DIY home studio sound improvements

[jonnybutter]

Just my 2c (or 1c!)

I moved about a year ago into a well treated room - bass traps and diffusion mainly. It made an enormous difference in my ability to mix, because I can hear much better what's going on now. And after I got the room set up, the one way I instantly improved on *that* was to move my audio monitors away from the back wall several feet. As has been said, no set up is going to be perfect, but you can do a lot to make things workable.

You can build your own bass traps pretty cheaply, and it's not that hard. I'm not very handy, but even *I* could do it. I like Ethan Winer for everything acoustic, and his DIY is here: http://audioundone.com/do-it-yourself-bass-traps, but just google it and there are several how-tos.

[Gator]

Would be advantageous at all for me to place the monitors on the wall six feet behind me instead, or should I focus on keeping the good speaker/seat triangle I've got going on now? My mixes are often too bright, partially because of my room and partially because of my bad right ear, so I apparently overcompensate. Any suggestions are greatly appreciated. I have a few moving blankets handy so I'm hoping this will work.

Hi Paulie
Sorry for such a late reply. I dont usually use the forums but I want to start using them to learn. Im no expert at all but mind if I throw in my 10 cents worth? Why did mike suggest a blanket? It may have to with the material in it. Up until recently i was using normal packing foam for absorbers. Then i saw a great Taxi TV interview the other day with an engineer who mentioned that this foam only deals with higher frequencies so stay away from it. One of the guys already mentioned that building insulation material is brilliant. Mineral wool is apparently fantastic which is also building insulation. For God's sake dont go buying any specialist audio treatments. It's probably building insulation material with a fancy name AND price.
Where to put your absorbers? This is a tough one for all of us as we dont have fancy recording studios. We are recording in the same house we live in so we dont want to go drilling holes in the walls etc. But basically, the wall behind you is where your monitors are bouncing the sound off. You can eyeball it but you can also sit in your chair and get a friend to move a mirror around that back wall. When you can see your monitors in the mirror..thats your reflection point and your absorber should go there.
Monitors. Never put them up against that wall. Move them out a foot or so. Your two monitors and your ears should form an equal triangle. And yes, the monitors from what i understand should be ear height...not above your height or below.
Your pic looks similar to my setup and that means one problem that we cant deal with. Our corners are not empty so we are getting bass build up there. Studios use bass traps for this but their corners are free of TVs, armchairs, sofas blah blah. There's not a lot I can do about this in my home. Perhaps its the same for you. Dont turn your room into a padded room by the way. You do need absorption but dont deaden your room. Fortunately you have a lot of items there acting as diffusers. This will help preventing direct ricochetting of sounds. So that's my 10 cents Paulie. Hope there's something useful in there.
Xave

[mojobone]

If you're stuck with a small room, there's no help for it; compromises must be made. The way nearfields are supposed to work means the equilateral triangle is most important, next is getting your speakers out of the boundary effect, away from the wall. There are ways of mounting absorption panels impermanently, and some prefab acoustic panels are designed to be freestanding, but just placing your monitors on stands, rather than shelves is a rather large and relatively cheap improvement, I've found. I could go into all the reasons, but you could buy Mike Senior's book.

My former monitor situation (one of them, anyway) involved a matched pair of wooden shelving units that happened to be at the proper height, relative to my sorta low mix chair, and I used Primacoustic recoil stabilizers to try to isolate the speakers from the shelves, BUT...it didn't work as well as cheap stands that I found on Musician's Friend's Stupid Deal Of The Day. Really, a flat wooden base with some sort of leveling scheme and heavy cardboard or PVC tubes filled with sand and sealed with silicon adhesive, topped by another wood platform, then the recoil stabilizers could offer significant improvement, IF you can just manage to pull them out from the wall by a couple feet. In my particular case, raising the speakers by a few inches probably also helped a lot, because of the way sounds propagate and bounce around a room; the last thing you want is to have a driver located equidistant between the floor and ceiling, and in their former position, the tweeters were pretty close to that.

After that, you can worry about live end/dead end and diffusers and whatnot, which of course, you should. Your first two absorbers should be directly behind the monitors and the next should be directly above the mix chair. Have an eye toward making everything as symmetrical as possible; you might could use a laser level, even if you're in a space where nothing is quite squared up. (most square/rectangular rooms aren't, really, and old floors tend to sag in the middle)

One of the weirdest setups I've seen involved eye bolts screwed into ceiling beams from which hung a pair of macrame baskets (the kind people use to hang plants) suspended by coil springs. As a means of isolating monitor speakers from pretty much anything that could resonate or buzz sympathetically, it worked surprisingly well.

[Paulie]

So I've now got rubber plavcemat material on my desk, two landscaping bricks as the platform standing on end like books, then on top of them another layer of rubber placemebtm then 3/4" gray foam, then the speaker. the speakers are pointing at my chair, and about 5-6" behind the speakers on the wall I've mounted rectangles of egg carton patterned foam like you put on a mattress (3" from back to cone tip).

Seems to make a difference.

[mojobone]

Open cell egg crate foam is nigh-useless other than for maybe damping flutter echoes at relatively high frequencies, but given that your monitors are desktop size, you may not need damping down into the bass range. It might be that a DIY solution is not for you; maybe get something like this: http://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/ISOL8R130 You can angle the speakers upward, pull them toward you, away from the wall and still get your equilateral triangle happening and your drivers won't be parallel to the walls and desktop. You'll still be fighting reflections from the desk and the back wall, judging by the pic. I've heard it said that you can learn any mix environment, given time, but this is an instance where some graphics may be of help. Maybe borrow a measurement mic, download some software and a pink noise sample and shoot your room. An iPhone or Android app might be the cheapest alternative, though there's some free software available. At the end of the day, you may end up using headphones to check out your lows.

[andygabrys]

Open cell egg crate foam is nigh-useless other than for maybe damping flutter echoes at relatively high frequencies,

unfortunately I agree and most of the room wizards like Ethan Wiener et al agree too.

[lesmac]

Below is a quote from a Gearslutz thread by member 'DanDan' and a link from the same thread to a room mode calculator.

I wouldn't sweat the Measurement thing too much. It is great at indentifying optimum positions and so on. However, you will not see a noticeable change in the curves with the addition of each trap. You will see a difference when you do something big, say two corners, floor to ceiling. The basic treatment plan, as much Bass Trapping as possible in corners, then RFZ, including overhead, remains the same. We don't need to Measure the problems to know where the corners are.
We all need convincing now and again. Run a mode calculator with your room dimensions. Pick the lowest three modes. Play a sine of each in your room, tweak the frequency slightly. Resonance is very obvious. Move about, to the back, up to the ceiling, to the corners. You will be amazed how strong the effects are. This will show you where the trapping should be and why you need so much.

http://www.hunecke.de/en/calculators/ro ... modes.html

To find the best spot to start with you could play a mono full range source through one speaker while someone moves it slowly around the part of the room you are monitoring in. Keep everything symmetrical in relation to the room and your listening triangle [which may vary depending on your optimum choice]. Most recommend having your head central to the side walls.
So say we are moving your right speaker make sure you can mirror your left speaker in relation to room boundaries while still having an equilateral triangle. Keep the tweeter at ear height. The further you monitor over 75dB the more you will notice the room modes coming into play.

Something similar you could do is run some pink noise from one speaker and record with a mic placed at potential ear positions. Route that track to an unused output, not the main outs, to prevent howl around. Open a frequency analyser on the record enabled track and find the position with the smoothest response at higher volume levels.

Bricks and rubber mat are the way the way I went too.

[Paulie]

Thanks everyone, I do notice a difference with what I've got up so far, probably from the material under the speakers, not so much from the foam behind it. I might try moving my desk away from the wall about a foot... it will look weird, but I've never been big on looks.