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Room acoustics

How about a thread on room acoustics and ways to improve the in-room performance of your system and its speakers? Subjects covered could be the physics of room response, measurement of response in your own room, and how to deal with imperfections, above and below the Schroeder frequency, like damping, bass traps, speaker positioning, (multiple) subwoofers, and dsp equalization. Other subjects could be how to create a room with lower background noise for greater dynamic range, building construction, or what to do in small rooms.
I am a bit busy just now, but as soon as I have time I will try to kick off with some posts and links.
willemj
toddverrone's avatar
toddverrone
840 posts
 
I've actually just started using REW and was pleasantly surprised at the measurements. I do need to tame my frequencies below 200Hz, but there don't seem to be any consistent peaks now that I've brought my orange tree in the room for the winter. The very large pot of moist soil seems to have done a beautiful job as a bass absorber. Before that, I had a few peaks that wouldn't decay..
My question is this: how do I know where to put bass traps when I make them? My guess is to generate bass tones at the problem frequencies, then walk around with an SPL meter looking for areas with the highest measurements. I'd love other ideas..
willemj OP
1,036 posts
 
Indeed Randy (I have an open plan as well), but real life rooms are almost invariably more complex than simple models. Therefore, rather than measure dimensions, I prefer to measure (and adress) the response.
toddverrone's avatar
toddverrone
840 posts
 
Oh, @willemj  , we can't post pics directly in a thread on this forum. You'll have to post pics on your systems page or on any image hosting site, then put links in your posts on this thread. Not optimal, but..
toddverrone's avatar
toddverrone
840 posts
 
And I completely agree, great thread. It seems this is more technical than most want to deal with around here, since it involves more than purchasing an item and installing it.. but we do have many members who like to dig in and who are incredibly knowledgeable, so hopefully this thread will bring that knowledge out.
willemj OP
1,036 posts
 
OK, maybe we need to look into that then, because graphs are very illustrative of potential problems. Most telling are waterfall graphs, as these show that peaks also linger on. If people talk about slow bass performance of a speaker/sub they are wrong to blame the speaker. It is the room that makes the sound linger on. And that is very audible.
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