John Sayers' Recording Studio Design Forum Archive

i just got done going to the thrift store, buying 8 king sized thick quilts, and hanging them from cieling to floor on all 4 walls of my studio and one on the ceiling

MY GOD....the difference.....

i can hear the damn air moving through the hairs in my nose when i breathe...do i want it to be THAT dead? this room is 12 X 12 ft X 10 foot to the cieling...all walls are fully coated with heavy quilts now and so is the cieling. sounds totally DEAD

i dont have a singing booth,, i just sing behind my desk a few feet into a K2 on a large boom

do i want my singing area to be THAT dead? i mean, now when i close the door i can feel that "pressure" like when you roll the window up in a car that has a awesome seal LOL


ive read the rules for posting but im not asking nay detailed advice, just a simple question of " does it really need to be THAT dead"? and im assuming that it being that dead will help in my mastering phase of the music creation process as well? can a room possibly be "too dead"?

yes a room could be too dead. since the low end absorption of the quilts may be very little, you're effectively killing off your high end and leaving the mud. multiple recordings in this room will then result in a build up of excessive bass and lower mids. then again, for vox, you could do some cutting of the low-low-mids and maybe its better than you had before. probably not going to be good for mixing and mastering though.

make sure to treat your hanging blankets with fire retardant. not sure the reference about a door seal since the blankets don't seem to be good sealants.

gullfo wrote:yes a room could be too dead. since the low end absorption of the quilts may be very little, you're effectively killing off your high end and leaving the mud. multiple recordings in this room will then result in a build up of excessive bass and lower mids. then again, for vox, you could do some cutting of the low-low-mids and maybe its better than you had before. probably not going to be good for mixing and mastering though.

make sure to treat your hanging blankets with fire retardant. not sure the reference about a door seal since the blankets don't seem to be good sealants.

im sorry, i forgot to include that im using the JBL LSR series monitors, and with those, they come with a little mic used to calibrate the monitors and to "listen" to the room and make EQ adjustments to compensate ( and ive done that already and i can see it cut out alot of bass ) could i install bass traps in my corners and then re-calibrate the JBL's? would that solve the bass problem? or has the calibration i just did cut out the "excess bass" already?....the room is exactly 12 x 12 by 10 feet tall sheet rock walls in a apartment carpet floor.

im sorry, i forgot to include that im using the JBL LSR series monitors, and with those, they come with a little mic used to calibrate the monitors and to "listen" to the room and make EQ adjustments to compensate ( and ive done that already and i can see it cut out alot of bass ) could i install bass traps in my corners and then re-calibrate the JBL's? would that solve the bass problem?

No. You seem to be confusing the issues here. All that your speaker EQ gimmick would do is fool you into thinking your speakers and your room are performing far better than they really are!

What Glenn is talking about is how the room itself responds to sound, not about how well your speakers reproduce sound. Whenever you make any sound in that room (singing, playing an instrument, playing back a recording, whatever) the sounds waves bounce around inside the room, and interact with it. Different parts of the room affect different frequencies of sound. What you have accomplished with those blankets is to deaden all of the high frequencies completely, killing off all of the reflections, but those blankets are way too thin to be affecting mid and low frequency sounds, which will keep on bouncing around in there, just as they always did. So you now have a "muddy" or "dull" room. Highs are in the morgue, mids are on life support, but lows are alive and kicking. Not a happy scenario.

Anytime you record anything in there, your mic will still pick up those lows bouncing around. If you mix together a couple of different tracks recorded in that room (say a couple of acoustic guitar tracks plus a couple of vocals), those "bouncing lows" will add up, leaving you with a very dull and lifeless sounding recording that is also "boomy" at the same time. Yuk.

If you put bass traps in your room, that would help, but they will remove even MORE of the highs! The little bit of high that is still in there will now not only be dead, but will be thoroughly massacred, slaughtered and shredded. It will go from merely sounding "bad" to sounding "disgusting". Dead rooms are not nice. Our brains don't like 'em, because they sound very unnatural.

So bass traps are definitely needed (BIG ones!), but you also need to get some of the highs back into your room, so that it sounds a bit more natural, and less dead. There are several ways of doing that, and this is one reason for all of the stuff that yo ignored from the "don't post before reading this" message: We can't help you solve your problem unless you tell us all of that stuff, since it is all important! There are MANY ways of fixing your situation, but we can't tell you which one fits your case, since you didn't tells a single thing about it! (other than that you sing, it sounds awful, and there are blankets on the walls). Tell us about the rest of the stuff that we ask for, and we can probably help you.

There's a reason for all those comments on the first page....

( And all of this has nothing to do with your speakers, by the way: That's an entirely different aspect that we can get to later, after helping you fix your dead room. )


- Stuart -

would that solve the bass problem? or has the calibration i just did cut out the "excess bass" already?....the room is exactly 12 x 12 by 10 feet tall sheet rock walls in a apartment carpet floor.

Adding to what I said above, you have another rather glaring problem there: the dimensions of the room. It is SQUARE! That's bad.

One step back: adjusting your speaker EQ cannot fix the room: at best it can compensate slightly for ONE specif location in the room, which is the exact location where you had the mic when you ran that EQ process. But even a couple of inches way from there, the room response will be totally different. Move the mic 6" from that location, run the process again, and you'll get an entirely different EQ adjustment curve. So it works, but only for one position at at time. Problem is, you have TWO ears... So at best, your speakers can only get things right for one of your ears. Even worse, it is practically impossible for you to sit in the exact same location all the time, every time, even less to be able to put your mic at that one "good" point for every recording...

EQ cannot, ever, fix room acoustics. It's a myth.

But you have a worse problem: your room is square. This means that all of your room modes associated with the length and width of your room, line up perfectly. All peaks are doubled, and so are all nulls: That is about the worse case you can have. There are only two shapes worse than a square for your room: 1) a cube. 2) A sphere.

I'd strongly suggest that you do something to change one of those dimensions, and try to get your room a bit ratio closer to one of the known good ratios.

We could help you with that too, but once again, only if we know all of the details that you didn't want to mention, as you didn't think they were important, but that are turning out to be vitally important as you feed us each tid bit....


- Stuart -

well i just got finished making a test mix in that room ( a dance track with vocals ) and it sounds utterly amazing....balanced, even, tight. sounds amazing in the car and on my home stereo system...those JBL's really DO do what they say they do.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDfN8...eature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HdfJecXCc8

i also noticed my vocals were alot cleaner ( no background noise ) and required alot less eq...if fact, the entire mix required less eq. so thanks for all your advice im positive that its all 100% correct, but this just works perfectly, and the sound quality has gone through the roof =)

thanks again!

David Lustrup

spam

no its not spam........so let me get this straight, because im expressing happiness over finding a product that works and works well, THAT is spam?.....so i guess everyone on here who has said " wow this works great"...is spamming????...i really do have those monitors and im sorry if it offends you that your predictions about how my mixes would turn out were wrong this time.....im sure you dont claim to be perfect 100% of the time right?

the facts dont lie...i made an amazing sounding mix in that room..and i didnt take down any quilts...im sorry if the results didnt jive with what your advice told me it would come out sounding like, but none of us are correct 100% of the time...it came out great....shrugs, im not gonna go changing around my room when it produces killer mixes like the one it did today. im not gonna start thinking that all the work jbl must have put into creating the dsp's in those monitors was bull when i hear how good it sounds....i cant...id be lying to myself, they just.....work like they say they do..shrugs

Whatever

maybe my fault. i was expecting a video YOU produced to show us how it solved YOUR room issues. instead it linked to a top level page without any information except marketing information, the second one went directly to a marketing video.

so while we all like to see progress in modern speaker technology, and i am fond of JBL products, the reality is, the links are simply hype and therefore it should be little wonder it is interpreted as spam.

if you want to share, please post the before and after acoustic measurements (turn the EQ on and off will probably demonstrate it) so we have some empirical evidence to review.