Acoustic Measurements: Some bad advice. - AcousticsInsider.com
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- Опубликовано: 3 окт 2024
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Have you ever posted on a forum (or read someone's post) about how to get started treating your room, and the echo chamber responded:
"You gotta measure your room first!"
I keep reading this over and over again, and every time I think:
Great, another soul lost down the rabbit hole. See you in six months!
If there's one piece of advice I vehemently disagree with, it's that you should measure your room before you do anything else.
Over and over again I just see it lead to confusion, overwhelm and time wasted.
Sometimes it keeps people from getting started with anything at all, scared to make a mistake and screw everything up. While getting started and gaining experience is THE most important thing you can do when it comes to acoustics!
So this week, a slight rant from my side, but also how to think about measurements and include them more productively when treating a home studio DIY style.
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Nailed it. The before/after measurements are "is the treatment working", not "what treatment do I need".
Agree that the pre treated measurement is bonkers but I'm glad I did an empty room sweep. It's pretty cool to see the difference in the waterfall after treatment was added. Then of course, subsequent sweeps helped properly position the panels and listening position. Thanks Jesco!
I agree, I always start with a measurement to get an basis for the following tasks. It is clear that measurement does not tell you what to do next.
About that "pop the hood" part. That happened to me. I was abroad, holiday trip. We rented a car and drove it pretty far, when suddenly, the engine started behaving funny, and the car was throwing "houston we have a problem" error messages at us. Well, we stopped it, popped the hood, and after a minute or so we found the culprit - a spark plug wire has fallen off.
So, despite neither of us was a car mechanic (though i am a pretty technical person, and have a general idea about how cars function), we managed to fix the car - we reattached the wire, and drove around happily for the rest of the holiday.
So, there's nothing wrong with popping the hood. Of course, many issues are not fixable without knowledge and tools, but some are!
But what if you face problems at your listening position and don’t know what to do?
My attic is about finished. The work on the room is done and slowly I’m installing my system. Installed the two main speakers and slammed on a CD. No lows at my seat!!!!
One meter to the left or right enough bass. That’s what I want but in my listening position.
What’s going on?
Probably massive standing waves. It’s not the biggest room and dropping and peaks in bass through the room. Learned it from your videos.
So now what. Just fiddle around building bass traps and other absorbers or make a measurement and get some indication of what the bass is doing in the room?
I agree I don’t have to spend a complete weekend on measuring but some indication sets you in the right direction. That’s what I think
Wait, I thought you were stopping with the 'voodoo' catchphrase?
I like how clean your voice sounds in that room.
I always value your opinion! I'm doing a studio build from scratch early next year, stand alone building so lots of potential to get it right/wrong :)
Jesco, how do you mount the diffuser on your door without ruining the door?
Don't need to measure - Yes, that is bad advice! Either way, I like your videos.
I found that an iterative back and forth measuring and listening process was very helpful and the data that I collected was most useful for things like reflection and sound stage accuracy. SPL measurements we're much harder to interpret based on what was in the room, but a process of adding or subtracting a large amount of bass traps would obviously move a certain part of the frequency spectrum. Often it was very helpful to focus the measurement on a particular frequency and then move what I thought would be the Sonic lever related to that frequency. That was very productive and it was not too complicated.
Thanks Jesco. Joined ur email list a while ago and these videos helped me a ton!
What if we drill a Hole from our listening room to a much bigger room. What would be cons and pros as sound pressure decreases ?
i have now experience with measurement and without, it has barely made a dent having a measuring mic. i still need to do the listening with a tone generator and music to make it sound good. its mostly the same with acoustics i would think, no need to measure and plan for acoustic panels, there is no perfect number of panels, get more than enough and start filing the space. almost all issues in a room gets better with more absorption.
Man... I did the bass chaser thing and had a fantastic phantom center picture. Then I measured my room and started fiddling with things. It's really not much different than following your first two steps. Moving my pseudo traps did change the graphs, though. The measurements from now on will only be after I add or move panels around.
Hey Jesco. You said that no measurements could tell us where to put what treatment. What about a room acoustic cartography ? Does it fall into the "too heavy" basket or do you think its not reliable ?
To be honest I just did mine a few weeks ago. That was really painful (160 measures taken!) but in the end I thought I was able to analyze where and what frequencies must be treated, which helped me plan the resonators / bass traps and choose their size and placement. What are your thoughts about this ? Be honest please, I dont mind hearing I wasted some time. It's part of the learning process that's all ! Thanks for sharing btw, I owe you the listen position and speakers placement ! ;) Cheers.
I would like to know your thoughts on the Steven Slate VSX.
Hi Jesco. I have a question for you. I'm starting my own room treatment, as i got some GUTEX isolation for free. I found that it has a high flow resistivity (50 000). The porous absorber calculator told me that its not much use to make 20cm panels with that, so I was thinking of buying some rockwool (flow resistivity 10 000) to put in the panels as well. Is it useful to combine these materials? Which one should I place in front? Does combining them provide a flow resistivity of 30k? Or should I ditch the GUTEX isolation and make the panels purely out of rockwool?
measurements will help to track progress as you add treatment.
Sonarworks seem to have the multi-location thing nailed. Sticking the mic just in the listening position and just taking readings in that single position never seemed sensible to me because neither ear will be in that location.
A guy said in a video today “if your room is cancelling some frequencies out, and Sonarworks heard that that particular frequency is low, it will boost the frequency and make the issue worse” and I thought that was quite interesting.
@@domdraper3221 yep, it can't work miracles but because it spreads the sample points around (and has a large number of them) it is less vulnerable to antinodes than alternatives that keep the mic planted in the hot-spot. The other issue is the capabilities of the speaker system - those little 5" (or less) powered monitors don't have the grunt to overcome their own excessive porting let alone room issues!
Your vides are great and I agree with you on most things but your could have made better analogys in this video. I am going to give you 1 star out of 10 on the car breaking down analogy. When your car breaks down don't open the hood because your not a mechanic and your never fix it because that is not how it works .... lol. When you have a problem you need to troubleshoot and the issue could be an easy fix under the hood.
👍👍!!
Hi, and thank you for the video,
Do you have any piece of scientific evidence supporting the claims at the end of your video ? (i.e. that our perceptions differ somewhat from what a microphone can grasp, and that measurements do not reflects our perceptions)
Because apart from mask effects and the gammatone filter-like human sound perception (which can be simulated with a bank of filters), I do not know of any phenomenon justifying such claims (but I may be mislead, or lack of knowledge on the topic).
If you want to just treat with a tuned Helmholtz or tuned membrane traps types.
Then "you DIYers" need to measure first to know what target frequency you should tune those types of treatments (otherwise they will not be efficient there they need to be in the frequency band).
Yeah, generally speaking for the other more common types of std acustical panels this video is a good advice.
But it is dependent on what type of treatment is planned to be used.💕🎵🎶
Dude every time my shitty cars have broken down I’ve popped the hood and either fixed it or found the problem. I’m not sure how you think people access the motor etc 😂😂😂😂
I disagree. At least its good practice to record and store a sweep and pink noise from a standard position as a 'before.benchmark. Its also good for the newbie to get familiar with the process. But I do agree that listening with awareness is even more important. But otherwise this is interesting. Its OK to disagree.