Drum room - Acoustics treatment.

How to use REW, What is a Bass Trap, a diffuser, the speed of sound, etc.

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makenaiboy
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Drum room - Acoustics treatment.

Post by makenaiboy »

Hi all,

After lots of fun with a builder who promised me the world and delivered very little, I eventually got my drum room built (http://www.johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/viewt ... =2&t=13169). With the edition of some kick-butt double doors recently, I'm really happy with the result (from the outside:)) It's good enough for my family to watch TV at a low level and the neighbours can't hear me play.

Inside it's sounding OK.... but terrible when I record and I have to compensate with a lot of EQ to get anything reasonable. :horse: Works for processed compressed songs but not something natural.... so I'm now at the stage where I want to get more from my room.

Currently for acoustic I'm using foam wedges in the corners, foam tiles on the ceiling and standard 120cm and 60cm panels places on the walls around the room. I've learnt since I bought these it wasn't a great option....

I've been reading up here again and thought a good place to start would be with a REW test. Hopefully I've done this correctly. I used my Earthworks TC25 Omni mic in the mix position pointing up. I've posted the results here https://www.dropbox.com/s/1l6grgtnl23gr ... justed.zip. I'm not sure I got the limit's and axis settings correct but to my eyes it confirms that the foam wedges aren't doing much for the low end. I'd really appreciate help interpreting these results!! :D

With building the new stud wall inside my existing room. The measurements of the room is now 4.1 x 3.6 with a ceiling height of about 2.30 metres (it was 4.4m x 3.9m) Is the room big enough to get a decent drum sound.?

Also, I'd really like to put timber a timber floor in the room (currently carpet) but is my room too small for timber / will it cause too much reverb? I imagine if I treat the walls and ceiling properly it will be ok. I've always wanted a timber room with fancy looking floors and slat resonators like John builds! 8)

Cheers
Soundman2020
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Re: Drum room - Acoustics treatment.

Post by Soundman2020 »

I'm not sure I got the limit's and axis settings correct but to my eyes it confirms that the foam wedges aren't doing much for the low end. I'd really appreciate help interpreting these results!!
:shock: :!: :shock: Wow! There's some pretty major ringing going on there in the low end! It looks modal, but but some of it does not make sense, as it isn't near the modal frequencies related to those dimensions.

But one thing is for sure: that room is an acoustic MESS! No wonder you can't mix in it.

Photos. Please post photos of how it looks right now, so we can see what you have in there.

I would start out by putting superchunks in as many corners as you can, at the very least the four vertical corners, then measure again with REW to see how that worked out, and what still needs doing afterwards.

Also, I'd really like to put timber a timber floor in the room (currently carpet) but is my room too small for timber / will it cause too much reverb?
What is under the carpet? I hope you are going to say "concrete", as that would be ideal. But that carpet has to go: It is not doing you any favors at all, and is very likely making things even worse.

- Stuart -
makenaiboy
Posts: 17
Joined: Wed Jun 10, 2009 10:37 am
Location: Brisbane, Australia

Re: Drum room - Acoustics treatment.

Post by makenaiboy »

Hi Stuart,

Thanks for your reply. I've had this in the back of my mind but other annoying issues such as retaining walls and car repairs have taken me away from it. I need this to take focus and get back to playing ASAP as the other stuff is stressing me out at the moment!
Wow! There's some pretty major ringing going on there in the low end! It looks modal, but but some of it does not make sense, as it isn't near the modal frequencies related to those dimensions.
I really should have emptied the room but I did do the room analysis with my drums and a couple of book cases in the room. I wonder if the bookcases are resonating and causes some of the low frequency issues? I guess another REW with an empty room is called for which I'll aim to do soon.

Please find a couple of pics of my room below:
Room layout.jpg
Front wall and mix position.jpg
I usually have a MUCH bigger kit set up similar to the one in the "layout.jpg" attachment
Drums and rear wall.jpg
Since my original post here, John has helped me out with a design for my room taking into account the frequency issues I have in my room. Here is the design below.
Room design.jpg
For the back wall which isn't shown, for the rear wall and similar to the sides I have a rear wall absorbers (http://www.johnlsayers.com/HR/index1.htm) and for the corners the corners the corner absorbers (http://www.johnlsayers.com/HR/index1.htm)

For the ceiling, I'll toying between clouds or John's ceiling design (http://johnlsayers.com/Recmanual/Titles/Acoustics3.htm). I only have 2.35m of ceiling height so I'd like to keep as much as I can but from what I gather angled clouds with give me a better result by breaking up the parallel surfaces so I'm leaning towards the clouds.

Currently for the floor, it's a single story house on slab with carpet on top. I'm planning on laying down some timber hardwood floors.

My monitors are Adam A7X's, I really love these monitors and given I'm going this far, all accounts point to doing soffit mounts so I took John's design and with my limited Sketchup skills came up with the following using John's soffit design.
Room design with soffits.jpg
I haven't taken into account the mixing position or angles of the monitors at this point as I just wanted to get my mental image on paper to see if it worked from an aesthetically and didn't ruin the original design acoustically. What are your thoughts on this approach?

Thanks for your help.

Cheers!
Soundman2020
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Re: Drum room - Acoustics treatment.

Post by Soundman2020 »

What are your thoughts on this approach?
I would make the actual soffits bigger (wider), and also not use tuned devices on the front wall: just use broadband absorption, or leave it reflective and check with ray-tracing to make sure it is not a problem.

- Stuart -
makenaiboy
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Joined: Wed Jun 10, 2009 10:37 am
Location: Brisbane, Australia

Re: Drum room - Acoustics treatment.

Post by makenaiboy »

Hey guys,

It's been over a year since I started looking at this extension to my project and time has really got away. As we all know these projects can sure last a lot longer than we had thought... hoped!!

I'm starting to go back over my original designs in the hope of getting this finished in the next couple of months. I've had so many issues finding the right people that I'm largely going to do it myself. I don't think it will be a blow by blow account of the build but I'm happy to post the details here if anyone is interested.

I'm essentially going to build as per my design above (no soffits). The resonators will be sealed units so I can return the room back to normal easily and possibly even take them with me if I move.

I'm starting to gather a list of materials together and I have down 25mm or 18mm and a question mark as to which thickness to use for the frames of the boxes. I'm thinking of going the 18mm due to MDF being so damn heavy! Do you see any issues with this?

Also, I was planning on filling the whole shell with insulation but I remember that John states "Insulation glued to back of plywood" (http://johnlsayers.com/Recmanual/Titles/Acoustics2.htm) so if anyone can refresh my memory on which approach is better I'd really appreciate it! :)

Cheers!
makenaiboy
Posts: 17
Joined: Wed Jun 10, 2009 10:37 am
Location: Brisbane, Australia

Re: Drum room - Acoustics treatment.

Post by makenaiboy »

Hi all. I thought I'd post a quick update. The year is slowly coming to a close. Life sure does fly by.

Still working on acoustic treatment for my drum room and looked at different options over the past 6 months. I don't have much building experience and not being able to find someone to help, I did consider GIK Acoustics and their panels as an alternative for a while but it worked out at about $2,500 shipping it was back to the drawing board.

After a lot of messing around with builders and contractor who either charged too way way too much, never turned up and wouldn't listen, I decided to take on this on myself

I've just built a prototype of a corner slat resonator based on this design here: http://www.johnlsayers.com/HR/index1.htm

I've modified the design a bit but here is what I have so far.

Photo of MDF shell in corner:

Image

Testing to see if a slat fits

Image

I ended up going with a modular design that is half the height of the room, that I will stack 2 high in each corner. I did this for a couple of reasons. Mostly because it meant that I could get the MDF in my car but aslo so I could move the units around and make them easier to assemble.


Next steps are to:

- cut the remaining slats
- stain the slats
- seal unit with gap filler
- screw in support posts
- insert insulation
- cover with black cloth
- nail in slats

I've often wondered if it's worth me going to this effort, and it's often something I think about before I go to sleep - it keeps coming up! and I keep coming back to the fact that I want a better sounding room.... I know It won't be perfect but I'm going to give it my best shot!

More updates to come if anyone is interested.

Cheers
Soundman2020
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Re: Drum room - Acoustics treatment.

Post by Soundman2020 »

I guess you missed my previous post about this device you are trying to build and your treatment plan in general: "I would make the actual soffits bigger (wider), and also not use tuned devices on the front wall: "

Why would you want to color the sound in front of you? And why would you want small, ineffective soffits at the wrong angle and with the speakers in the wrong locations?

And most important of all: What frequency(ies) do you plan to tune that device to? And why did you chose those specific frequencies, or that specific frequency?

It looks like you are trying to combine parts of one design philosophy with parts of other design philosophies, which is not a good idea. Either go with a standard RFZ-type design with your speakers correctly soffit mounted, or go with a rectangular room design with the speakers on massive stands behind the desk. You can't combine both concepts the way you are trying to do it...

I would really, really, REALLY suggest going with more conventional treatment for your room, based on firstly on getting the geometry correct, then on getting the "standard" basic treatment correct. Then do another REW test, and decide how to proceed based on that.

To start with, you need to get the speakers off the desk and into properly designed soffits, with the speakers positioned and oriented correctly, then get the mix position located correctly. Then install the standard small-room treatment, including major bass trapping in as many corners are you can, plus thick absorption on the rear wall and all first refection points. The analyze with REW, see what still needs doing, and add additional treatment.


- Stuart -
makenaiboy
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Joined: Wed Jun 10, 2009 10:37 am
Location: Brisbane, Australia

Re: Drum room - Acoustics treatment.

Post by makenaiboy »

Hi Stuart,

Thanks for your reply.

I did see your post about the soffits and your suggestion not to use the resonators on the front wall. The design in my post on the 13th of May was done by John primarily as a drum tracking room. Considering I do (some very minimal) mixing in the room I considered the soffit approach but couldn't sacrifice enough floor space with such a large kit in my room so will be mounting the speakers on stands.

Based on your post, I decided to take your advice and keep the front wall with absorption only. I'll be also be covering the RFZ's, rear, sides and above me with 100mm insulation.

For the corners, I was planning on using super chunks but I wanted to at least keep some life in the room so went with the corner slat resonators floor to ceiling.

My problems were mostly at 40, 80 to 130, 170 to 190 and 250 to 330 Hz so I built these to cater for that range based on the Helmholtz calculator.

Do you think this is a bad idea?
Soundman2020
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Re: Drum room - Acoustics treatment.

Post by Soundman2020 »

I considered the soffit approach but couldn't sacrifice enough floor space with such a large kit in my room so will be mounting the speakers on stands.
soffits only take up a couple of extra inches in room depth. If you think about it, it's logical: What a soffit really is, is just a large flat, heavy panel that is placed as an extension of the front face of the speaker, which is still in roughly the same position it would have been anyway. The only difference is that you need to leave a little extra space at the rear for speaker ventilation, but apart from that, there's no real difference in the location of where the speakers will be...
I'll be also be covering the RFZ's, rear, sides and above me with 100mm insulation.
Just to clarify: you cannot create a reflection free zone with absorption! It has to be created with reflection, believe it or not. Some people seem to think that just putting absorption on all first reflection points will produce a true reflection free zone: it does not. All that it does is to make the first reflections more muddy, since it absorbs practically all of the high frequencies most of the high-mids, some of the low mids, and none of the lows. So it "colors" the reflected sound. That's why true RFZ rooms have carefully angled reflective surfaces at the front of the room, in order to direct ALL first order reflections past the engineer's ears, to the rear of the room where it can be diffused (if the room is big enough) or absorbed.
For the corners, I was planning on using super chunks but I wanted to at least keep some life in the room so went with the corner slat resonators floor to ceiling.
Supechunks are great bass traps, but putting slats over them makes them selective reflectors as well, and selective absorbers. Yes, you will get some more life back into the room, but since you will be absorbing some frequencies while reflecting others, the response won't be even. The normal method for keeping highs in the room is to wrap the superchunk in plastic. The thickness of the plastic can be selected to ensure that only the lows get through to the insulation, while the highs are reflected back into the room.
My problems were mostly at 40, 80 to 130, 170 to 190 and 250 to 330 Hz so I built these to cater for that range based on the Helmholtz calculator.
Which Helmholtz calculator did you use? There are two versions of the equation, but only one is correct. The other was a misprint in an old textbook, that then got copied to other texbooks, and re-copied again. Make sure you are using the correct version of the equation.

Also, your traps are NOT tuned to hose frequencies. You are building a broad-band slotwall, with a very low Q, that absorbs across the entire range from about 10 Hz to about 2 kHz, ... theoretically! But in practice, it won't even do that. The reason for that is because the depth of your cavity is not constant: It is a triangular shape, so it varies from just a small fraction of an inch at the two edges, to maybe a foot or so in the middle (apex of the triangle), thus providing very, very, broadband absorption, not the tightly tuned high-Q response you'd need for dealing with room modes.

Then there's the other issue with cavity depth. In order for a Helmholtz resonator to absorb effectively, the depth of the cavity needs to be in the range of 1/8th wavelength to 1/12th wavelength, average 1/10th, because that's what is needed in order for air to act as a spring, efficiently. So the cavity would need to be about 34 inches deep for the slot that is tuned to 40 Hz, and 4 inches deep for the slot that is tuned to 330 Hz. While that might actually be the case at one specific point on the width of each slat, the air behind the rest of the slat is not going to be "springy" enough, so the resonance won't be efficient.

Then there's the issue of tuning: room modes are very tight, very high-Q problems, just a few Hz wide. To hit a modal problem, your device must be tuned very, very accurately. And since the slots are very narrow for low frequencies, even a tiny inaccuracy in your workmanship can mean that your slot is not tuned anywhere near where you wanted it to be. For example, let's say that you want to hit a modal issue at 201 Hz, and you have a standard wall cavity depth of 90mm (3-1/2"), so you do the math and figure out that you need a slot exactly 2mm wide, ... but when you built it, you nailed the slat just a fraction skew, so the slot is really only 1.8mm wide, instead of 2mm. You figure it's no big deal, because it looks very close to correct... However... The resonant frequency is now 191 Hz, instead of the 201 Hz that you wanted. You are off by a whopping ten percent! There's no way that such a device would be any use at all. The maximum variation that you could allow in your slot gap is 1.97mm to 2.01mm. In imperial terms, that means your slot width would need to be 3/38th of an inch, accurate to within +/- 1/128th of an inch. Can you really work that accurately? Even changes in room temperature and humidity could conceivable cause the wood of your slat to expand or contract sufficiently to de-tune the device completely....

And finally, there's the issue of cavity air volume; in order for a slot resonator to be effective at dealing with a specific tone, the internal resonant volume associated with that specific slot needs to be about 1% of the room volume. There's only a tiny fraction of that amount behind any particular slot in your device.

All of the above are the reasons why you don't generally see people using slot walls to deal with modal issues: worst case, it does nothing at all, best case, it is extremely hard to tune right, and not very effective even if you get it perfect.

Oh, and you also have to make sure that the device is positioned exactly where the pressure of the modal standing wave is at its peak, or close to its peak... so it would be useless, for example, to have a trap on the middle of the front wall that is supposed to deal with a modal issue that affects on the ceiling and floor...

- Stuart -
makenaiboy
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Re: Drum room - Acoustics treatment.

Post by makenaiboy »

Thanks Soundman,

I used the calculator from John's site but even with the correct equation, I still didn't get it right.

Soundman2020 wrote: All of the above are the reasons why you don't generally see people using slot walls to deal with modal issues: worst case, it does nothing at all, best case, it is extremely hard to tune right, and not very effective even if you get it perfect.
Based on this, when is the right time to use a slot wall?

Soundman2020 wrote: Just to clarify: you cannot create a reflection free zone with absorption! It has to be created with reflection, believe it or not. Some people seem to think that just putting absorption on all first reflection points will produce a true reflection free zone: it does not. All that it does is to make the first reflections more muddy, since it absorbs practically all of the high frequencies most of the high-mids, some of the low mids, and none of the lows. So it "colors" the reflected sound. That's why true RFZ rooms have carefully angled reflective surfaces at the front of the room, in order to direct ALL first order reflections past the engineer's ears, to the rear of the room where it can be diffused (if the room is big enough) or absorbed.
Ok, I think I get it now. I've confused RFZ with treating early reflection points, which I was planning on doing. I understand now that this is not RFZ


Soundman2020 wrote:
To start with, you need to get the speakers off the desk and into properly designed soffits, with the speakers positioned and oriented correctly, then get the mix position located correctly. Then install the standard small-room treatment, including major bass trapping in as many corners are you can, plus thick absorption on the rear wall and all first refection points. The analyze with REW, see what still needs doing, and add additional treatment.
- Stuart -
Thanks, I will start here as you suggest. What would you recommend for the First reflection points, corners etc. I was about to order 100mm insulation and DIY but now I'm tempted to fall back on GIK Acoustics Monster Bass traps and 244's

I appreciate your reply.

Cheers,
Soundman2020
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Re: Drum room - Acoustics treatment.

Post by Soundman2020 »

Based on this, when is the right time to use a slot wall?
The are great for smoothing out mid-range issues, since you can tune them to the problematic range and still keep them broadband. Alternatively, you can tune them to a few specific problematic frequencies in the mid range. In addition, they provide some bass absorption below the tuned range, and some reflection/diffusion above it.
Ok, I think I get it now. I've confused RFZ with treating early reflection points, which I was planning on doing. I understand now that this is not RFZ
I would still aim for doing an RFZ-type room by modifying your design, due the major benefits you get from such a room.
What would you recommend for the First reflection points, corners etc. I was about to order 100mm insulation and DIY
That is, indeed, a great way to do it. If you get full sheets of OC-703 you can cut them up into triangles that measure about 90cm on the two adjacent sides, and stack those in the rear corners, floor to ceiling, to create "superchunk" style base traps. Cover the entire rear wall, (between the two superchunks) with two layers of that same insulation (so it is 20cm deep). You can also use full sheets in simple wood frames covered with cloth at the first reflection points in your side walls and front wall (between the speakers and the wall), and as a cloud over the desk. Make that cloud big, hard backed, and angle it so it is lower over the speakers and higher over your head.

That's more or less the "standard" treatment for a room that is not RFZ.

That would give you a very usable room, with reasonably good acoustics. Assuming you set up your speakers and mix position correctly, of course, with the correct angles, geometry, and heights.


- Stuart -
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