Can't I get a totally silent room?

Chelonian

Member
I've been seeing this term "room noise" on various forums, and wondered about it. It seems to me I should probably be able to get this or extremely close to it. I just have to turn off the furnace (not just the blowers, but the furnace itself) and have either a silent computer in the room or the computer outside the room. Maybe I have to unplug my refrigerator during the recording (that's not realistic for frequent use, but I'm just mentioning what's possible.

So, shouldn't one be able to get truly silent recording conditions at home? Zero room noise?
 
It's not really possible. Even a room with nothing in it will still have a sound. The earth itself makes a certain amount of noise.
Most of what room noise is will be the reflection of the sound of whatever you are recording bouncing off the walls and getting back in the Mic.
 
So, shouldn't one be able to get truly silent recording conditions at home? Zero room noise?
Whatever noise is in the room {or, for that matter, outside the room} is only a problem if it interferes with what's being recorded. Most of the time it won't and if it does, you eliminate it one way or another.
 
Sound "isolation" (both in and out) is hard to do and expensive, and as noted, you can't remove 100% of "sound" in the environment, and for all practical (especially in a "home recording" sense) purposes, not going to make a difference in your final mix. Treat the room or arrange the space so it is not the problem, and then just get good at workarounds if you want to get on with recording, vs. trying to get a "silent" recording space.

Sure, you can turn off your furnace, but you won't be able to use your recording space all the time. I have to turn off the A/C here if I want to do actual recording for a few months of the year, so I tend to do very little during those months, honestly. It has to be more planned and practiced than I am usually in a mood to do :). Fixing that problem would essentially mean building a new house, and that's not going to happen...

And outside noises intrude. There's a nearby, small airport, and it seems like the neighbors always have some lawn equipment or hobby woodworking project (one likes to grind metal!) going on. Keeping that noise out would also require a new house, or moving this one. But, if I am patient, there are gaps of relative quiet, and I just have to be able to wait out the small airplane that decides to buzz overhead right when I'm starting to record, or do a re-take if it does it at the very end of a take. Low-level noise stuff in the middle of tracks will often just disappear in the mix, or can be cleaned up, or a comp created from a re-take in some cases.
 
I've been seeing this term "room noise" on various forums, and wondered about it. It seems to me I should probably be able to get this or extremely close to it.

You can aim to get extremely close...or close enough.
What's important is the ratio of signal to noise.

Noise is the hiss you'll get from any microphone or preamp, or the distant hum of AC, or the computer fan, or road traffic noise...Whatever.
Signal is the thing you intend to capture. The voice, the guitar.

If the ratio is high enough then the noise doesn't matter. It's never going to be heard.

It can be very revealing to set up your microphone, record arm the track, then pop your headphones on and just listen to the room,
but also be aware that it can become an obsession trying to get silence.

Just aim to be able to make a recording and play it back without being aware of any noise, particularly during quiet sections of the performance.
 
Agreed that you'll never get a totally silent room. The quietest I've ever experience was in the depths of Mammoth cave during a wild cave tour. In a small passage with only a few people, Everyone just shut up and all you could hear was some breathing a few ft away, and the sound of blood rushing through your head! Add in the total darkness. Eerie!

It helps to turn off things that have fans, like the AC. The 'fridge will only cycle occasionally, so you can usually get by between them. No laundry, TVs etc. Get the computer isolated as much as possible.

Working late at night will often minimize outside noise. You won't get the lawn mowers, leaf blowers, small airplanes, heavy traffic, etc at midnight in most residential areas. That can be really good for doing vocals, where you aren't making enough noise to irritate neighbors.

Years ago, I did a song for a friend's birthday, and after it was all done, I was listening to the vocal track. Between verses, I faintly heard the drone of a small plane. It was only apparent when listening to the vocal track alone. I never heard it when the acoustic guitar track and backing vocals were added. If I had, that section could have been fixed with some volume adjustment.
 
My studio at home is pretty silent - got to be quite loud noises outside to get in, and I discovered that for three years before he moved out, my youngest son was having his mates in my studio two or three times a week when I'd gone to be and I never heard a thing!

I have a video studio half a mile away with an office and it is next to a railway line, and level crossing with a warning alarm - I thought this meant I'd have real issues with sound, but with people with clip on microphones it really isn't much of an issue - it's wanted signal to unwanted noise ratio - and a voice 250mm from their mouth vs 30m to the railway is perfectly workable.
 
there's no such thing as silence, and believe me I've tried! I have a substantially built workshop with thick stone walls and a thick wooden composite doorway to the outside in the basement of my home, which is already quite well screened from noise. I also use it for recording-related work. On the same quest for silence as you I recently connected an electret condenser into my PC, which I then wrapped up tightly in multiple layers of a roll of brand new very deep pile woollen carpet, with a set of unwanted thick curtains thrown over the whole lot for good measure. I then made a test recording. With enough digital amplification applied to the resulting audio file I could STILL hear traffic noise from the nearby road, and even more so from the railway line on the other side of an earthen embankment. I was still hearing midrange noisy, let alone persistent low frequency rumbling, which is almost impossible to stop, even at very low levels. As Rob Aylestone has observed above, your best bet is usually to 'bury' the unwanted noise with the strongest possible input signal, such as you'll get with clip on microphones and other close miking techniques. Some of the top studios in London had to cope with underground trains running nearby in iron-lined tunnels deeply buried under many, many yards of heavy London clay, and still managed to produce some of the best music in the world
 
Isn't the idea of recording supposed to be capturing of a performance in the place it was recorded?

A little bit of noise in the background is a part of that IMO.

I love the little things that come out in a recording that make it 'real'. Not so much a train going by, but simple things like a fart or a squeaky chicken...

The noise floor of any room without the obvious things like a furnace in your recording space, is just reality. If your computer fan makes enough noise to ruin a recording, then you are either insane level of OCD or you need to stop pushing your computer into gaming mode that makes the fans blow dry your hair.

If you have such pristine quiet recordings that noise becomes an issue, you are either recording at such a low volume that it is apparent, or there is something very wrong with your gear.
 
Isn't the idea of recording supposed to be capturing of a performance in the place it was recorded?.

There are those who say that this is no longer the goal, as much music made today never really exists in actual space. It was definitely the goal in the past. That might be one reason that I tend to gravitate towards live recordings so much. Its something that existed at some point in time.
 
I've spent quite a bit of time over the last couple of years working on improving the recording of a solo acoustic guitar. For a while - the background noise in my headphones was driving me crazy.

I live in a somewhat noisy neighborhood. Like someone else mentioned: traffic off in the distance, yard crews (the biggest interference), dogs barking, or the neighbor working on some project with power tools. So when I'm ready to lay something down I often have to wait for that "window" of silence. But there is still noise.

So I've started to get over it and realize that "silence" does not and will not exist.

And as far as the HVAC.... I, quite deliberately, will condition the room for comfort (and tuning stability) and then simply turn it off when I roll tape. Whether it's summer or winter. That hum from the HVAC is a deal breaker.

If you turn it up you can hear background noise at the end where you hear me breath. Not much - but it's there.

This is about as quiet as it gets for me.
 
There are those who say that this is no longer the goal, as much music made today never really exists in actual space. It was definitely the goal in the past. That might be one reason that I tend to gravitate towards live recordings so much. Its something that existed at some point in time.

Yeah man, the art of recording has morphed into a more defined and maybe fake premise. But I still try to keep the live feel in any way I can.

Nothing gives me more happiness than seeing a band live and pull it off well. Even with human mistakes. It is disturbing to see a band live that can't perform like they did in/with studio manipulation.
 
At the end of quite a few of my recordings of drums, percussion, vocals or acoustic guitars, because I leave a long pause for the decay, if one listens to the individual tracks, one can hear my son playing video games with his mates {loudly !} downstairs, my wife going up or down the stairs, the toilet flush, neighbours shouting, seagulls or crows etc.
But they won't be heard on the song.
 
You may think I am nutty, or maybe I've gone "knobby" because of all the buttons and knobs around me; but why do I need a silent room for home recording? Oh, yes, I put forth reasonable effort to eliminate as much extraneous noise as I can; but we are considering HOME RECORDING here. Now if I had the money to pay for professional studio time, I could find a place in which I could record under ideal conditions; but I am doing my recording as a hobby, so I make do with what I have available, and that includes the recording environment in which I work. I have a reasonably good mike stand that helps to isolate the low hum of the furnace blower, and I have on a few occasions held a good condenser mike in my hand while singing the vocal track. When I listened to that track by itself, I could hear an occasional movement in the background; but when I played the whole song with my "band" behind me, the slight amount of noise couldn't be heard. While I do not remember the model number of that mike, I know that it was billed as a mike which a singer could hold while singing. The maker of that mike apparently did a pretty good job of isolating the mike's cartridge from the case of the mike so that it worked well as a handheld mike. Of course, in a live performance before an audience, I doubt that anyone would hear the noise produced by a person's hand holding the mike unless his hand was rather unsteady; the band would mask most noise produced by an experienced performer. So it is with me; my "band" pretty well masks the slight amount of noise I might get if I decide to hold the mike for a particular track. Most of the time, i have the mike on a stand because, as I said earlier, I have a pretty good floor stand. A silent room? I don't think I've ever had such a luxury; but I produce a goodly amount of music enjoyed by many of my friends.
 
I agree, you can get OCD about 'absolute' silence.

Attached is son in a ground floor flat on a moderately busy road in Le Havre (Rue Casimir) Unfortunately he has left little space to judge noise but I think the S/N is very acceptable? "Gut" strung classical acoustic guitar.

He obviously played to himself to get the two parts. Mic Mackie EM-91c at just under a mtr. Behringer UMC204HD.

Dave.
 

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I've been seeing this term "room noise" on various forums, and wondered about it. It seems to me I should probably be able to get this or extremely close to it. I just have to turn off the furnace (not just the blowers, but the furnace itself) and have either a silent computer in the room or the computer outside the room. Maybe I have to unplug my refrigerator during the recording (that's not realistic for frequent use, but I'm just mentioning what's possible.

So, shouldn't one be able to get truly silent recording conditions at home? Zero room noise?

The very simple, and true, answer would be; no, you will never get zero noise anywhere. The thing is, that everytime you isolate to diminish the noise, you'll just lower the noisefloor by x dB. And since "Zero noise" would mean -∞ dB, you'll technically never get there. You could get closer, of course, but never actually achieve -∞ dB.

In practice, you could get your room closer to the noisefloor of your equipment, but it's an expensive job to do so. It takes mass upon mass of wall material, insulation, floating floors and workarounds regarding the exterior noise of your gear (fans, PSU's and such). The thing is; how silent do you really need it to be?
 
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