How to Improve Home Studio Acoustic Treatment
Update July 29, 2010: If are looking for tips on how to setup your recording studio in terms of acoustic placement. Refer to this tutorial: Home Studio Recording and Mixing Studio Setup Acoustic Design.
For beginners in home recording and mixing, it is of primary importance and priority that you acoustically treat your room for flattest frequency response. Flattest frequency response tells the truth, nothing more nothing less. So it means that what you really hear during mixing can translate “accurately” to a wide variety of audio reproduction systems (like iPod, CD discman, television, radio, or even hi-fidelity systems with subwoofers or not).
If the room is not acoustically treated to handle “frequency” biases, your mix might only sound good in your studio but sounds awful when reproduced in other audio monitoring systems. No matter how expensive your nearfield monitor, you still need to acoustically treat your room.
If you are successful on this, it means that what you really hear can “accurately” translate to other audio systems. So if you mix it great, it will surely sound good in other audio systems. This is how important to have a mixing studio well acoustically treated.
What are the causes of this “frequency” biases problem that makes your mix lie to you (sound good in your studio but sounds bad in other studios or audio monitoring/speaker systems)?
Consider the arrangement below (which is not correct and not optimal placement for mixing records at home):
Problems of this setup:
1.) Standing waves and reflected waves, distort the real level of the frequency being heard by the engineer.
Why? When you see the arrows in the above screen, these arrows are the sound waves leaving the speaker, they reflect on the walls without acoustic treatment. What happen is that , they reflect right away because the speaker sound waves needs only to travel in a shorter distance as shown in the above screenshot.
These reflective waves can magnify or distort the real sound level of the mixed audio. So for example if that frequencies belongs to a guitar track around 500 to 5000Hz, the engineer may think the guitar volume is too loud, so what will happen is that he will lower the volume of that track in the mix, which in reality is not really loud but is composed of the standing/reflected waves from the monitoring system.
2. The studio monitors are not oriented well to the engineer, so he cannot visualize clearly the stereo image of the mix. Based on the screenshot, a lot of sound waves did not hit the engineers ear and instead reflect on the surfaces/walls of the studio. This again , can bias the reproduced sound.
Since mixing engineers depends on the reproduced sound to make judgment, erroneously reproduced sound (due to poor room acoustics) can produced an erroneous mix.
3.The worst is the placement of subwoofer. Since it is placed near the room corners, it will reflect those bass frequencies too early which again amplifies the bass image which in reality is a low level bass signal.
Solution:For the solution, please read this tutorial: Home Studio Recording and Mixing Studio Setup Acoustic Design.
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