Diffuser looks cool and the bass trap was a pretty good solution. You need more surfaces to absorb sound, though. Ideally that diffuser would be behind you, to diffuse whatever comes from the speakers. Your speakers are also creating fake bass by being too close to the wall, so some foam panels behind them should help. You probably have carpet there but a rug never hurts, and a cloud panel above your seating position helps with ceiling reflection.
@fbrz84 wrote what I was going to write. I'll add a bit more. The blue wall would definitely need some absorbers. They can be a mosaic of foam or two larger decorative panel absorbers. As suggested, I'd put absorbers behind the speakers' wall, move the excellent diffuser to the back wall, and add cloud absorbers to the ceiling. Also, to give you more advice, I would have to see you sitting at the desk to ensure the speakers are at a proper height and orientation. Then, you can use the mirror method to determine the best place for the absorbers. The music area is coming along great, Bob.
i love how this channel morphed from a from a DIY channel with the premise of: "i need a bed, let me show you how to make a bed" to a product developing channel with the premise of: "i have the need for a bed, let me tell you how i got to the bed that i needed"... yes, it's a product that you needed (a bed in this example) but how you tell how it is made, makes me think true my own needs for a bed and how to design and make my own! Thanks Bob!
@@Iliketomakestuff well, there were some typo's that i have tried to edit out (hope i caught them all). so originally i wrote a whole essay about the contradiction in the idea of "show more, talk less".. and how the "talk" part also can be more related to the "storytelling" and the "show" also can mean that you show too much. as an artist & maker with a masters in audiovisual arts it just triggers me (of cours as long time making it listener, this is also the case for David and Jimmy!!!)
Sound treatment is mostly a matter of understanding what sounds bad and then preventing it. In a very rough priority order, here are the big ones. Standing waves are bad. That's when the sound bounces around a room following the same path every time. It's bad because that path reinforces some frequencies and kills others, so the room sounds odd. This path can be as simple as two parallel surfaces (and if you've ever clapped your hands in a concrete carpark and heard the "flutter echo" you'll know what I mean - it sounds like a twang). This can be broken up by diffusers, like the one you made in this video. Practical tip, sound reflects off everything, so a bookshelf is actually a great diffuser. In general terms, you don't have to make every surface have texture, just make sure that one of each parallel pair does. Also remember the floor and ceiling are parallel. There will be paths around the room that reflect off more than two surfaces, like hitting each wall at 45 degrees, but if you sort the parallel surfaces it'll probably sort these too. The next one is the amount of reverberation. A bathroom has tonnes, a walk-in robe full of clothes has far less, standing in the middle of a field has basically none. In general, there are two concerns, the amount of reverb, and the balance of it. In general, you want to land somewhere in the middle between the two extremes, and when you're writing music you want to hear more of the speakers playing your mix and less of the reverb of your room, so having a bit less reverb than a comfortable room is good. Once again, bookshelves also absorb sound pretty well. Libraries are quiet places as much because of the books as the librarians not letting anyone talk. The balance of the reverb is the other concern. If you were to take a concrete basement and put thin foam all over every wall then the high frequencies would get absorbed and the room would sound very 'dead' in the top end, but thin foam doesn't absorb bass much at all, so the low end would sound like the room was empty and be very boomy. Listening to music in such an environment would sound really odd, and it would be impossible to mix anything in there. It's hard to give simple advice on how you might actually test how balanced your room is, but I would think the bass trap you made is likely to be relatively ineffective, and even if effective is probably too small. One very very easy experiment to do is to just to try placing something that absorbs a lot of bass in the room and see if it helps - a foam mattress rolled up in a cylinder absorbs bass pretty well, as do sealed bags of fibreglass insulation (or any other type of fibre-based insulation). It's common for people to just put a sealed bag of insulation in the corner of a room as a bass trap. If you try this and you discover the make a positive difference, you can either add more bass traps, or you can remove other thinner absorbent things so the highs are less absorbed. Having a room with a little too much balanced reverb is better than less reverb that isn't balanced, as you will try and compensate when mixing, making your mixes sound funny. These strategies will get you a long way there. A sanity check it to compare how decent quality headphones sound compared to how the speakers sound at your reference location (where you sit when listening to your mixes). They will sound quite different, but both should sound relatively balanced, so that might give you some direction if your room doesn't sound great and you can't work out why. You should also listen to your mixes on lots of different headphones, speakers, places, etc, to eliminate the sound of any one environment. Also, the more you listen to music in that room, the more you'll learn the room and can get your mixes in broadly the same shape as the pros have done. Hope this helps!
A spectral frequency display view of a frequency sweep recording in the room may help visualize the most resonant frequencies in the room as well as show you a before and after contrast.
DIY PERKS has a video about this sorta stuff that might come in handy if not by directly copying it, it might give you some ideas and inspiration in terms of possibilities. I tried his method out or a rough approximation of it, and made a pretty significant difference in sound reflections in my room. Cheers.
For better understanding room acoustics I recommend the Acoustics Insider channel and some GIK Acoustics videos. My main feedback is for a Bass trap that will be effective at absorbing bass frequencies, you need lots of absorbent material that is deep to absorb lower frequencies. You’ve got a grasp of the main concepts! To see if the bass trap worked or not, you would measure the frequency response of your room with a calibrated measurement microphone and some free software like REW, before and after.
Your funky QRD diffusor looks really nice! As others have mentioned: Depending on your goals, adding more absorption in your room might help tighten the audio in your test recording. I'm building a studio right now so I am in deep on this stuff, but the general premise is that you want to cover somewhere around 20-30% of your hard surfaces with 2-4" thick panels (decent for voiceover but going 10"+ for music will help) filled with fluffy insulation (rockwool/owens corning/etc). You can do more, but this alone will start to improve the intelligibility of your audio. Acoustic treatment is a never ending rabbithole ;)
I wish you guys had the podcast this week. It's been a while and I missed hearing what is going on with you. On the positive side I am glad to see a video from you in January. Great concept with the wall piece.
@@jb76489 Thanks for your assessment of my relationship with Bob, Jimmy and David. Would you like to comment on my looks, intelligence or financial status too. Since you know me so well
Someone who knows a lot about acoustics is your fellow colleague John Heisz here on RUclips. He is mostly known for his prowess in building his own woodworking machines, but he has also built a complete room for listening to Hi-Fi Music and watching Movies.
Breaking up your big flat surfaces will help. Even a few picture frames on the wall will help (somewhat) The ceiling looks to have foam tiles so probably not a problem The biggest problem might actually be the floor since it's concrete and not carpet. This is where being messy actually helps! Leave boxes and chairs and tools and stuff out on the floor. Or if you're too tidy for that a few rugs will help.
I was a sound recording and reinforcement tech in college for a local production company. Sound is one of those things that unless you are specifically listening critically to it, you won't notice a difference between mediocre and great sound. To my ear, the biggest thing that I would correct is a little extra echo in your office. Honestly, anything to break up the flat surfaces on the wall, floor and ceiling will help. You can make baffle boxes easily enough and put those on your walls and ceiling, and I think that would be all I would add.
Happy new year Bob and team! Litrerally been thinking about exactly this recently for my music classroom - so so happy to see such a great video that explains some different ideas!
Your awesome and of course the defuser looks cool, just a guy who wants to make parts of his home or life better, and has the tools if not the knowledge or experience, totally normal, and awesome!
Very cool, Bob~! Sorry that I don't have any hints, tips, tricks, or advice...I'm just along for the ride on this one. Your channel is always an education, even in areas for which I'm very familiar. Looking forward to what comes next~!
You can use REW to take measurements of the room. That'll help identify issues and you can google the solutions. It'll all depend on what are you looking for and the use of the space. Its a good idea to cover the whole corner of the wall where your speakers are and I'd recommend absorption over diffusion behind the desk. That'll reduce any resonance and mostly phase issues. A good basic thing to do is: 1) Absorption on the wall where the desk and speakers will be (bass traps, acoustic panels you can easily make out of rockwool, etc.) 2) Diffusion behind your listening position 3) Absorption or a combination with diffusion (aka the same thing you did with the bass trap) to the left and right walls of your listening position Ensure your listening position forms an equilateral triangle with the speakers. This setup greatly enhances accuracy when working with audio. RUclipsrs with great info on this: Produce Like A Pro In The Mix WayneWav Good luck! Love your videos!
I think you have a good start. I would recommend running that same comparison while recording instruments and singing (with you and your daughter) and see what frequency range sticks out, using your ears, along with a frequency analyzer in your recording software, probably in the EQ, then find treatment for that specific range. Another factor to consider is how the sound from your speakers behaves at mixing volume. You want to avoid large frequency spikes and dips when recording AND when mixing, so that the finished product sounds fairly equal on different speakers, instead of mixing to sound good in the room, but big differences on other systems. One other consideration is how you want the sounds to go into the recording. Do you want them with no room sound, and add reverb and delay in post-production? Or does the room sound okay and you want that environmental sound in the recording? Good luck! This is a big rabbit hole, but it can be pretty fun.
For anyone looking to put diffusers in their room on a budget something that works really well which you possibly already have is bookshelves... ideally those full of books. The uneven surface that the books and shelves provide will both work as diffusers and absorbers as well (up to a point). Ultimately there isn't really a right and wrong way of doing this. Heck some people recorded part of their albums in a bathroom because the tiled surface gave them the sort of echo they were after... but try doing a podcast in a bathroom and you won't be keeping many subscribers. Doing audio treatment is a great way to find an audio mood that's uniquely yours and at the end of the day if you like it, it's all that matters.
The reason why you need a bass trap in the corner is that any collection of 3 planes at 90-degree angles to each other (or very close to 90 degrees as almost all walls aren’t perfect 90’s) have the property of being retro-reflective, meaning anything coming at them from one direction always departs them in the same exact direction, just partially translated orthogonally (in the x-y dimension when looking at the corner dead on). So you get weird resonances particularly in bass frequencies as those wavelengths are big enough across for the incoming and outgoing to overlap with one another, and powerful enough to not get much weaker with each reflection, to give you a whole mix of constructive and destructive interference depending on where you’re positioned in the space and how far you are between the corner and the source. Hope this helps when thinking about how to design things!
Absolutely LOVE that diffuser. You should just make some simple DIY acoustic panels. You should use “In The Mix” video on the subject. I built them a few years ago and make a HUGE difference. His tutorial is super simple and by far is the most cost effective one to making good panels. Rule of thumb is enough panels to cover all the walls leaving about 6-10 inch gap between them. The more panels, the more absorption. If you don’t need it as dead, 10 of them should do you fine and you’ll spend about $30-40 per panel.
A big part of effective sound treatment is total coverage area. You still have lots of huge flat surfaces that need to either be broken up, or put in absorbers. Also the densities of the foam will have an effect on what frequencies they absorb. If you want the most effective coverage for the least work, you want to figure out where the sound you expect to be dealing with will be coming from (where your mic/instrument will be placed) and then from there look at the spots where sound will first go to reflect from, and cover those areas. The next big thing will be isolating the recording room from other sources of sound - sealing door and window cracks, adding mass to hollow/thin doors. etc.
Room EQ Wizard (REW) sweeps of the room with a flat/reference mic before and after can show you real-time frequency response and decay. Easy way to prove if your traps+treatment work.
Get a custom large beach towel design printed there are lots of companies that do it these days. Then build a frame around the town where there is 3-6 inches of hollow space behind the towel. Hang it on the flat walls like art but it doubles as echo reduction. You can fill the hollow space with sound absorbing foam to take it a step further. But in my experience the framed towel works great
As soon as I saw the concept of the wood slats I immediately thought it would be cool to 3D print a top and bottom holder with a single pin sticking out, then make the frame with corresponding holes so each individual wood piece could be turned at a slightly different random angle and bounce the audio away at different angles. I would leave just enough space between each one so they would never touch no matter the angle. Don't know what effect this would have on the audio but my brain says it should work.
I once worked at an office with loud money counting machines. One thing they did to help absorb the noise in the room was cover the walls in carpet. Might be a simple trick for your office.
The second recording sounded just a bit on the bass side, and was of course lacking in certain ambient noises, from what I could hear. To be honest, the first recording wasn’t really bad, but as in any recording, the more you can control what goes in the mic, the better you can work with the sound post production. A very simple solution to help your sound is using egg crate foam, and point the irregular side away from the wall. 2 foot squares, randomly placed opposite of your masterpiece wall diffuser would help. Lovely job on your projects! I think they will make a difference!
The way to prove if the bass trap works is a calibration mic and software called REW (Room EQ Wizard). Compare a sweep with and without the bass trap in place you'll see a difference in the frequencies it impacted. Lower frequencies are bass, about 120hz and below.
To test the bass response use a tone generator and ramp the frequency up/down with the bass trap in place and without. If you hear a difference, voila! It worked. Do sweeps from say 50-500 or so. If you have hot spots in the room without the trap it will make it easier to notice! (most rooms do)
usually you want absorption behind your speakers and diffusion on the back wall behind your listening position. This gives you a natural sound with less 3rd order refection.
There is a video by DIY Perks where he makes home made wall panels using towels to prevent sound reflection, and he compares the result to professionally made panels. If I remember rightly, his home made ones were superior. Maybe watch that video and make your own, using beach towels with graphics on them as the decorative top layer...or paint onto bedsheets (or something) for the top layer to make your own designs and split it over a few frames (kind of like those triple picture things you can buy). That would be a fun project to build in itself.
Sound absorption is going to be your best friend. Upholster insolation to a wooden frame and then mount it on the wall with French cleats. Joanns fabrics is a good option as the fabric is the most expensive part.
Try the mirror trick to find out where in the room you have reflection hot spots. Sit in your listening spot, have someone else move a mirror around at speaker height, and where you can see the speaker in the mirror from your listening position, is where you need treatment.
Books are wonderful surface for diffusing sound. Walk into a busy library focusing on the sound in hallways compared to between the shelves. I suggest you add a wall of horizontal book shelves across the dark wall. Paperbacks or hardbound, it shouldn't matter. Use what you have available. Great insight, thanks for sharing.
usually you do measurements before and after by playing a frequency sweep with a microphone in a particular place as your baseline, then you do it again after the treatment with the same exact setup and compare the difference between the two (taking an absolute measurement is harder than getting a relative one) also hot tip: open-face storage (shelves, bookshelves, ect) IS a diffuser if it's full of different sized things, much more efficient use of space compared to building dedicated diffusion panels since now it's also storage for pedals and tuners and patch cables and all that.
I would recommend putting up something to absorb sound on the remaining walls. You could wrap fabric around foam or just use those foam tiles you see in studios
A really cheap and easy way to deal with the walls is to make acoustic panels. Take 2x4s and make a frame. Stretch fabric over one side. Inside the wood frame you put rockwool safe and sound batts from a home store. Then cover the back and staple it so the rockwool doesn't go anywhere. You want to add any hanging hardware frame pieces before you close it up with fabric. They're fairly lightweight and help break up the wall. I've seen a lot of tutorials using fiberglass insulation and it's a truly terrible idea. You want rockwool because it's just inert rectangle lava rock cotton candy. It doesn't really get into the air too much or poke through the fabric. You can easily move them around to tune the room vs a permanent stick on solution.
I can already hear Dennis Foley from Acoustic Fields having an absolute conniption fit about this lol. The treatment you built is visually stunning, and I think with the tools you have, you can make stuff that will make way more of a difference. There are a lot of calculators online where you can input the measurements of your room, and can help determine the best treatment. Good treatment will be incredibly noticeable, even with just some proper absorption at your first reflection points. It seems like you have a relatively good grasp on the concepts, acoustic treatment can definitely be a dark art lol. Loved the video otherwise!
Do you have space left above the acoustic drop ceiling? I would highly suggest you to just add tons of mineralwool there and focus on all the edges against the wall. Also above your desk. Look up how different mineral wool densities affect sound, you want lower density and thicker 6 inch+ generally for bass. And as always, measure with REW before and after to get a better understanding of what actually happens.
Once you get rid of the worst echoes, any other changes are going to be very subtle and barely detectable to most ears. These two additions look cool, and are probably helping to some extent, but you wont know without highly sensitive measuring equipment. Still worthy additions to the space. Thanks for sharing!
I have Abbey Road on my wall too! Mine has a wedding photo next to it (where we’re crossing a zebra-striped street), lol Also…there was even a difference in sound when you said “bouncing off that wall”, and I’m listening through a single mediocre earbud! Others may have mentioned though that your test was a bit wild because you moved a lot Also also…DIY Perks does a simple frame with, of all things, towels, which is quite effective. A screen behind the mic can help too (either purpose-built or DIY)
I feel like I would have just notched the edge of the panel for the conduit and put a split cleat on the wall but maybe that wouldn't work for some reason here.
The other big case of sound management is sound suppression through wall so it can be more ''silent'' for the other people in the living space... I wish it was this easy... But it do give me some idea for some wall panneling. I will return to the drawing table!
Rockwool acoustic panels are cheap and easy to make. Think of the big fabric covered square frames on the walls of an auditorium or big meeting room hall at a church or something.
Timing is everything... Less than an hour ago, a friend of mine just asked if i could build a diffuser for his studio. Would you share your dimensions and material costs so i can get a rough idea?
put up alot of soft fabric and stuff will stop the reflextions, Now u have hard flat surface still in the room..thats why u wouldnt notice so much right now. but it will be nice to see u doing more on this with the room :)
There's a book all about building/renovating into a recording studio. I used it myself and can't recommend it enough: "Home Recording Studio: Build it like the pros" by Rod Gervais There's a lot of really low level advice if you want to rabbithole, but there's also a lot of really good high level advice you can follow wihtout having to dig too many holes yourself.
Does the noise that LEDs make play a role in the diffusion/deflection? Or is it so minimal that it shouldn’t be too much of a disruption? Love the design. Thought for sure you were gonna make a sound wave form.
You could measure it with an app called SMARRT di, which measure density of frequency using an omnidirectional mic hooked to a computer. But that’s if you want to get granular with this.😅
I would have played a recording and seen how the waveform is attenuated. Considering speech has a wavelength of a meter or so, this likely won't have a meaningful effect (though the curved surface might?)
I don't know that I'd have made it so the slats move. How often are you really going to move them? Not worth the once or twice you might move them to introduce the rattle they'll create when a heavy truck goes down the road or a large plane flies overhead - at least not in my opinion. :)
One of the most useful things for sound absorption is a simple furniture blanket. You can shove them into frames, or stuff them in corners and they’re fairly cheap.
u lookin very berries n cream in this one dawg. rock on. you even do any guitar mods? i can't buy a guitar without switching pickups or doing something to ruin the resale value.
You can buy a measurement mic for 30-40$ and measure the room response to pink noise with a free measurement software to know if the treatment is doing anything! 😉
Diffuser looks cool and the bass trap was a pretty good solution. You need more surfaces to absorb sound, though. Ideally that diffuser would be behind you, to diffuse whatever comes from the speakers. Your speakers are also creating fake bass by being too close to the wall, so some foam panels behind them should help. You probably have carpet there but a rug never hurts, and a cloud panel above your seating position helps with ceiling reflection.
This 100%
This for sure
@fbrz84 wrote what I was going to write. I'll add a bit more. The blue wall would definitely need some absorbers. They can be a mosaic of foam or two larger decorative panel absorbers. As suggested, I'd put absorbers behind the speakers' wall, move the excellent diffuser to the back wall, and add cloud absorbers to the ceiling.
Also, to give you more advice, I would have to see you sitting at the desk to ensure the speakers are at a proper height and orientation. Then, you can use the mirror method to determine the best place for the absorbers.
The music area is coming along great, Bob.
Near wall bass gain doesn't need to be treated acoustically, there's no reason to. Just EQ it out or just enjoy the signature.
i love how this channel morphed from a from a DIY channel with the premise of: "i need a bed, let me show you how to make a bed" to a product developing channel with the premise of: "i have the need for a bed, let me tell you how i got to the bed that i needed"... yes, it's a product that you needed (a bed in this example) but how you tell how it is made, makes me think true my own needs for a bed and how to design and make my own! Thanks Bob!
You just explained that way better than I've been able to!! Thanks you so much for being here 👍🏼
@@Iliketomakestuff well, there were some typo's that i have tried to edit out (hope i caught them all).
so originally i wrote a whole essay about the contradiction in the idea of "show more, talk less".. and how the "talk" part also can be more related to the "storytelling" and the "show" also can mean that you show too much.
as an artist & maker with a masters in audiovisual arts it just triggers me
(of cours as long time making it listener, this is also the case for David and Jimmy!!!)
Sound treatment is mostly a matter of understanding what sounds bad and then preventing it.
In a very rough priority order, here are the big ones.
Standing waves are bad. That's when the sound bounces around a room following the same path every time. It's bad because that path reinforces some frequencies and kills others, so the room sounds odd. This path can be as simple as two parallel surfaces (and if you've ever clapped your hands in a concrete carpark and heard the "flutter echo" you'll know what I mean - it sounds like a twang). This can be broken up by diffusers, like the one you made in this video. Practical tip, sound reflects off everything, so a bookshelf is actually a great diffuser. In general terms, you don't have to make every surface have texture, just make sure that one of each parallel pair does. Also remember the floor and ceiling are parallel. There will be paths around the room that reflect off more than two surfaces, like hitting each wall at 45 degrees, but if you sort the parallel surfaces it'll probably sort these too.
The next one is the amount of reverberation.
A bathroom has tonnes, a walk-in robe full of clothes has far less, standing in the middle of a field has basically none. In general, there are two concerns, the amount of reverb, and the balance of it. In general, you want to land somewhere in the middle between the two extremes, and when you're writing music you want to hear more of the speakers playing your mix and less of the reverb of your room, so having a bit less reverb than a comfortable room is good. Once again, bookshelves also absorb sound pretty well. Libraries are quiet places as much because of the books as the librarians not letting anyone talk.
The balance of the reverb is the other concern. If you were to take a concrete basement and put thin foam all over every wall then the high frequencies would get absorbed and the room would sound very 'dead' in the top end, but thin foam doesn't absorb bass much at all, so the low end would sound like the room was empty and be very boomy. Listening to music in such an environment would sound really odd, and it would be impossible to mix anything in there. It's hard to give simple advice on how you might actually test how balanced your room is, but I would think the bass trap you made is likely to be relatively ineffective, and even if effective is probably too small. One very very easy experiment to do is to just to try placing something that absorbs a lot of bass in the room and see if it helps - a foam mattress rolled up in a cylinder absorbs bass pretty well, as do sealed bags of fibreglass insulation (or any other type of fibre-based insulation). It's common for people to just put a sealed bag of insulation in the corner of a room as a bass trap. If you try this and you discover the make a positive difference, you can either add more bass traps, or you can remove other thinner absorbent things so the highs are less absorbed. Having a room with a little too much balanced reverb is better than less reverb that isn't balanced, as you will try and compensate when mixing, making your mixes sound funny.
These strategies will get you a long way there. A sanity check it to compare how decent quality headphones sound compared to how the speakers sound at your reference location (where you sit when listening to your mixes). They will sound quite different, but both should sound relatively balanced, so that might give you some direction if your room doesn't sound great and you can't work out why. You should also listen to your mixes on lots of different headphones, speakers, places, etc, to eliminate the sound of any one environment. Also, the more you listen to music in that room, the more you'll learn the room and can get your mixes in broadly the same shape as the pros have done.
Hope this helps!
This guy knows what he's talking about. 10/10.
A spectral frequency display view of a frequency sweep recording in the room may help visualize the most resonant frequencies in the room as well as show you a before and after contrast.
DIY PERKS has a video about this sorta stuff that might come in handy if not by directly copying it, it might give you some ideas and inspiration in terms of possibilities. I tried his method out or a rough approximation of it, and made a pretty significant difference in sound reflections in my room. Cheers.
For better understanding room acoustics I recommend the Acoustics Insider channel and some GIK Acoustics videos. My main feedback is for a Bass trap that will be effective at absorbing bass frequencies, you need lots of absorbent material that is deep to absorb lower frequencies. You’ve got a grasp of the main concepts! To see if the bass trap worked or not, you would measure the frequency response of your room with a calibrated measurement microphone and some free software like REW, before and after.
Beautiful work, Bob! The place is looking fantastic! Really well done! 😃
Happy new year!
Stay safe there with your family! 🖖😊
DIY Perks made a good video about 5 years ago on some homemade acoustic panels that you might find interesting, Bob.
Your funky QRD diffusor looks really nice! As others have mentioned: Depending on your goals, adding more absorption in your room might help tighten the audio in your test recording. I'm building a studio right now so I am in deep on this stuff, but the general premise is that you want to cover somewhere around 20-30% of your hard surfaces with 2-4" thick panels (decent for voiceover but going 10"+ for music will help) filled with fluffy insulation (rockwool/owens corning/etc). You can do more, but this alone will start to improve the intelligibility of your audio. Acoustic treatment is a never ending rabbithole ;)
I wish you guys had the podcast this week. It's been a while and I missed hearing what is going on with you. On the positive side I am glad to see a video from you in January. Great concept with the wall piece.
Parasocial
@@jb76489 Thanks for your assessment of my relationship with Bob, Jimmy and David. Would you like to comment on my looks, intelligence or financial status too. Since you know me so well
Someone who knows a lot about acoustics is your fellow colleague John Heisz here on RUclips. He is mostly known for his prowess in building his own woodworking machines, but he has also built a complete room for listening to Hi-Fi Music and watching Movies.
Breaking up your big flat surfaces will help.
Even a few picture frames on the wall will help (somewhat)
The ceiling looks to have foam tiles so probably not a problem
The biggest problem might actually be the floor since it's concrete and not carpet.
This is where being messy actually helps!
Leave boxes and chairs and tools and stuff out on the floor.
Or if you're too tidy for that a few rugs will help.
I was a sound recording and reinforcement tech in college for a local production company. Sound is one of those things that unless you are specifically listening critically to it, you won't notice a difference between mediocre and great sound. To my ear, the biggest thing that I would correct is a little extra echo in your office. Honestly, anything to break up the flat surfaces on the wall, floor and ceiling will help. You can make baffle boxes easily enough and put those on your walls and ceiling, and I think that would be all I would add.
Happy new year Bob and team! Litrerally been thinking about exactly this recently for my music classroom - so so happy to see such a great video that explains some different ideas!
"I make everything complicated, and I'm about to do it again." needs to be on some merch 🤣
Your awesome and of course the defuser looks cool, just a guy who wants to make parts of his home or life better, and has the tools if not the knowledge or experience, totally normal, and awesome!
Very cool, Bob~! Sorry that I don't have any hints, tips, tricks, or advice...I'm just along for the ride on this one. Your channel is always an education, even in areas for which I'm very familiar. Looking forward to what comes next~!
You are an inspiration for me. Really cool video. The way you explain stuff really like it. Keep growing 😊
Functional art - you nailed it! 👏
You can use REW to take measurements of the room. That'll help identify issues and you can google the solutions. It'll all depend on what are you looking for and the use of the space. Its a good idea to cover the whole corner of the wall where your speakers are and I'd recommend absorption over diffusion behind the desk. That'll reduce any resonance and mostly phase issues. A good basic thing to do is:
1) Absorption on the wall where the desk and speakers will be (bass traps, acoustic panels you can easily make out of rockwool, etc.)
2) Diffusion behind your listening position
3) Absorption or a combination with diffusion (aka the same thing you did with the bass trap) to the left and right walls of your listening position
Ensure your listening position forms an equilateral triangle with the speakers. This setup greatly enhances accuracy when working with audio.
RUclipsrs with great info on this:
Produce Like A Pro
In The Mix
WayneWav
Good luck! Love your videos!
it look pretty bad ass i love the blue LED in the back
I think you have a good start. I would recommend running that same comparison while recording instruments and singing (with you and your daughter) and see what frequency range sticks out, using your ears, along with a frequency analyzer in your recording software, probably in the EQ, then find treatment for that specific range. Another factor to consider is how the sound from your speakers behaves at mixing volume. You want to avoid large frequency spikes and dips when recording AND when mixing, so that the finished product sounds fairly equal on different speakers, instead of mixing to sound good in the room, but big differences on other systems. One other consideration is how you want the sounds to go into the recording. Do you want them with no room sound, and add reverb and delay in post-production? Or does the room sound okay and you want that environmental sound in the recording? Good luck! This is a big rabbit hole, but it can be pretty fun.
For anyone looking to put diffusers in their room on a budget something that works really well which you possibly already have is bookshelves... ideally those full of books. The uneven surface that the books and shelves provide will both work as diffusers and absorbers as well (up to a point).
Ultimately there isn't really a right and wrong way of doing this. Heck some people recorded part of their albums in a bathroom because the tiled surface gave them the sort of echo they were after... but try doing a podcast in a bathroom and you won't be keeping many subscribers. Doing audio treatment is a great way to find an audio mood that's uniquely yours and at the end of the day if you like it, it's all that matters.
Looks amazing!
The reason why you need a bass trap in the corner is that any collection of 3 planes at 90-degree angles to each other (or very close to 90 degrees as almost all walls aren’t perfect 90’s) have the property of being retro-reflective, meaning anything coming at them from one direction always departs them in the same exact direction, just partially translated orthogonally (in the x-y dimension when looking at the corner dead on). So you get weird resonances particularly in bass frequencies as those wavelengths are big enough across for the incoming and outgoing to overlap with one another, and powerful enough to not get much weaker with each reflection, to give you a whole mix of constructive and destructive interference depending on where you’re positioned in the space and how far you are between the corner and the source. Hope this helps when thinking about how to design things!
Absolutely LOVE that diffuser. You should just make some simple DIY acoustic panels. You should use “In The Mix” video on the subject. I built them a few years ago and make a HUGE difference. His tutorial is super simple and by far is the most cost effective one to making good panels.
Rule of thumb is enough panels to cover all the walls leaving about 6-10 inch gap between them. The more panels, the more absorption. If you don’t need it as dead, 10 of them should do you fine and you’ll spend about $30-40 per panel.
A big part of effective sound treatment is total coverage area. You still have lots of huge flat surfaces that need to either be broken up, or put in absorbers. Also the densities of the foam will have an effect on what frequencies they absorb. If you want the most effective coverage for the least work, you want to figure out where the sound you expect to be dealing with will be coming from (where your mic/instrument will be placed) and then from there look at the spots where sound will first go to reflect from, and cover those areas.
The next big thing will be isolating the recording room from other sources of sound - sealing door and window cracks, adding mass to hollow/thin doors. etc.
Room EQ Wizard (REW) sweeps of the room with a flat/reference mic before and after can show you real-time frequency response and decay. Easy way to prove if your traps+treatment work.
Get a custom large beach towel design printed there are lots of companies that do it these days. Then build a frame around the town where there is 3-6 inches of hollow space behind the towel. Hang it on the flat walls like art but it doubles as echo reduction. You can fill the hollow space with sound absorbing foam to take it a step further. But in my experience the framed towel works great
As soon as I saw the concept of the wood slats I immediately thought it would be cool to 3D print a top and bottom holder with a single pin sticking out, then make the frame with corresponding holes so each individual wood piece could be turned at a slightly different random angle and bounce the audio away at different angles. I would leave just enough space between each one so they would never touch no matter the angle. Don't know what effect this would have on the audio but my brain says it should work.
Soft furnishings works wonders.Carpets, furniture etc.
Anything worth doing is worth doing to excess! That looks really cool.
Been waiting for this one!
I once worked at an office with loud money counting machines. One thing they did to help absorb the noise in the room was cover the walls in carpet. Might be a simple trick for your office.
The second recording sounded just a bit on the bass side, and was of course lacking in certain ambient noises, from what I could hear. To be honest, the first recording wasn’t really bad, but as in any recording, the more you can control what goes in the mic, the better you can work with the sound post production. A very simple solution to help your sound is using egg crate foam, and point the irregular side away from the wall. 2 foot squares, randomly placed opposite of your masterpiece wall diffuser would help.
Lovely job on your projects! I think they will make a difference!
The way to prove if the bass trap works is a calibration mic and software called REW (Room EQ Wizard). Compare a sweep with and without the bass trap in place you'll see a difference in the frequencies it impacted. Lower frequencies are bass, about 120hz and below.
To test the bass response use a tone generator and ramp the frequency up/down with the bass trap in place and without. If you hear a difference, voila! It worked. Do sweeps from say 50-500 or so. If you have hot spots in the room without the trap it will make it easier to notice! (most rooms do)
With the diffuser there is a little more presence but it’s very slight. It looks cool though!
Awesome build
usually you want absorption behind your speakers and diffusion on the back wall behind your listening position. This gives you a natural sound with less 3rd order refection.
There is a video by DIY Perks where he makes home made wall panels using towels to prevent sound reflection, and he compares the result to professionally made panels. If I remember rightly, his home made ones were superior.
Maybe watch that video and make your own, using beach towels with graphics on them as the decorative top layer...or paint onto bedsheets (or something) for the top layer to make your own designs and split it over a few frames (kind of like those triple picture things you can buy).
That would be a fun project to build in itself.
Sound absorption is going to be your best friend. Upholster insolation to a wooden frame and then mount it on the wall with French cleats. Joanns fabrics is a good option as the fabric is the most expensive part.
Try the mirror trick to find out where in the room you have reflection hot spots.
Sit in your listening spot, have someone else move a mirror around at speaker height, and where you can see the speaker in the mirror from your listening position, is where you need treatment.
I'm glad you were able to work around that conduit. My OCPD wouldn't let me....I'd have to move it..........somehow
Books are wonderful surface for diffusing sound. Walk into a busy library focusing on the sound in hallways compared to between the shelves. I suggest you add a wall of horizontal book shelves across the dark wall. Paperbacks or hardbound, it shouldn't matter. Use what you have available.
Great insight, thanks for sharing.
usually you do measurements before and after by playing a frequency sweep with a microphone in a particular place as your baseline, then you do it again after the treatment with the same exact setup and compare the difference between the two (taking an absolute measurement is harder than getting a relative one)
also hot tip: open-face storage (shelves, bookshelves, ect) IS a diffuser if it's full of different sized things, much more efficient use of space compared to building dedicated diffusion panels since now it's also storage for pedals and tuners and patch cables and all that.
Looks awesome. Would be awesome if you could find a way to put servos or motors on the cleats and have them move with the sound.
I would recommend putting up something to absorb sound on the remaining walls. You could wrap fabric around foam or just use those foam tiles you see in studios
A really cheap and easy way to deal with the walls is to make acoustic panels. Take 2x4s and make a frame. Stretch fabric over one side. Inside the wood frame you put rockwool safe and sound batts from a home store. Then cover the back and staple it so the rockwool doesn't go anywhere. You want to add any hanging hardware frame pieces before you close it up with fabric. They're fairly lightweight and help break up the wall. I've seen a lot of tutorials using fiberglass insulation and it's a truly terrible idea. You want rockwool because it's just inert rectangle lava rock cotton candy. It doesn't really get into the air too much or poke through the fabric. You can easily move them around to tune the room vs a permanent stick on solution.
I can already hear Dennis Foley from Acoustic Fields having an absolute conniption fit about this lol.
The treatment you built is visually stunning, and I think with the tools you have, you can make stuff that will make way more of a difference.
There are a lot of calculators online where you can input the measurements of your room, and can help determine the best treatment. Good treatment will be incredibly noticeable, even with just some proper absorption at your first reflection points.
It seems like you have a relatively good grasp on the concepts, acoustic treatment can definitely be a dark art lol. Loved the video otherwise!
Anyways, the video was good.
Thanks for your honesty.
Bob, don't ever stop including the blooper reel
Great timing! I'm setting up my office to podcast and struggling with sound.
Do you have space left above the acoustic drop ceiling? I would highly suggest you to just add tons of mineralwool there and focus on all the edges against the wall. Also above your desk. Look up how different mineral wool densities affect sound, you want lower density and thicker 6 inch+ generally for bass. And as always, measure with REW before and after to get a better understanding of what actually happens.
Bob, with your love of music creation - do you write and perform your own 'build music' that we hear during montages and so forth?
Definitely a cool big piece! The bass trap looks like an alien thing
I don't know anything about sound diffusion, but it looks cool!
Can always change the sub ceiling to different height pieces for absorption. Since they prolly are already absorbing lot of sound.
Once you get rid of the worst echoes, any other changes are going to be very subtle and barely detectable to most ears. These two additions look cool, and are probably helping to some extent, but you wont know without highly sensitive measuring equipment. Still worthy additions to the space. Thanks for sharing!
nice work.
Awesome video! I’ve always wanted to setup a room in my house for sound! Thanks for all the inspiring content!! What’s on your pedalboard?
I have Abbey Road on my wall too! Mine has a wedding photo next to it (where we’re crossing a zebra-striped street), lol
Also…there was even a difference in sound when you said “bouncing off that wall”, and I’m listening through a single mediocre earbud! Others may have mentioned though that your test was a bit wild because you moved a lot
Also also…DIY Perks does a simple frame with, of all things, towels, which is quite effective. A screen behind the mic can help too (either purpose-built or DIY)
I feel like I would have just notched the edge of the panel for the conduit and put a split cleat on the wall but maybe that wouldn't work for some reason here.
13:50 If that's an AT2050 then it has a switch between "cardioid" - "omnidirectional" - "figure 8" pick-up patterns.
You might be able to see the difference in an audio spectrum analyzer. I use one of these when hunting down an audio issue.
The other big case of sound management is sound suppression through wall so it can be more ''silent'' for the other people in the living space... I wish it was this easy... But it do give me some idea for some wall panneling. I will return to the drawing table!
Rockwool acoustic panels are cheap and easy to make. Think of the big fabric covered square frames on the walls of an auditorium or big meeting room hall at a church or something.
Timing is everything... Less than an hour ago, a friend of mine just asked if i could build a diffuser for his studio. Would you share your dimensions and material costs so i can get a rough idea?
put up alot of soft fabric and stuff will stop the reflextions, Now u have hard flat surface still in the room..thats why u wouldnt notice so much right now. but it will be nice to see u doing more on this with the room :)
Use an EQ and check the waves/record and view frequency differences as you make continued changes?
This won't change the sound in the room, but would sure look cool.... paint the ceiling black! Wooooot! :)
15:58 That IS a very cool looking thing! Beautiful natural wood with awesome backlighting AND it serves a functional purpose. Great job!
There's a book all about building/renovating into a recording studio. I used it myself and can't recommend it enough: "Home Recording Studio: Build it like the pros" by Rod Gervais There's a lot of really low level advice if you want to rabbithole, but there's also a lot of really good high level advice you can follow wihtout having to dig too many holes yourself.
Does the noise that LEDs make play a role in the diffusion/deflection? Or is it so minimal that it shouldn’t be too much of a disruption? Love the design. Thought for sure you were gonna make a sound wave form.
1st thing you'd need is to make sure that mo 2 surfaces are parallel. So the room must be all wonky and the ceiling must hang at an angle...
Wow you have a Mark I Rhodes!
You could measure it with an app called SMARRT di, which measure density of frequency using an omnidirectional mic hooked to a computer. But that’s if you want to get granular with this.😅
Did I maybe notice a change while you were talking as you were installing the bass trap?
Do you think any of these ideas would help cut down on the noise in a small workshop?
Man, I wish I could get a proper soundspace. But it takes so much room and proper equipment is like prohibitively expensive.
Bob looks like a college professor that parties with the students. 😂
The pro audio mob is going to roast the snot out of this. I like the diffuser though.
I would have played a recording and seen how the waveform is attenuated. Considering speech has a wavelength of a meter or so, this likely won't have a meaningful effect (though the curved surface might?)
I don't know that I'd have made it so the slats move. How often are you really going to move them? Not worth the once or twice you might move them to introduce the rattle they'll create when a heavy truck goes down the road or a large plane flies overhead - at least not in my opinion. :)
11:59 that's what I thought 😂
Love your videos. In this case I think you should observe the KISS method and just install preformed audio foam squares.
Not sure if I hear the difference, but it does look cool
Don’t forget the ceiling!
Wether it did anything for sound IDK but it looks cool
One of the most useful things for sound absorption is a simple furniture blanket. You can shove them into frames, or stuff them in corners and they’re fairly cheap.
Put big heavy curtains on the walls
Seems like a great opportunity for a collaboration with John Heisz. I'd suggest you to look up his channels and see if there's an opportunity.
My tip: Press record and make sure it's recording before speaking!
I noticed a change in your voice from before you hung corner thing and as you hung it
cool beans
New year new beans!
C.O.O.L. B.E.A.N.S.
u lookin very berries n cream in this one dawg. rock on. you even do any guitar mods? i can't buy a guitar without switching pickups or doing something to ruin the resale value.
Random but are you related to The Wheezy Waiter? You have such similar speaking tone and cadence.
You can buy a measurement mic for 30-40$ and measure the room response to pink noise with a free measurement software to know if the treatment is doing anything! 😉
That foam will do next to nothing for bass. You need to use something like mineral wool and >6 inches of it.
You need more absorption panels