Building a Home Studio part II (My Recording Space)
How do I balance building a home studio in the same space as my living room? Where do gear and aesthetics have to conced to each other? Can I balance having a room to entertain guests in and have a recording studio in the same space?
I just purchased monitors for my studio, so I figured this would be a good time to go into the acoustics of my recording space. They're not the best, but they're not bad. Since this space is also my living room I have to make the trade off between living room and home studio. It has to look good, so no gray foam covering the walls.
The room is 18 x 11 x 8 feet tall. I dropped the inches because I did the measurements a while ago and I don't remember them. This leads to approximate axial room modes of 30, 50, and 70 hz respectively, and problems at 150 and 210 hz. I was running some audio calibrations on my speakers and noticed a bit of a hump around 110hz, but that could've been the speakers or even my ears. 110 is around 4 times 30 and twice 50, so it's possible that that was a room mode that was activated. I'll have to run more tests to see which it is.
The room is set up the long way, though it used to be set up the short way. We changed it around when we acquired some wall units from my sister and even my girlfriend noticed the difference. Set up the long way, the room does sound better than the short way.
Where the couch is, my head is around 10-11 feet from the wall if I'm leaning back, a couple less if I'm leaning forward or sitting on the floor. I'm appprox 8 feet from the speakers, and the speakers are currently 4 feet apart, though I'd like to bring them farther apart to at least 5 or 6 feet.
The rear wall is completely covered with bookshelves except for the upper 2-1/2 feet or so. This shortens the room a bit, and provides broad band diffusion along the back wall. The left wall is also fairly diffuse with two CD racks measuring approx 2 feet wide by 6 feet high, 4 hanging guitars, and this computer desk. The right wall, unfortunately, is pretty much bare. Ideally, one of the CD racks should be on the right wall, but aesthetically it just doesn't work. Funny how your art can make comprimises for your art sometimes.
There is one important thing on the right wall. A lazy-boy type chair positioned in such a way that it perfectly blocks the direct reflection from the speaker on that wall. My computer desk breaks up the reflection coming from the left speaker.
Behind the speakers are two windows, one of which should house an air conditioner before long. Since it's the summer I keep them open and sound goes out of them never to be heard from (at least by me) again. In the winter we'll have to see what happens, lows will pass right through a closed window, but highs get reflected big time. I guess I'll keep the cloth shades down.
The room is pretty diffuse and absorbant. That was driven home to me when we brought the wall units in - one is in the hallway, and the other is on the right wall behind the couch. As we were wheeling them in, things were very noisy in the hallway, noisy in the foyer, but the moment we stepped into the living room it was as if the sound got sucked out. Whoosh. The room is fairly dead and diffuse.
My main acoustic problem comes in the front area of the room near the ceiling. There there's just a lot of bare wall and ceiling, and walking around the room clapping reveals a nice flutter echo. You know, the ringing kind of echo very prominent. Short of adding some sort of diffusors to the ceiling, which would be visually oppressive, or heavy artwork to the upper walls, which would be potentially cozy, but rather odd, I don't see that I'm going to fix it any time soon, so I'll just have to be aware of it and live with it.
The best part is that between the speakers is my television. Yes, my studio doubles as a home theater system. No surround sound, but movies sound great, and video games are much more engaging. I'm hoping that my television (a 27" Toshiba) will double as a monitor from time to time. It's not an HDTV or anything so the resolution isn't going to be so great, but it would be nice to be able to do tracking or something without dragging out the monitor. See, I plan on having the computer at the front of the room too and use a wireless keyboard and mouse. This way I'll be able to record, mix, and surf the web all from the comfort of my couch.
Again, aesthetically this is great - no wires all over the place, and no computer in the middle of everything, and when I can afford a flat panel monitor, I'll just have to bring it out and set it on the coffee table. As long as it doesn't obstruct the sound coming from the speakers I'll be in heaven.
My position and the position of the speakers isn't the greatest according to the acousticians. The speakers aren't far enough apart, for near-field monitoring I'm not close enough to the speakers so I'm getting early reflections. I've tried to keep the room fairly close to the Moulton Room.
Dave Moulton contends that early reflections, which most acousticians and engineers shun (more on this later), are important to your perception of music, so he designed the Moulton Room. Basically this is a room that's longer than it is wide, with broad band diffusion on the rear wall, and broad band absorption on the wall behind the speakers. It should also be symmetrical.
Well, the windows definately absorb sound well... it just flies right out never to come back, though I may want to get heavy curtains to absorb highs and act as a bass trap. I'll have to tune them to the room by setting the distance from the wall. Heavy curtains doesn't necessarily mean dark color, they could be a light color but heavy enough to absorb sound.
Other people say that you should eliminate early reflections. This can be done by adding broad band absorption to specific places in the room. 1) Directly opposite the speakers on the front, back, side walls floor and ceiling. 2) anywhere sound will reflect from the speakers and reach your ears. Basically you're supposed to take flat mirror and have your friend run them along the walls until you can see a speaker in the reflection. This will be two spots per wall - one for each speaker. This will prevent early reflections from coloring the sound of the speaker.
These people contend that the sound from the walls, floor, and ceiling arrive sleightly out of phase with the original signal, thereby coloring it. After a certain amount of time the sounds arriving are discrete echoes and the brain filters them out as such.
Dave Moulton, on the other hand, contends that the brain is not only capable of utilizing these early reflections, but that they're necessary for your perception of sound. You therefore don't want to eliminate the early reflections, but you do want to deaden the later reflections, which is accomplished by diffusing sound at the back wall, and deadening sound at the front wall.
Everyone agrees that rooms should be symmetrical.
The idea behind near-field monitor is that you sit so close to the speakers that they drown out the early reflections. They become almost like headphones. I don't find this to be particularly attractive. It's sort of the audio equivelant to sitting too close to the monitor or television. Eventually you become near sighted. While I like listening to music via headphones, I recognize it as a different experience from listening in a living room, which is where most people listen to music.
Perhaps under near-field monitoring conditions you can pick out greater detail that gets lost due to the early echoes, but I'm necessarily concerned with the itty bitty detail, and when I am I'll listen in my headphones. What I'm concerned with is how is it going to sound in your living room? In your car? In your walkman? Are the broad strokes right.
This room will also serve as a tracking room. I'm going to be using my SM57's and SM58's until I can afford a better mic. I plan on setting up vocals and any acoustic instruments either on the couch with me, or behind the couch. Since SM57's are so great at deflecting off-axis noise (i.e. what isn't right in front of it) I'm not worried too much about bleed through - i.e. noise from the speakers getting in to the sound from the mic. I also want to ensure that the singer is comfortable and gives a good performance. I'm more concerned with that than bleed. I don't want them in a little box with headphones. My next mic will most likely be a multi polar pattern mic, or an omni directional. There's no 'proximity effect' where bass gets boosted the closer it gets to the sound source with omni directional mics, and they'll pick up more room sound. I will have to worry about speaker bleed though, but I'll address that when the time comes.
As far as background noise... I'll have to live with it. I'm several hundred feet from a very busy street and I may want to record with the windows open, or the air conditioner on. We'll just have to see how things go. I'll just have to judiciously use a noise gate, and let some of the more interesting noises live on the recording. I'm all about capturing a live performance.
Over all, I'm pretty happy with my room. Things sound fairly even throughout the room, though lower mids blossom out towards the back of the room, and right next to the speakers things get that weird "right next to the speaker" sound that you'd expect. That is, that near-field sound. The room looks good too... Well, as good as I can make it I'm still a little messy and you do have to contend with my bookshelves stuffed with books and my racks stuffed with CD's and the mess on my computer desk and...
On the other hand, I feel comfortable entertaining in the same space I record in and aside from the overly audiophile looking speakers, guitars hanging on the wall and bass amp you'd never know it was also a studio. Though I may want to build a small rack with patch bay and some outboard equipment, but I'll try to hide it out of the way. Maybe I'll put a table cloth on it and disguise it as a side table. If I put the top and back on it, I won't have to worry about spills.
page first created on Sunday, July 28, 2002
© Mark Wieczorek