" is the general rule. The very best floor you can get, acoustically, is a nice solid pad of very thick concrete. That's why most professional studios have concrete floors, or other hard, reflective floors (hardwood, laminate flooring, ceramic tiles, linoleum, etc.), and little to no carpet. Take a look at photos of world-class studios such as Abbey Road, or Galaxy, and see how much carpet you see on the floor... Next, you'll have to get rid of that "kink" at the top left of the page, where "wall 5" and "wall 6" are. That needs to be straightened out, one way or another, so that the room is rectangular at that end. The best bet would be to push wall 5 over until it is flush with "wall 1". You need to do this for a very simple reason: symmetry is critical for a control room! The room must be absolutely, totally, and completely symmetrical from the the front wall back as far as the mix position at least, and hopefully all the way back to the rear wall. In other words, the left half of the room must be an exact mirror image of the right half of the room, geometrically. Why? If not, then your left and right ears are listening to two different acoustical spaces, with two different frequency response curves, two different time response curves, and two different phase response curves. So your left ear will be hearing things differently from your right ear, and your brain will try to get you to adjust for that subconsciously by telling you to "fix" it in the mix: You'll automatically be doing things to try to make it sound good again by mixing asymmetrically, and it will sound good... but ONLY in your room! It will sound "wrong" in all other rooms that don't have a huge kink in the front corner, just like yours... it will sound lousy on earbuds, lousy in your car, lousy in the club, lousy in the venues you play it at, lousy in the church sanctuary, and lousy every other place on the planet that you play it... except in your room. Because it will have been custom mixed to sound good in that uniquely warped and distorted acoustic environment. This is often called "mix translation": your mix wont' "translate" to other places, unless your room is acoustically neutral, and having a huge hump that screws up the symmetry in the front corner is guaranteed to make your room very much "not neutral". So that has to be fixed. OK, so you took out your useless raised floor, ironed out your "kink", and got the room rotated. Finally I can answer your question about the speakers. Now you need to set up your speakers as follows: move the desk away from the front wall a bit, and set up some massive, heavy, rigid stands between the desk and the front wall, right up tight against the wall, except for a 4" gap (see below), and exactly 27" from the side walls (when I say that, I mean that the MIDDLE of the front panel of each speaker is 27" from the side wall, not the left edge, or right edge: the middle of the woofer cone is your reference point. That's what needs to be 27" from the side wall). Set up the speakers vertically on top of those stands (never horizontally, as you have them now). The speaker stands must be just high enough so that the acoustic axis of the speaker ends up about 47-1/4" above the floor. You could go a bit higher if you want, but definitely no more than 52". And please note the the measurements are for the acoustic axis of your speakers, not the top or bottom of the cabinet. Neumann has a document some place on their web site that shows the location of the acoustic axis for all their speakers: download that so you can see where it is for yours. I have that document some place, but I can't find it right now... But you do need to know where that point is on your speakers, since that's what has to be 47-1/4" above the floor. Now carefully angle the speakers inwards by about 30°, or maybe a bit less than that in your case (maybe around 25 to 28°), since your room is narrow. Set up your desk so that your chair is 54" from the front wall. Or rather, so that your ears will be 54" from the front wall when you are seated and mixing. Set up your desk so that you can operate things comfortably while seated in that exact position. The rack gear will have to go behind you, or to one side, but NOT in front of you. You can never get good acoustic response with that monster piece of furniture trashing room symmetry in front of you. You now have your room geometry correct, for that room. If you did all the above correctly, then the speakers are now aiming at a point about 12" behind your head, which is perfect, and they are at the exact same height as your ears, which is perfect, and they are set up totally symmetrically in the room, which is also perfect. You'll need to adjust the speaker response itself, to compensate for the location in the room. There are some controls on the back. In the "Acoustic Controls" section of the back panel, set the "Bass" switch to -5, leave the "Low mid" at 0, and set the "Treble" to "-1". That should be about right. Now for treatment: Your room has some of the worst possible dimensions, since it is 12' long by 8' wide, and I'm assuming 8' high as well. There's a direct mathematical relationship between those, so you have really ugly modal response in there, and it cannot be fixed. However, it can be tamed a bit, with bass trapping. MAJOR bass trapping, since it is a very small room. You will have very large modal resonances at 70.6 Hz, 141 Hz, 211.8 Hz, and so on, all the way up the scale. You also have lesser (but still very large) issues at 85 Hz, 117 Hz, 149 Hz, etc. Those are all biggies, and all below the Schroeder frequency, which is 157 Hz for your room. Not good news. So you need major bass trapping, but you don't have any space to put it, in the usual locations! The best place is usually the two rear vertical corners and the two front vertical corners, but your room won't permit that. So you will have to put yours in the wall/ceiling corners. All of them. I'd put large superchunk style traps up there, at least 24" on the diagonal face, and more if you can. Then you need a large hard-backed cloud over the front of the room, to help with both your modal issues and your first reflection points on the ceiling, as well as with overall room acoustics. You'll also need large thick absorption panels (6") on your side walls at the first reflection points. (The one on the right will be in front of the glass: too bad. There's no other choice here). And finally, two smaller absorption panels on the front wall, 4" thick, between the speaker and the front wall, and the entire rear wall with 6" of absorption. For all of the absorption above I'd recommend Owens Corning OC-703. It's the best there is for that, and not expensive.. If you do all that, your room will have fairly decent acoustics (as good as can be expected from those dimensions), and your KH-310's will sound pretty darn amazing. You'll also have a control room where you can actually mix well and have your mixes translate smoothly to other locations.

From Neumann's website I see a couple of possible solutions:

Your first link is broken: it goes to G-mail! :shock: The second link works, but that's not what those brackets are meant for. Those are fine for mounting speakers in your live room, for playback, but NOT for your control room! There's a reason it is called the "control room", and it's not just because its the place that you control everything from: it's also because the whole environment inside the room is vary carefully controlled acoustically, to provide the cleanest most neutral possible sound at the mix position, so that the engineer can control the mix as accurately as possible. Much research has been done on this, and there there are a whole bunch of documents that describe exactly how to design and build a control room, and how to set it up to accomplish the above. Mounting your reference speakers above ear height is one of the best ways to destroy that controlled environment. Mounting them close to the ceiling is another way. Tilting them excessively is yet another: That bracket accomplishes all three! So using it to mount your mains in a control room is about the worst possible scenario. The best possible, is to have the speakers at ear height or just slightly above, not close to the ceiling, and not tilted down. And to also have them mounted such that they cannot induce vibrations in the floor or desk (which is why you need massively heavy speaker stands), evenly spaced in the correct geometrical layout that provides the best symmetry possible, the correct angles, and with the correct treatment in the room. In short, the way you have things set up right now is about as bad as it gets, and you'll never be able to turn out world-class mixes that translate well to all other sound systems and locations. That has nothing at all to do with your abilities as musicians, or as engineers: it's just a simple consequence of the terrible room you are in, and the terrible way it is set up. If you'd like me to go into more details about why you need to do any of the above changes, or how to do them, then I'd be happy to explain that for you. But if all you want to know is how to set up a pair of 310's in the room as it is now, with no changes at all, to get great results, then I have bad news for you: it isn't possible. There is no way to make that happen, no matter where you put the speakers. The room itself prevents it from ever happening, for oh so many reasons. - Stuart -

Stuart, Thank you for your honesty. That's the kind of information I was looking for. I posted 3 pics and a .doc because I knew there were problems, I just didn't know how serious. A lot to discuss with Mickey. The Neumann 310's....I was under the impression they were designed to be oriented horizonatally? All of the info I've seen from Neumann shows them horizontal, the left and right may be switched, can be used as a center speaker, and can be flipped upside down as long as both are flipped upside down. I've seen no referrence or illustration on using the 310's vertically. So now I'm confused.

Vertical/horizontal: Sorry about that! I didn't make it clear that I was referring to the speakers you have now, not the 310's. If speakers are specifically designed to be used horizontally ONLY, then that's the way to use them. But for speakers that can be used either vertically or horizontally, they should go vertically. The reason is rather simple: with horizontal mounting, the woofer and tweeter are offset from each other, which means that as you move your head left and right of the sweet spot, your ears are exposed to more highs/less lows on the one side, and more lows/less highs on the other side. If they are mounted vertically, that doesn't happen: as you move off-axis, you just get an overall reduction in level (until you reach the point where the off-axis response is no longer linear, of course). If you look at the documentation for the 310, it shows the vertical and horizontal plots, and you can see that you are fine getting up to about 20° off axis horizontally, but less than 10° vertically. About your room: Is there any other room in the same building that might be better suited for use as your control room? The bigger the better, and the higher the ceiling the better. The one you have can be used, but is borderline due to the unfortunate dimensions. Any time you have a relationship between room dimensions that is a direct multiple, that's pretty bad. It means that all of the modal issues associated with one of those dimensions will line up exactly with all of the modal issues associated with the other direction. In your case, assuming you have an 8 foot ceiling in there, all of the modes in the vertical direction occur at the exact same frequency as all of the modes in the width direction, AND ALSO with the second harmonic for all of the modes in the length direction. The ideal is that there is no such relationship between dimensions, such that the modes all occur at different frequencies, and therefore at lower levels. Right now, your mode at 141 Hz is triple strength (18 dB boost), because your 0,0,2 axial mode lines up with your 0,2,0 axial mode which both line up with the 3,0,0 axial mode :shock: :!: Actually, yours is even worse still, since you have an oblique mode at 137 Hz that will very likely be triggered by the same note, so that's potentially 4 times the intensity for that mode. And the same applies to many of your other modal frequencies. That's not a happy situation at all! Here's a link to a commonly used room mode calculator, so you can see for yourself just how bad it is: http://www.bobgolds.com/Mode/RoomModes.htm Plug in your length, width and height as 12, 8, 8 then hit the "compute imperial" button, and prepare to cry... The angled hard-backed cloud I mentioned in my treatment recommendations can help with that, since it breaks up the modal response to a certain extent in the vertical direction, but fixing the other two implies moving walls... - Stuart -

No, we do not have another room. I've been looking at this all day. Luckily the walls were NOT built on the raised floor. The raised floor can be ripped out. Underneath is ceramic tile on cement. I can demo Wall 3 and move it out about a foot and move the entrance to Wall 1. Wall 1 will lose the big window. Walls 5 & 6 can be straightened out at the cost of our vocal booth. (Vocal booth sounds like crap anyway. We rarely use it.) The control desk will face wall 3 so we will have to look to the left a lot. Another thought... Instead of putting a small window in Wall 1 what about installing a security camera system? Mount the TV monitor in front of the control desk. 4 cameras placed around the outside of the control room.

Ceiling is 9'4"

You should post a floor diagram with dimensions. Show all the structure stuff that can't be moved. All we have are a few pix to go by ... more info ... better.

RJHollins wrote:

You should post a floor diagram with dimensions. Show all the structure stuff that can't be moved. All we have are a few pix to go by ... more info ... better.

See "Control Room Description.doc" attached to OP. Thanks.

The raised floor can be ripped out. Underneath is ceramic tile on cement.

Excellent! Hard to beat that for a good acoustic surface. Good news.

I can demo Wall 3 and move it out about a foot

More good news! Could you also try to match the "kink" on wall 5 / wall 6, in the corner between wall 3 / wall 4? As long as things are symmetrical, that's all you need. So if you can figure a way to make a matching "kink" on the other side, that would be good. Of course, it would be even better if you could get rid of the original kink! How much of an impact would that have on the vocal booth?

(Vocal booth sounds like crap anyway. We rarely use it.)

OK, I guess that answers the above! I'm guessing that it sound terrible because it is really small, so making it smaller would make it even worse... If you don't need it, and don't use it, then by all means blow it away. You can always record vocals in the CR, if it is treated right.

The control desk will face wall 3 so we will have to look to the left a lot.

Bad idea: it should face either wall 4 or wall 2. The idea is to have the speakers facing down the longest possible axis of the room, never across the short axis. The reason is simple: You want the longest possible "flight time" for sound leaving the speakers, going past your head, bouncing off the back wall, and hitting your head from behind again. Ideally, the difference in flight time between direct sound (straight from the speakers to your ears) and that sound bouncing back from behind you, should be at least 20 ms. That's the "Haas time". The reason is that numerous studies show that our brains are no good at interpreting things when the exact sound same comes in twice in less than 20 ms: The poor old brain just gives up and says "That's blurry mud: no direction information there": But if the time difference is longer than about 20 ms, it says "Oh cool! That's two different sounds! One is coming from the front at 27.4° and the other from the back at 10.3°". So if you want to be able to hear your sound stage accurately (the apparent position of instruments panned between the speakers) then you need to have a long distance between your ears and the rear wall. 20 ms flight time difference works out to about 20 feet of flight distance difference (very roughly....), so you want to have your head at least 10 feet away from the rear wall, or as close to that as you can get. So the room must be set up with the speakers facing down the long way, in your case, since the short way is waaaayyyy tooooo shooorttt!. The long way is still not brilliant, but it is much, much better. With a bit of clever trickery in the design, we can get you close to 20ms. ...

Another thought... Instead of putting a small window in Wall 1 what about installing a security camera system? Mount the TV monitor in front of the control desk. 4 cameras placed around the outside of the control room.

You could do that, yes. Some studios do, especially for rooms that are not adjacent to the control room, or where the sight lines are poor. But it seems to me that you could put a really nice sliding glass door in Wall 1, or maybe a hinged door with a large glass panel in it. As long as we locate it well, so that it is not at your first reflection point on that wall. You could have good access, good sight lines, and good acoustics.

Ceiling is 9'4"

Woo hoo!!! Better and better. That's the best news yet! With 9.4" high, 12' long, and 8'4" wide, you are really, really close to one of the best ratios (Sepmeyer's second best ratio). So you'd only need to move Wall 3 over by 4". If that is a typical stud wall with drywall on it, then it might even be possible to move it without moving it! :) Just taking off the drywall from your side, and doubling it up on the other side of that wall would do the trick. That would give the room an extra 3-1/2" width, acoustically, and we could then add suitable treatment between the now-visible studs, then cover the wall with acoustic cloth and put a few nice wood slats over that, for aesthetics (and acoustics too). Of course, that all depends what is on the other side of that wall, and how it is built... But it's an option worth looking at, since you would not have to actually trash the wall then rebuild it. Question: What is on the other side of that wall? It sounds to me like you have some good possibilities. With the above news, I'm a lot more hopeful for this room than I was yesterday! One other option: If you are going to eliminate the door in wall 2 and have the main door in wall 1, then you could turn the room the other way, so that it faces wall 2 (with no door in it). If that is the front of the room, then the wall 5/wall 6 kink isn't a big issue any more, and it could stay like that. It would be right at the back of the room, where it doesn't have such a big effect, so you could keep your iso booth too, if you wanted! (We might be able to make that booth sound a bit better too, if you wanted to give it a go after we fix your control room... :)) - Stuart -

Quote: Me, "I can demo Wall 3 and move it out about a foot" My mistake. Wall 3 can NOT be moved. I intended to say wall 2 can be moved. Control desk could face wall 2.