Talk but not walk?

There was a mastering room I was doing some work on in Nashville. The engineer was remastering some SNL shows and had ordered in some new amps and speakers at the same time I was doing my thing in there. The guys from the speaker company and the mastering engineer were sold on the idea that for true staging there was a certain placement formula that needed to be used. Fine, wasn’t my gig so they did their thing and at the end of the day it sounded horrible. No one liked it, but they were determined to stay on course. A day or two later I asked if I could set things up for the heck of it, and after I got some dirty looks they said go ahead. 2 hours later it was like the SNL cast was walking through the room. Everyone was pretty freaked out and one guy super mad suggesting what I just did couldn’t happen :)

I’ve been through this same thing hundreds, probably thousands, of times in person. Same thing happened when I was a mic tech. The only formula that works is the one you create.

another Nashville example

I was tuning up a drum room and the drummer kept getting mad at me the way I was doing the miking on the kick drum. He got stuck in his head that kick drums don’t have a note but instead are raw pressure. (guess he never met "sugarfoot"). It was a long day and every time we went into the control room you could hear the kick was out of tune throwing off the bass line. Stubborn as he was we ended up retuning the room and kick and mics together. You know how I fixed it. A little thing called a pressure box.

A lot of folks in this hobby try to make full range speakers do what a room is telling them not to do. Right around 80hz and down panel speakers (all speakers) start to challenge the rooms walls density. One little move and the speakers will shift upward. You might get your staging just about right and then play another recording and there’s that range shift. People blame it on the recording or start looking for other components or start filling their rooms with traps, instead of realizing the walls in the room are having a conflict with the mechanics of the speakers. Somewhere in that room there is a pressure build up or the opposite keeping the bottom notes from fully forming. Major problem right? Nope, it’s actually an easy fix. You can get a professional Pressure Box made from me, but to take care of the basic problem you can make your own ported pressure box and move it around the room till it activates and restores the pressure in the room to balance.

At the end of the day, don’t get stuck on numbers. Learn how the control pressure. And always remember, your not hearing the speakers, but pressure. Once you start treating your room like a speaker things get a lot easier.

mg

"as it brings to the fore problems of dogma, and the stuff folks just carry around.. preventing them from looking at problems in a fresh way."

I've had clients first starting to tune completely in audiophile stuck world. They were being controlled by home brewed theories this hobby's "experts" wrote up somewhere and became fake facts. Once these same folks started to allow themselves to be their own experts their systems took huge leaps forward.

I have some listeners when they come to one of my places, I just hand them the keys and I enjoy what they come up with and the way that they tune my systems to their sound.

MG

"At the end of the day, don’t get stuck on numbers."

Numbers or understanding/developing calculations can help a person be more efficient. It is all really just patterns of interactions. They are numerous so they become inconvenient to predict, unless someone at some point puts them all together and comes up with a formula/algorithm/something that will take all of them into consideration. Until then, if it has not happened yet, we will be sticking planks on the walls and guess where they should be. And then repeat and repeat and repeat until we get the right combination. It may be fun as a hobby but it is very inefficient if someone’s goal is getting the result and not attempting to get the result. Of course, experience may shorten the experimentation, if that is one’s life calling. For those who do not have that much time, nice calculations would be way more useful.

Other fields have gone quite far with such a mathematical approach. I am not sure that room tuning is that high on this civilization’s list of priorities so maybe that is why the current approach seems to be still 15th century.

Having said that, I wrote it yesterday on another thread but it seems to be more suitable here, I just met a person who studied at the college for which Michael Green did some work on a music hall (or something in that sense). It was mentioned ad nauseam earlier in this thread.

Be it what it is, this person, completely unbiased and not particularly interested in anything regarding audiophile topics, is very impressed with acoustics of that place and the sound that is experienced there.

Hi Glupson

With anything it takes a few generations to go from hand adjustments to auto tune. But it's on it's way when listeners are ready. Might not happen in my lifetime but I've already designed the automated tunable room and system. I'm sure I'm not alone in this development. I can't imagine younger minds who have tuned are not already thinking how to incorporate what I have done into the next level. There aren't that many dots to connect when you look at auto-tuning for musical instruments.

With the HEA generation the stalling point was when they took a detour away from adjustability, but as you can see that is quickly being reversed. Sometimes old school doesn't meet new school till an innovation is well into the mainstream. I personally enjoy doing the adjustments by hand much like a musician enjoys playing their instrument, and tuning that instrument to a room and other musical instruments. For HEA though the whole plug & play thing was so heavily pounded into the brains of listeners for so long and with such a cult like loyalty the mere mention of anything variable took away from their climb to the top of the marketing food chain.

Tuning was always going to be the end game when it comes to music and electronics, but when you have a hobby that was so strong with personality types such as the EE generation produced, where numbers are God, you can see where the hold up happened and why. Think about it, we had a whole generation in this hobby who put measurement creating above listening.  Numbers are a tool but they are not a note being interpreted by the human brain and senses.

mg

I did a session at a studio in (coincidently) Studio City (in the San Fernando Valley, just over the Hollywood Hills from L.A.) and the engineer instructed me on where he wanted the drumset. That location happened to put the drum throne about 3’ from a cinder block wall, with my back to the wall. After the first "keeper" take the players went into the control room to have a listen, and I was shocked at how bad the drums sounded. All phasey and "discombobulated", the drums lacking body and tone, the cymbals way too "splashy" (they were very nice sounding Paiste 602’s).

While the engineer reconsidering his mic choices, it occurred to me, based on my awareness of comb-filtering, that the cinder block wall might be the problem. I suggested I move the drumset further away from the wall, and the engineer, though dubious, obliged me. We did another take, and went in to listen. Problem solved! Audiophiles know wall reflections can greatly affect the sound heard in a listening room, but this recording engineer wasn’t aware that the cinder block wall would affect the sound of a drumset? How many recordings had he made with drums in that location?!

At a different session (in Hollywood) a young engineer had set up the main mics, and was now considering where to place his "room" mics. When he stuck one right in the corner where two walls and the ceiling met, I knew the guy had no education in acoustical engineering. The corners, the worst sounding location in any room! I said nothing (you don’t want to get on the bad side of your engineer), and we did a take. Listening to the playback, with the corner-located room mic isolated (the engineer wanted to show-off his talents ;-), the sound was just horrid, like a speaker playing in a 50 gallon metal barrel! Instead of being proud, the engineer was embarrassed; he had revealed his ignorance of basic acoustic theory and the physics of sound. Learning on the job.