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Hi there! I'm Leisure-B, and you're watching part two of Humanworkshop's
"Building the Ton-Kraft Studio".
In this video we're going to take a closer look at the original room we had in mind,
and how all attempts we made to make the room sound better failed miserably.
Here you can see the original room all cleaned up,
with one of the obsolete bass walls we've created.
The room is about 8 square meters and 2.6 meters in height,
which is by default to small to create a serious studio space.
In order to make use of midfield speakers one needs a room of at least
sixteen square meters
to make sure one has a certain area where the sound is more or less neutral.
Since we were not convinced of this minor detail, we decided
to give the acoustic treatment a go.
The first thing we did was clear out all the acoustic foam and insulation material
with which Andy had attempted to acoustically optimate the room.
Now, let's first take a look at the acoustic foam.
This stuff is often used for optimising a studio space, but it's actually not helping matters.
What acoustic foam does, especially when the whole room is covered with it,
is completely take away all reflections, or reverb, of any sound played in the room.
However, this mainly goes for softer sources with little to no bass range.
If the walls behind the foam are made out of concrete or bricks,
and you're playing music from your monitor speakers, most of the low range sound
will still be reflected.
In other words, the acoustic foam has no direct influence on the reflections of
the low spectrum,
and can therefore be considered more of a pain in the a$$ than any kind of
solution for your studio.
Don't get me wrong though, it's great for building vocal booths,
and should surely not be completely disregarded in the process when building a studio.
Also, he had 10cm thick styropor plates underneath the foam,
which, due to its amazing ability to resonate along with the low tones,
was also not helping much either.
The one thing one should learn here,
which we didn't, was that you shouldn't just go out and buy random $hit for
acoustic treatment, because it just doesn't work that way.
To a certain degree it is of course a hit and miss process, but there's
certain rules which you should definitely observe.
The bass reflections were really fu%$ing up the sound from the Alesis M1 MK2 ultra speakers.
This was mainly made clear by how some positions in the room seemed to have no
bass at all,
while others were drenched in it.
In small rooms the bass frequencies tend to summ or diminish due to the small
range the reflection has, as you can see and hear in this animation.
Again, not knowledgeable of the basic principles of acoustics, I suggested
we build a completely new, hanging wall of rockwool in the back of the room
so no bass reflections would come back from the back of the room.
Now before you mark Andy crazy for attempting this stupid idea,
please keep in mind I have a degree in sound design, and therefore seemed to have
some authority in the field.
So, Andy drove to the shop, bought some wood and rockwool, and we proceeded to build the wall.
Sure as hell the wall didn't make any difference whatsoever,
and Andy decided it was time to approach matters in a more professional manner.
He dug up an article on recording.de where these guys were buidling a
studio in Kreuzberg, Berlin.
The studio was built in a highly reflective space, which should be
considered a nightmare for any studio builder.
This meant that they really had to pull every trick in the book to make the room
work.
which seemed like a good starting point for us to work from.
For a link to the article, please check out the video description.
The first thing Andy did was download REW.
REW is a free acoustic measurement program,
and just to make things clear here, it's amazing.
Just don't expect it to immediately tell you how to fix your room.
When used correctly,
and you most certainly should make sure that you do,
REW will give you a clear graphical representation of what you hear in
your room.
Even more than in other professions, in audio land there is always an enormous danger
of over saturating your input.
Of course, your ears are usually the most reliable source of input when working on
an audio related project.
But after a day or two of working on an acoustic set up, it is almost impossible to
determine the exact difference of "before" and "after" the treatment.
REW gives you an exact visual representation of, among other features,
the reflections and decay times of the frequencies in your room.
This means that it clearly visualises what you hear,
and pretty much takes the "over-saturation of the ears" out of the
equation.
REW requires the purchase of one BEHRINGER ECM8000 mic and
a decibel meter, which I would very strongly advise.
We started of by using the decibel meter android app, which wasn't closely
as effective as using a 40 euro decibel meter from the local hardware
store.
For more information and download of REW, please visit the video description
link.
After making measurements with REW,
Andy decided it would be best to start off by putting some bass traps in the
corners.
Since bass tends to accumulate in corners, it is always a good idea to take care of
this as much as possible by putting bass absorbers in there.
In our case we build the corners in triangles of 50x50 centimeters.
After taking measurements, we noticed that the room conditions had most
certainly improved, but were still way out of the range of the desired results.
Since the results had most certainly improved, we decided to keep the spirits high,
and build an acoustic diffuser to take care of a nasty problem we had in the
midrange spectrum, around 700Hz.
You don't want to take out all the reflections from the room, since this
would sound unnatural and would make it very tiresome to work in your studio.
you want to somehow spread the mid and high range spectrum of the sound in such a way that it
kind of scatters back at you.
This is why God created the diffuser.
To design a diffuser yourself, you either need to be highly skilled in mathematics,
or when you're not,
make use of another nifty little free program which shows you how to build one
depending on the size of our room,
the problematic frequency, and the distance of the listening position.
This program is called QRDude.
More info about it as well as a download link are available in the description
of this video.
So, we designed and built the diffuser by the given parameters, and lord behold,
the problem seemed to get less.
Noticeable!
The final and very important move we made was the exact positioning of the
speakers.
Once again this is where REW is critical for creating the ideal hotspot.
The "hotspot" is the listening position where the sound of the speakers
comes to you most "natural".
In the ideal circumstances the hotspot is not just a spot but more like an area
of about 60cm in diameter in a relatively small studio space.
The smaller the space, the smaller the hotspot.
By positioning your speakers in different places, according to a previously
determined logical pattern,
you can determine what works best in your room.
Since the speakers and the hotspot always need to form an equilateral triangle,
the main things you can work on are the distance of the speakers relatively
each other, and the position of the speakers from the wall.
Let me tell you, you'll be amazed by the difference the variation of both
parameters makes.
So, we measured the room,
and the results had clearly improved. However, after thorough testing and use of the room,
it turned out to still be a major pain in the a$$ when working in it.
The bass range still proved to be relatively to very unstable, depending on the
position of your head
within a range of about
30 centimeters.
Also there was a major dip in the 700Hz range which made it
almost impossible to properly mix lead instruments.
After all this trouble, Andy still seemed determined to create a studio space in
which he could work properly,
because he mentioned
to me that "it still $uck$ ball$".
The room was just too small, and the walls, the ceiling and the roof were built out
of the wrong materials.
There was just no way to seriously improve this room,
so the only choice he had left was to build a completely new room in the barn
which he happened to also own.
I realise for most people this might be a pretty bumming conclusion,
but hey, that's just the way it seems to work in acoustics.
Usually there are no easy solutions.
However, by skipping all our missteps, and using the tips and tricks you will find in
part 3 to 5 of this series,
you might still be able to build a professional audio work space
with as little cash and effort as possible.
Which is still not little of both by the way.
So that's it for now,
I'm off, we'll leave you with a couple of cool pictures we took
during the building of the actual studio....
Have fun....
Enjoy, and i'll see you soon...