Acoustic Treatment

[recordingpro]

Based off of our brief discussion of acoustics when talking about selecting studio monitors, I was wondering.... just how many people in the home studio market are concerned with acoustics, and what are most people doing about it? I work with a lot of home studios, so I think I have an idea of what most people are doing, but I'm interested in some specific feedback from the masses here!

[Alexander]

Ok, I'll go here...let's even include 'commercial' facilities in this. I've been to many a pro studio where they've sure looked nice with acoustic treatment as far as the eye can see and with a line up of gear to make you cry, but sounded really quite bad. Has anyone else noticed this?

[Coerce]

Proper acoustics relies upon a thorough understanding of acoustic principles and the ability to obtain accurate data on what is going on within an environment. I would guess that most project studios don't have the means to obtain accurate measurements and some don't know what to do with it if they do. Not to knock but it can take years to understand this stuff. Even the big designers have really goofed with some rooms.

As for what they are doing I think you may see a lot of acoutical foam products up on the walls with the intent on being more sound reduction than balancing acoutsics. I'll bet that is the problem when you have a room that doesn't translate well outside of that particular room (which is also a common complaint from begining studio enthusiasts).

[SR1200]

Building my studio into my home, I had to be more concerned with keeping the sound IN the room (becuase of neighbors and family members that live in the house) I have noticed this is the case will almost ALL the home studios ive seen with more than one room to record. A few studios ive seen are just a well planned (or not so well planned) stack of gear in a corner of a room. Depending on the purpose of the studio, this can work quite well.
I had the luxury of having the enitre basement of my home to myself to build double walls with sound absorbing drop cieling tiles and other cool things (such as rounded corners on all the walls in the controll room and a 20 space rack that hangs from my cieling at an angle and acts as a splayed cieling. For my tracking room, i figured that i would be using outboard gear for reverb so I made the room as DEAD as possible. For close micing its GREAT! For ambient micing.... its ok (i get a different tone.... but i dont get a room sound (back to the reverb units)) I simply put up carpet instead of wall paper. (the room isnt that big, so rather than eat up more room with acoustic foam i used thin indoor/outdoor carpeting) The walls themselves were inulated with industrial foamcore, homasote and sheetrock (and some of them have fiberglass inside as well between the studs)
So I guess for me.... acoustics were a consideration for the control room, but diffusion was the goal of the tracking room

[mightypudge]

When assembling my studio, soundproofing was also the primary focus.

When I was designing my work space I had to assume that I would be using one room for both recrding and monitoring. I also knew that I would probably be recording 99% of my instruments direct. Building a very "live" space would have been great for recording but disastrous for monitoring. Therefore out of necessity I designed a relatively dry space, perfect for monitoring mixes.

The point is that in the home studio market, acoustic treatment takes on a slightly different meaning than in the professional market where you are dealing with several rooms that will ultimately serve different functions in the recording process.

[shaneperc]

Also, if you don't have clients coming into your studio, and if the acoustics aren't TOO wild, a cheap and effective fix to dry up a room is just to use your studio space for storage. Get all those boxes of junk out of your garage and put them in your recording space in random patterns along the walls (but not touching the walls). It makes the studio look like hell, but cardboard boxes filled with heavy items do a good job of diffusing flutter and echo. It also affects the sound more evenly across the frequency range than carpeting the walls, and there will still be some amount of ambiance left over. If you just carpet the walls, you'll probably end up with a boomy sounding room with no ambiance (which may or may not be a good thing for you).

So there you go. An acoustically improved recording space, and a clean garage to boot!

(I hate replying to a thread from months ago, but maybe someone will eventually read this.)

[Alexander]

Thanks for your reply. That's a great 'low cost' suggestion. Card board boxes actually do work pretty well and it's great being able to tune the room with various sizes of boxes. You can have fun filling the boxes with various materials too. It does look pretty cluttered eventually but hey, while your saving the pennies for legit treatment, why not? I really wish this thread were more active. My fear is that the industry has moved so much toward the need for the "perfect" signal path that in general we've forgotten about preparing the environment to accommodate the gear we use. True, wall treatment doesn't have cool flashing lights and all but if you can't hear what your gear is really doing to the sound, where I'm from that translates into "you've just wasted a lot of money" I stand unwaveringly that if your environment is messing with your sound destructively then you'll never get a mix that sounds the same outside your studio as it did in the studio unless you've spent a lot of time teaching your ear to compensate for flutter echo and comb filtering, standing waves and the like.
Summary,.... spending a lot of cash for that .0001 of whatever in the latest piece of gear is not as critical (because you WON'T hear it) as putting the same cash towards acoustics. There are people who spend their lives learning how to control sound and they are available to help you know what treatments you need for your room. Let's make use of them...the listening audience will be much happier if we do.

[shaneperc]

I agree. The best sounding recording setups are always planned from the outside of the signal path (room) towards the center (recorder). Many people try to implement this philosophy when they build their home studio, but they really consider the microphone the most important link in their recording gear.
I've heard stories of some people getting into their room so much that they don't even need external processors. No reverb, no compression, not even an EQ. I'd love to get to that point!

[Alexander]

Years ago I had the privilege to engineer at a studio that was as close to acoustically perfect as my ear has heard to date and it was a dream to record and mix/master there. The room was very flattering and I could pull the mics way back to include the (adjustable) room sound with beautiful results. It sure made my job easier. It really helped me hone my mic placement skills. Proper mic placement eliminated the need for a lot of corrective EQ because I could use the mic as a EQ.
They did bring in an Acoustician to design the studio. Since working there and experiencing what a balanced/tuned room sounds like (and having worked in several beautiful but horrible sounding rooms too) I haven't been able to ignore this topic.