I have my REW measurements
It's much easier if you save each set of measurements in one single file, instead of three separate files...
Anyway, I took at look at your data, and I'm having a hard time understanding the room. It is a bit too dead for that size, but it is also rather unbalanced, and the phase is all over the place! Not surprised that it doesn't sound good. But I can't quite put my finger on the underlying problem. Your decay time is around 190 ms, and should be more like 220 ms. Not a huge difference, and it wouldn't fully explain why the room sounds poor.
I would need to know a lot more about the treatment in that room to understand what's going on there. Maybe you could add more detailed accurate, information to your diagram, showing what the surfaces of the room are, and what treatment materials you have where.
By the way, you have a grounding problem of some type: there's constant 120 Hz. "hum" in your system: If you can't hear it in your speakers, then it is probably a faulty mic, or faulty mic cable, or bad connector. Or it might be an actual electrical issue. Whatever it is, you will need to figure it out and resolve it.
Another "by the way": the angle of your measurement mic in the photo is not correct: It needs to be angled up far steeper than that: about 60°. You seem to have it at maybe 45°, or even less. For future measurements, please angle it up more.
Anyway, to get the room sounding decent, first you will need to get rid of all the clutter: in the photo, there's a lot of "stuff" that just shouldn't be there: that bookshelf thing on the left and everything on it, for example, and the huge desk on the right with that big "thing" sitting on it: those will have to go. Acousti symmetry is very important for the front half of the room, and you don't have it at all! Here's what your speaker balance looks like:
LeftHandPete--FR-20-20k--L.vs.R-speaer-compare-1..48-c.png
That's unsmoothed (1/48 octave), and you can see the really wild swings there. That graph compares the level of your left channel vs. your right channel across the entire spectrum, for every single frequency. Wherever the graph curve is above the 0 dB line, your left speaker is louder, and wherever it is below the line your right speaker is louder. There's a range of over 30 dB there!
That's a huge, major, room-wrecking imbalance.
OK, your ear's don't really have the resolution to hear 1/48 octave difference, but they sure do have the ability to hear at 1/12 octave, so here's what it looks like when smoothed to 1/12:
LeftHandPete--FR-20-20k--L.vs.R-speaer-compare-1..12.png
The swings are still really wild even at that level of smoothing, an there's still more than 20 dB variation between the speakers, but now you can see another disturbing issue: the entire graph is skew! For low frequencies, your right speaker is louder, but for high frequencies your left speaker is louder. Your entire sound stage is skewed. This is even more obvious at 1/6 octave smoothing:
LeftHandPete--FR-20-20k--L.vs.R-speaer-compare-1..6-c.png
You can clearly see how the curve slopes upwards to the right: it should be flat and level.
Specifications for critical listening rooms call for that line to be dead flat: no more than 1 dB difference. Here's what the 1/12 octave curve should look like:
Frank-REW-FR-20-20k-speaker-compare-Baffles-on-1..12.png
That's from the room linked above, which isn't finished yet, but we are already beating the specs on that point. The speakers are nearly perfectly balanced. Yours are not... In your case, part of that is the clutter, part is probably the signal chain or speaker setup, and part is the room itself. That needs to be fixed.
Above the mix position I have two clouds which measure 24x84, filled with R13
Details please! How were they built? Materials, angles, thicknesses, etc.
The rear wall pic shows some type of triangular protrusion that isn't shown on the diagram: What is that, and how was it built?
Any insight or guidance is greatly appreciated, thanks!
If you really want your room to be as good as it can be, I'd suggest that instead of trying to fix it the way it is, you start over from zero by gutting it: take everything out: all of the treatment, all of the clutter, all of the everything, and start again. Start with a REW test in the empty room. Then flush-mount ("soffit mount") your two best speakers, in a properly designed soffit (see the thread for details....), set up your desk and chair at the correct location (determined acoustically), build major bass trapping for the rear wall, and re-do the treatment on the side walls, as well as the cloud. Do REW tests at each point in the process to check that things are working correctly, and adapt your treatment plan as necessary to deal with each result. If you follow the thread all the way through, you should get a good idea of how the room-tuning process goes. That room is nearly done: just a couple more weeks and he'll be able to hang out his shingle and start making music!
There's decent possibilities for your room, since you have the high ceiling, and that's a big plus. But my basic suggestion would be to take out everything and start again. I don't think it is worth trying to figure out what is wrong and fix it: much better to start with an empty slate. I'm not sure if you can do that on the budget you mentioned, though: it will probably cost more than 3k, if you go the full RFZ style room with soffit-mounted speakers. You might be able to do it for 3 k, but it would be tight.
- Stuart -
