In-Room responce measurement with Legacy Focus SE speakers

OP:

Don’t go buying OmniMic because I use it. REW had similar capabilities, you just have to check the settings when you do a sinusoidal sweep. There’s usually some parameter that say "stop listening after x milliseconds" I’m just not familiar enough with REW. That’s the gating limit. There’s possibly/probably also a way to blend the gated measurements with the ungated for bass. That’s something OmniMic just does out of the box but I’m pretty sure REW has something similar.

Alternatively, if you ARE using REW with the gating turned on, it will cut the bass response off.

......however, get this.....in doing a REW frequency sweep at the seated position, there was NO change in bass room frequency response! Yet, you can easily hear maybe 15% more "bass"!!

I did mention that the frequency response measurements would not help you in this case. 😀

This has to do with hour our ear/brain integrates signal volume over time. That is, the perception of bass, mid, treble levels is an average over time as opposed to an instantaneous measure. With very live rooms like yours we perceive mid/treble as much louder because it’s staying with us longer. The total energy is Direct Sound + Sound from up to 0.6 seconds ago = 1.4x amount of perceived sound (as an example).

Our ear/brain mechanism is exposed to a lot more of that energy during a listening session. As we move to cut the reflection times out the total energy there gets cut, and now we hear bass.

But oh man do some people have a really difficult time with this concept. 🤣

Also worth noting that studies have shown that having meetings in highly reflective rooms is literally exhausting. Your brain has to spend so much time listening through the reverb that it tires itself out making it harder to concentrate by the end of a lecture or meeting. If you’ve ever gone home after a long meeting feeling totally drained you probably had this to blame.

This is why colleges repeatedly invest in sound absorption in lecture halls.

@erik_squires I the Earthworks Mic. It is not USB, but it does not require a calibration curve because it is dead flat and smoothly omnidirectional.

@erik_squires "Also worth noting that studies have shown that having meetings in highly reflective rooms is literally exhausting."  Yup, I think we have all experienced that first hand in bars and restaurants, and theaters.  That's why when my father said "I don't like listening to music above "X" setting----I don't need to listen loud---it's just too aggravating", but I thought 'man I can barely really hear it, and for sure can't FEEL music?!!?', then checked on the DB meter and it was at 64+ DB, I knew it was the room acoustics. 

I work in wildland fire, and one year we had to stay at a fire camp that was in a school.  The Incident Team thought it would be great to have everyone sleep in the gymnasium.  I told my crew "no way....we'll find a different spot outside, even if it rains a little".  Couple crew said 'no way, I'm not risking getting wet, I'm going in the gym!'  Well, shove 800 fire fighters in a gym, and SNORING, and NO ONE is sleeping.  One of the guys ended up coming outside.  Next morning he said it was like being in a zoo enclosure. 

@mark200mph I am really glad for your comment!  I was hoping enough folks would be able to chime in and make this educational.  I'm trying to learn what web site to use to host images that I can post in here so folks can see some of what is going on.