How important are .....

[pastorjjo]

Doors? I feel really crazy for asking this. I know the objective is to take the room out of the equation.
But in my newly acquired Home Studio I do NOT have doors in my room yet.
I've decided to purchase French doors tomorrow from Home Depot.

My room is mostly for mixing and has some treatment already. (My signature should list Dimensions Etc.) currently I don't have much of a bass response issue, I'm wondering if by adding doors will I also be adding low frequency build up. It seems logical that if a low frequency wave needs about 15ft to develop and my room is 13.5' in length that I'm doing myself a favor by not having doors...
Outside noises are not much of an issue as no one is home when I work and my house is not close enough to neighbors for them to hear me or vice versa.

Does this seem right or do I need to go to sleep? It is 11:00p.m. here.

Thanks Jjo

P.s. I hope I have fully complied with the rules for posting

[pastorjjo]

I keep trying to upload pics but having no success. Sorry.

[Soundman2020]

How important are .....Doors? I feel really crazy for asking this. I know the objective is to take the room out of the equation.

That depends on what you are trying to achieve! If isolation is your goal, then doors are critical. If you don't care at all about isolation ("soundproofing"), and you just want to treat the room so it sounds good, then doors aren't such a big deal.

I've decided to purchase French doors tomorrow from Home Depot.

Before you do that, I would spend some time learning more about the consequences of having doors, or not, and then of the consequences of different types of doors.

currently I don't have much of a bass response issue,

Are you SURE about that? From what you say, I would expect that there are some pretty big modal response issues in that room.

The only way to know for sure, is to do an acoustic analysis of the room using the REW software: it plays various sounds through your speakers, listens to that through a reference mike, then shows you how the room is actually reacting. The procedure is quite simple, and you can post the data file that REW creates here, so we can analyze is for you, and suggest what you should do to fix the problems.

Treating a room without first understand what is wrong with it, is like trying to treat an illness when you don't even know what the symptoms are!

I'm wondering if by adding doors will I also be adding low frequency build up.

Not really. It will have an effect, but without knowing how the room is behaving now, or even what it looks like, its really hard to say what the effect might be. It could turn out the exact opposite of what you are expecting... Sound waves are curious things, and sometimes behave in ways you would not have expected at all.

It seems logical that if a low frequency wave needs about 15ft to develop and my room is 13.5' in length that I'm doing myself a favor by not having doors...

Welll... it's not really that simple. And your calculations are just a little off! The audio spectrum that we can hear runs from 20 Hz to 20 kHz. At 20 Hz, the wavelength is a bit over 56 feet, not 15 feet! You have to move nearly three entire octaves up the scale, to get down to shorter waves like that...

In other words, doors won't do much at all to affect bass build-up for 50 foot waves. They will affect isolation, of course, but not room acoustics at the low end.

In fact, for your room, the cut-off frequency is 42.1 Hz: Your room does not support any modes at all below that, so for all lower frequencies the entire room acts more like a balloon than a room: the walls "breathe" in and out, expanding and contracting with the sound. At higher frequencies, up to the Schroeder frequency for your room (123 Hz), room modes dominate, and you have a total of only 18 modes in that entire region, and the distribution of those modes is not too even.

Above the Schroeder frequency, room modes aren't so much of a problem, and you need to concentrate more on diffusion and absorption to control decay times, than worrying about dealing with those higher modes.

Treated with (6) OC703 Panels

Assuming those are standard 4' x 8' panels, that's a total of about 192 square feet of absorption. But for that room you need about 404 square feet of perfect absorption to bring your RT60 times within spec, so you don't even have half enough treatment yet.

I keep trying to upload pics but having no success. Sorry.

Directly below the window where you type your posts, there's an area with small heading saying

"Upload attachment
If you wish to attach one or more files enter the details below."

Then there's a button marked "Browse". Press that, and it will bring up a directory of your own hard disk. Navigate to the picture you want, double-click on it, then click on the button that says "Add the file", right next to the "Browse" button. That's it!


- Stuart -

[pastorjjo]

Wow!! Thanks Stuart for the reply. I appreciate it!

Jjo