A little help please

  • Thread starter Thread starter TexRoadkill
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TexRoadkill

TexRoadkill

Audio Bum
My experience is mainly in live/location recording so please forgive my newbieness (newbileness, newbliessence?)

I'm moving into a new house and will be devoting the living room and one of the bedrooms for a studio.

The living room will be used for tracking and the dimensions are 17'x31'x8'. The control room is 11'8''x9'8''x8' (a bit small I know).

I ran the rooms through MODESV2 and they don't look to bad. For the Bonello chart my tracking room was at ideal below 50hz and above it for the higher frequencies. The control room is at ideal for 80hz and less than ideal for the lower frequencies.

So what now? Surely my tracking room isn't perfect, I'm never that lucky. What do I need to look for on the Axial, Tangential and Oblique data? Does the Bonello Distribution give a good 'big picture'?

If my control room starts having issues at 80hz and below I'm guessing the obvious solution is corner bass traps? I have some pretty big couches that has helped my current room and I'm going to put one in each room. Do couches serve very well as bass traps? Is there any scientific way to figure what effect they will have?

What about high end absorption? Do I only need to tune for reverb time if my Bonello Distro looks good?

Thanks for any help. I wont be doing corporate work and my treatment budget is pretty tight. I just want some rooms suitable for doing pro level, indie budget recording and mixing.
 
Wow. When you finally ask a question you don't fuck around.:)
 
subtractor said:
Wow. When you finally ask a question you don't fuck around.:)

I was going to ask why me left nut hangs lower than the right one but I found the answer with a search.


I was looking over the graphs again and actually my control room is okay for Bonello Distro. It is at worst ideal at 80hz but it is actually above ideal for the lower frequencies. So what now? There has to be something I'm missing :confused:
 
Hey Tex, lets see if I can take these somewhat in order -

First, you're right - you're not that lucky. I only checked the dim's on the tracking room so far, but the sheet I wrote several years ago which only does axial modes, shows that those could be better. What MODESV2 shows includes ALL modes, so the gaps in axial modes aren't causing the Bonello distribution to look as bad as seeing just axial modes. It looks like the tangential and oblique modes may do enough to smooth things out so as not to be too bad. What MODESV2 doesn't mention is that tangential modes are 6 dB weaker than Axial, and Oblique modes are 6 dB weaker than Tangential. This means that your Axial modes will be the primary factor in room colorations, and should be no closer than 5-6 hZ and no farther than about 20. Too close and they cause a peak, too far apart and they cause a hole in the room response.

While the tangential and oblique modes can help fill in response, their lower power means they have less say over the room sound. F. Alton Everest states in several of his books that for rectangular rooms, sometimes it's best to ignore the two lesser types of modes, because "by the time you put furniture and gear in the room, they change anyway..." that's an approximate quote, don't have the books near at the moment.

Corner bass traps usually won't hurt ANY room, but lower freqs get really hard to trap without large dimensions. Couches in general make pretty good bass traps - part of the reason is that they HAVE to stand away from the wall, at least part of the mass anyway - here's why - All walls, including floors and ceilings, are boundarys. By definition, unless a wall allows sound to pass through, there will be maximum sound pressure and minimum air velocity at a boundary. This is why corners are particularly bad for bass buildup - you have three walls coming together at one point, so all 3 dimensions have their peak pressure at the corner, for ALL frequencies that can't pass thru the wall.

The problem is that in order for a material to "absorb" a frequency, the wave must enter the material at near maximum velocity/minimum level, which is just the opposite part of the wave that's available at a boundary. The reason for this is that absorption works by changing acoustic energy into heat - this happens when the wave travels thru a resistance (foam, insulation board, etc) - so, if you put an acoustic resistance across a cavity and seal it so all pressure changes must pass through that acoustic resistance, the frequency that is absorbed most is the one that has its quarter-wavelength at the absorber, relative to the boundary (wall) - as an example, take 80 hZ - wavelength=1130/f, so the wavelength in feet of 80 hZ is 1130/80 or 14.125 feet. Divide by 4 to get 1/4 wavelength, and you have 3.53 feet. A trap for 40 hZ would end up about 7 feet deep.

Now, about that couch - since at least part of it sticks out into the room close to 3 feet, it will tend to absorb some fairly low frequencies because the velocity of the low freqs is high where they enter the couch, so whatever acoustic resistance the couch covering and padding presents to the wave will have much more effect than if the absorbent were right at the wall. Couches aren't generally hermetically sealed, so they won't work as well as a specifically targeted tuned absorber, but they have the added value of comfort factor. If you put the couch in first, you will need less other forms of absorption so it's a good place to start. There isn't really a scientific way to spec out a couch, since they have too many variables as to covering, padding, frames, size, etc -

As to high end absorption, as John says almost everything absorbs highs, including carpet and drapes so generally thicker foam/absorption materials should be used to even out the absorption curve. Check out the SAE site under absorbers, then click on the chart. Look at the different thicknesses of fiberglas board and note that only the 4" board has near perfect absorbtion at 125 hZ. (.99 is considered perfect) - The thicker any material, the lower frequency it will absorb compared to a thinner sample of the same material. this is due to the same phenomenon of zero velocity at boundaries, maximum velocity at 1/4 wavelength mentioned a couple of paragraphs above.

To figure the total absorption at each octave frequency for a room, you need to calculate the total area of walls/floor/ceiling, separated into each type of material, so you can find the total absorption at each frequency band and chart the total room absorption at each octave frequency. I have yet to reach this part in practical application, so I'm probably getting a little vague here.

There is another spreadsheet at

http://www.studiotips.com/

under the Calculation tools heading, download Scott's excel sabin and mode speadsheet. It isn't as self-explanatory as the MODESV2 sheet, so if you're not into spreadsheets it may not help much. Here's what little I know on absorption - 1 sabin is defined as 1 square foot of any material which reflects NOTHING at that particular frequency. A 1 square foot hole in the wall with nothing behind it to bounce things off of, would = 1 sabin at any frequency, while a 1 square foot piece of 2" foam would only be about 0.1 sabin at 125 hZ, but would be much higher at 8 kHz. theoretically, the highest sabin rating of a material can't exceed 1.0 (perfect absorption) but tests of materials sometimes come out higher than that because of boundary diffraction. Most figures are downgraded to .99 even if they test higher, since 1.00 is the highest possible real absorption coefficient.

Once you find out how many sabins at each octave band are present in your room, you can add them up and get an absorption vs. frequency chart of your room. If you have even absorption across the frequency band, the reverb of the room will be un-colored. It may still be too much or too little reverb, depending on the total amount of absorption and your desires for degree of "liveness" in the room. Too much high absorption will leave reverb tails dark and boxy, too much low absorption will suck power out of lower sounds, so you want as even absorption as you can get.

If you like the sound but the RT60 (time it takes for the sound level to be reduced by 60 dB) is too long, you need to add full bandwidth absorption to lower the RT60 without changing the balance - If the RT60 time is too short (reverb decays too soon) you need to liven up some surfaces somehow.

I know this is getting long because I'm getting tired of writing - If you really want lots more, order a copy of F. Alton Everest's Master Handbook of Acoustics, available at Amazon.com if you can't find it locally. Most of what I mentioned is covered in that book, plus a whole lot more.

I'm not trying to put you off, just fading for now - I'll check back on this thread later to see what else you want to cover, or which parts I blew the explanation on and need to re-visit... Steve
 
Steve- Thanks for the info. That helps alot.

Is the Bonello distro somewhat irrelevent then? It seems like they would account for the difference in strengths of the modes. Is that not the case?

I've put the figures into the Sabin Mode sheet but I'm not understanding some of the results.

It seems like the frequency bands with highest Sabins/SQft also seem to have a high RT60. Shouldn't those numbers be inversely proportional to eachother? If there is a high Sabin rate (absorption) for a band shouldn't there be a low RT60 (reflection)?

There is also a RTC graph. Is that the same as STC and MTC?

Is RT60 measured in seconds?

Thanks again.
 
I don't know shit about all of that techno stuff. However, a buddy of mine just remodeled his house and was describing low freq. issues similar to yours. He had found a site that talked about making low freq. resonators to handle those low freqs.

http://www.ethanwiner.com/basstrap.html

hope that helps. congrads on the new crib.
 
Tex, just got off 12-hour graveyards and have to do an extra 12 hr day shift Sat, so am not worth a shit momentarily. I'll get back to this sometime Sun. or Mon. Bonello distributions ARE supposed to take strengths into account as far as I know now, I just like to get the axials behaving first if possible after reading Everest's comments about ignoring tangentials and obliques - For some reason, dimensions that don't look real good on my roomtune sheet due to too close spacing, still seem to look OK on the MODESV2 sheet.

I tend to stick to Everest's specs of axial modes not closer than 5-6 hZ nor farther apart than 20 or so. That's kind of what Bonello seemed to have in mind, but the graphs seem to be less picky about rooms than just an Axial plot is. Haven't figured out why yet...

Gotta get some crash time so I can rest up enough to get to bed so I can get up at 4:30 manana - I'll get back to the rest of this ASAP... Steve
 
Tex, doesn't look like I'm gonna get a breather for the next week - 6 more 12 hour shifts before I get a day off and do it again.

If you go to the studiotips.com site where you got that sabin sheet, there was mention of emailing Scott Foster for clarification, or something to that effect - I saw a question on the yahoo site (the actual BBS for studiotips.com) that Scott answered for a guy, but forgot to bookmark it so I could get you there.

It sounds like you are either doing something backward, or something is wrong with the sheet.

RTC has nothing to do with STC or MTC, it stands for Reverb Time Constant, otherwise known as RT-60 most of the time.

Bonello distrib. is anything BUT irrelevant - you need proper distribution of modal response to avoid colorations. Any modes that get too close or too far away will create either peaks or holes in the response and will need treatment.

You're right about sabins - they should be inversely proportional to RT-60 at that freq.

Yes, an RT-60 of 2.5 means that it takes 2.5 SECONDS for the sound level to drop 60 dB from peak.

I've yet to actually USE the sabin sheet, so I might run into the same problems you are. Why don't you join the studiotips site and ask Scott about his sheet? Those guys are pretty good about answering questions, I only wish Eric had a translator some times. He makes a hell of an effort, and I wish I spoke Dutch as well as he speaks English; still...(sigh)

Sorry it took so long on this answer, I hope it'll do for now. The only good news about all this OT is the toys, man, the toys... Steve
 
Hi Steve, do you work in another dept. where I work?:eek: I was on 12's 6 days a week for 2 1/2 months this spring. The other depts are on it now. Gets old no matter how good the toys are. I feel for ya guy! Tell us your shopping list!

BTW steve, does volume(amplitude?level?)have any bearing on acoustics? Trying to wipe out question #40213:D No hurry, just curious:)
fitz
 
Thanks again, Steve and JR. I'll check out those sites and see if I can clear some of that up.
 
Hey Rick - only 40,213? And here I thought you were a curious kinda guy :=)

Volume vs. Acoustics - If you leave out the listener, I would tend to think NOT. Up to anything that doens't bring down walls, it would seem that absorption, etc, would be a PERCENTAGE thing.

However, bring a "Hoo-Mann" into the euation, and Fletcher-Munson rears its ugly head (Equal loudness curves) so, In that case I would say volume makes a BIG difference.

Most of that just off the top of my head, gotta go do other stuff soon... Steve
 
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