This kind of down to earth advice with a medium amount of technical explanation is fantastic.
One thing I would mention is that rigid fiberglass corner traps seemed to do a lot in my studio.
Also if you are going to talk about room modes, you are also going to want to think about the permeability of your walls and whether they are going to even reflect the frequency in question and set up a mode.
And also we may want to make a distinction between making a listening environment that sounds amazing, and one that has utility. It can be easy for an intermediate or beginner at mixing to get really tricked by a great listening environment in to doing things that won’t translate.
On the other hand, life is short, and listening to a beautiful set up is just a better quality of life if nothing else.
you are also going to want to think about the permeability of your walls
If I understand things correctly, this was missing a bit from the whole (otherwise very good) explanation in the article: it constantly mentions 'walls' and each time I can't help but think that the difference between a solid concrete 30cm thick wall and a 10cm plasterboard plus some thermal insulation makes a difference in how it reflects lower frequencies. To the point that in the latter case there might be not much reflection at all and you actually have to start to measure from the wall (or whatever) in the next room?
Wood studs, drywall and fiberglass insulation don't do much to attenuate low frequencies. Fiberglass does almost nothing. Mass is the one thing that absorbs sound the best.
What if you're practicing with your high school rock band in an old wooden barn with boards that have become rock-hard after losing most of its moisture?
This article does not mention that scientific measurement with a calibrated measurement microphone can take all of the guesswork out of speaker placement, just like you need a calibrated color measurement puck (and associated color-management software) to guarantee accurate color on computer monitors and printers. A measurement microphone tells you if the 200Hz frequency is too loud or too quiet with respect to the 1000Hz frequency, and so on, just like color management tells you if red #FF0000 is oversaturated or undersaturated with respect to the sRGB or DCI-P3 or whatever color space you are targeting. I bought a UMIK-1 microphone, downloaded the factory .txt calibration file, and used the roomeqwizard.com software to tune my systems. Works great. Human audible sound travels in waves at frequencies in the 16Hz-20KHz range. Those waves bounce around the room and interact to make certain frequencies louder and others quieter ("standing waves"). This room response is especially important below 250-500Hz: search for "Schroeder Frequency" if curious.
I am the OP but I threw out my throw-away account. I don't use consumer AVRs; I use pro-audio equipment for producing the content consumed on consumer AVR equipment. I tried some of these fancy boxes that you upload EQ curves to for room correction (such as different MiniDSP-branded correction boxes which are very popular) but I've gotten measurably best results (with my measurement mic) using old-school 31-band graphic equalizers that have the 31 physical fader sliders you move up and down. These old-school analog devices have lower latency in milliseconds than the hi-tech DSP stuff which needs extra time to buffer and process the signal in ram. The fanciest digital correction available in those AVR type devices (such as Dirac brand correction) delays the entire signal by as much as 100+ milliseconds (making gaming and live instruments impossible because the audio lags so far behind the event that produced the audio, like how thunder lags behind a lightning flash). The theory is that because a 20Hz frequency has a 50ms cycle-time, you need to delay the audio signal at least 50ms across the entire 16Hz-20KHz spectrum to "see" what you are correcting down near 20Hz. However, multiple blind listening studies have shown that the human ear is not time-latency sensitive to the lowest base frequencies. These frequencies are "felt" more than heard and the brain lags with letting you "feel" the deep rumble. Old-school analog equalizers only delay the actual low-frequencies that correction is applied to (the frequencies you actually slide up or down on the physical slider/fader controls). So if you slide the 50Hz fader then only that frequency has its timing altered, and the brain can definitely hear the loudness correction at 50Hz when Godzilla roars or the earthquake in your movie happens but it can't hear the timing difference if you delay the 50Hz wave slightly in order to correct its loudness. So you gain loudness accuracy (which you can easily hear) at the expense of timing accuracy (which at low frequencies you can't hear). Also, I'm really picky about speaker hiss and a good 31-band analog EQ introduces less noise/hiss than more expensive digital EQ boxes I've tested. I put my measurement mic right up to the tweater and recorded the hiss that the digital box made and took a screenshot of the spectrogram, then compared with my analog EQs and my analog EQs were better, noticeably enough that I didn't even need the mic in order to hear the hiss difference.
So my advice is to get a UMIK-1 measurement mic and a 31-band graphic EQ, then download roomeqwizard.com software and learn to use it. It involves walking around your room with the mic while playing constant test tones and watching a sound spectrogram graph on your computer screen. Even though the test tone is constant, when you walk around your room with the mic you can see and hear how the tone changes due to the standing wave phenomenon. It will open your eyes (and ears) to how the room you are in affects the sound coming out of speakers. And rather than reading articles on the web you can actually experience for yourself the scientific reality of how it works, just like in high school chemistry class you see what happens with your own eyes when you mix vinegar with baking soda, rather than just reading theory in a book. The actual physical experimental confirmation is crucial.
Adjusting anything over 250-500Hz is a waste of time because if you shift your head (or measurement mic) just a foot or two you get a completely different frequency response. When you test this yourself you won't need to take my word for it or read web articles shilling snake oil audio products. Your eyes and ears and calibrated measurement mic will confirm the scientific reality for you.
As to other equipment... at the affordable lower end you want a USB or Thunderbolt interface with balanced XLR connectors connected either directly to studio monitors or to an equipment rack with the amps, crossovers, equalizers, etc needed to power big passive subwoofers. The Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 (~$160 on Amazon) is a best seller USB audio interface and crystal clear. I'm listening through one right now and I love it. Be aware that if using a Mac with a T2 security chip (2016 and newer Macs) you need to use an external thunderbolt USB hub because T2 occasionally cuts out the internal USB; scroll down this article if curious:
None of Apple's "fixes" fixed the problem. This was the last straw for me and many other audio guys so now we use both Ubuntu and Windows 10 with WSL instead of the Mac. Most photos of $1M+ recording studios I see nowaways have Windows 10 desktops. If you don't want Win10 telemetry spying on you you need to set up a pi-hole or external firewall box, but M1 Macs and all iOS devices report your location and other telemetry to Apple now so you also need an external firewall for Apple now too, but I'm digressing from audio....
Back to audio, the UMIK-1 USB measurement mic is usually ~$99 new on Amazon/eBay/wherever. The roomeqwizard.com is free (as in gratis, not open source) Java software that can use the mic. For studio monitors, Yamaha and Adam Audio are both good and affordable. Many like the JBLs as long as you aren't too picky about hiss. Genelec is the very best and provably so by independent scientific measurement (see audiosciencereview.com measurements). But Genelec is stupid expensive, over $1k for a pair of their budget monitors. Anyway, this post is long enough and turning into an article. To summarize, get a Scarlett USB interface (~$160), the UMIK-1 ($99), a good pair of 5" or 7" studio monitors (Yamaha, Adam Audio, or maybe JBL, $300-$600 for the pair), and a graphic EQ. The bargain-basement Rockville REQ231 for ~$130 is essentially a cheap but good clone of a more expensive EQ. You can also spend $250-$400+ for Behringer or dbx/JBL which looks prettier in the rack but honestly doesn't sound any different.
Having spent a bunch of time trying to figure this all out myself, as well, some practical tips (confirmed anecdotally by yours truly):
- Place your speakers such that they form an equilateral triangle, with the tweeters pointing directly at your head while you are seated in the control position. Near-field monitors are made for focusing on a 'sweet spot' like this. Using purpose-built speaker stands is the easiest route here.
- Treat the first reflection points with foam, or anything that absorbs/scatters sound (e.g. I hung a huge shag rug on the back wall)
- Break up smooth surfaces (walls/floors/windows) with other absorptive/non-smooth decorations and materials. Rug on floor, couch at back of room, curtains, even a bookcase; all will help absorb and scatter sound.
- A good rule of thumb is to spend as much money on 'treating' the room as the speakers themselves (even great speakers will sound like trash in a room with no treatment).
- When using the speakers for mixing/mastering work, listen at a conversational volume. The lower the volume, the less the room matters (and the room matters a lot).
- You will get far better sound from decent headphones (I have HD650s) than from all but the most pristinely designed/tuned monitor setups. Probably would cost well over $10k and a lot of knowhow to beat the headphones.
I like the Tom Petty method—I'm interpreting here, and paraphrasing in my own format based on a longer discussion and probably mixing up some of this with other knowledge.
Mix— headphones
Master— monitors
Test— Toyota Corolla (Petty, said something like "just about everybody's gonna be listening in a Toyota"—they'd literally print a tape and run it out to someone's car)
I laughed at the Toyota test, because there's a ton of truth in there. Got to test the mix on bad speakers to see if it translates...humbling, but necessary for a good mix. I do test in my car (coincidentally, it is a Corolla) as well :)
Isn't that the reason NS10's became popular as monitors, too? "If you can make it sound good on a pair of NS10's it'll sound good everywhere" being the mode†.
It's definitely sage advice!
† edit: Looks like I fell victim to hearsay. It's just something I'd heard so many times for so many years I assumed it was true, and it may be partly, but here's a great write up on the subject—tangential to the main thread: https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/yamaha-ns10-story
Yet another reason to want 24V or 48V systems to displace 12V systems. The base-model car amp is going to always use the battery voltage, due to the noise, the max volume is going to be high, and that means 2Ohm (or lower) speakers built for maximum dB/W (so often no crossover) with a single +12V rail.
I have a few rock CDs from the 90s (Dizzy up the Girl is one) that ar completely unlistenable in many cars; too bad Petty wasn't involved in mastering those.
It’s not that your car system is good or bad, the point is that you are very familiar with how other productions sound on it, making it a good reference system.
Yes and no. Your mix is never going to sound as crisp as it does in the studio (ideal listening conditions). Road noise + reverb off the glass + cheap speakers = not as good a listening environment. It's best to build familiarity of other commercial productions on your ideal setup (monitors/headphones/etc.) for referencing purposes earlier in the process, in my opinion. Good to reference on more 'everyday' listening systems, too (personal favorite, the iPhone speaker).
Aprocyphally, this goes back to The Rolling Stones who used to keep a single car speaker on the mixing desk to approximate how it would sound on a transistor radio of the time.
I noticed a huge improvement in the quality of my home office videoconferencing after pulling all my sleeping bags out of my camping gear and spreading them on the floor and hanging them around the room, just out of frame.
I agree that treating your first-reflection points is a massively important step (and maybe the most important step you can take) when balancing your listening position, so I'd like to offer a brief correction to your second point, so as not to misguide others who are new to this:
Yes, treat your first-reflection points with material that absorbs as much as energy as possible. However, scattering (aka diffusion) should be a waaay lower priority at your first-reflection points. In fact, if you're absorbing with enough mass at these points there shouldn't be much high or mid-range energy left to scatter. And for the low-mid and low freq energy that isn't being completely absorbed you'd need a hilariously-large diffuser to scatter wavelengths of those size. So don't even worry about diffusion paneling of any kind on your front walls. Just absorb, absorb, absorb at your early-reflection points.
I personally use several 5.25" GIK Acoustic panels with another 5" air gap between the back of the panel and the wall. At my listening position I have them placed on the wall to my left, my right, and have several panels hanging above my head with as much of an air-gap between them and the ceiling as I can allow to absorb the ceiling-reflections. There's more nuance to how I determine the exact positioning, but that's the general layout.
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I'd also like to reinforce the idea that for anyone who needs to make critical audio decisions you should absolutely be investing the time, money and effort to get your room treated/tuned to it's full potential. Otherwise it will undermine every decision you make until you do. You simply cannot make good decisions without A) excellent monitoring (speakers) and B) A properly-tuned room. To ignore either of these is to deceive yourself. Consider it your highest priority before you even consider spending money on additional hi-fi audio gear beyond your speakers. If you can't hear your speakers honestly and with minimal interference from the room then there's little point in focusing on the finer details.
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If you really want to hear how your room is affecting your audio then play a low and steady note (say a 60 Hz sine wave) and then walk around your room while it's playing. Listen for how dramatically the volume of this single note will fluctuate as you change position. It will likely vary from overbearingly loud to near-total silence. Now consider that every other note that you can possibly hear - from the lowest sub to the highest buzz) will also be subject to these kinds of boosts and dips in volume. Then you'll have some sort of idea of what you're up against.
I can recommend global EQs fixing your room in software.
The most simple and imperfect route: get a global EQ for your OS and play around with a sine generator and notch filters. Fix the 1-2 frequencies where it's just way too loud.
The fiddly and free route: https://www.roomeqwizard.com/ (search for tutorials on that) and than for windows there is "Equalizer APO" to load it. Use the best mic you have, in a really bad room even an sm57 will do wonders.
I think the worse your room and speakers are the more this helps (I lived an a square tube, now in a better shaped room the effect is much less noticeable). For me it really cleans up the otherwise muddy lows. I can recommend boosting them afterwards for a more hi-fi sound, really neutral doesn't have the punch you might be used to :).
Disclaimer: this will be worse than the perfect physical setup. You can fix some things in software, but there will be losses and it and only fix one point in your room really well. It's also a hassle to change EQ settings when you change to headphones.
Quite agreed. Granted, measuring and testing things are things that I enjoy, but I can't even imagine debating the behavior of something like a speaker without doing some basic measurements. Not necessarily to correct anything, but at least to find out what's going on.
I’m always a bit flummoxed by guidelines like this being taken as gospel. Sure I will start with the manufacture recommended placement if my room allows, but at the end of the day I have to hear the speakers so if it sounds good it is good rules for me. There really is no wrong if you like what you hear. Sure a rear port placed an inch from the wall will alter the response and likely cause chuffing as the air rushes in and out, but that falls under common sense to some degree. I guess one of the core tenets of “hifi” used to be flat frequency response from 20hz-20khz and no added coloration from the reproduction system. That’s fine but often times today’s music sounds crappy under those parameters. People like hyped bass and treble with a scooped midrange. That’s okay.
The parameters shift slightly when using studio monitoring to create a mix for music that needs to translate to other playback environments but even then a perfectly flat response is not necessary. If you know that your monitors are bass shy and increasing the bass will make it sound muddy on the majority of other systems then that is a data point you keep in mind. Learning the quirks of your monitoring setup is very important in this scenario. The point being that the guidelines are a starting point, not the rule.
> at the end of the day I have to hear the speakers so if it sounds good it is good rules for me. There really is no wrong if you like what you hear.
There are two very different goals that are easy to conflate and that the article isn't very clear about:
1. If you are a music listener or music producer focusing on making music, you just want a room that sounds great to you. If you're making music, you want a sound that inspires you and gets the creative juices flowing.
2. If you are a mixing or mastering engineer or a music producer focusing on polishing and mixing your work, you want a room that gives you insight on how the audio will sound in a wide variety of listening environments. Your goal is to get the song sounding as good on as many people's speakers, headphones, and rooms as possible and your own personal setup is a proxy for that.
For example, if you only have a couple of tiny speakers that don't go below 50 Hz, your song may have subbass that you literally cannot hear. But when someone with a subwoofer plays the song, all of that comes out. If it's too loud or out of tune, the song sounds like trash, but you have no way of knowing.
So the goal is a monitor setup that is relatively neutral so that the song doesn't sound better to you than it will to others. You want a fairly flat response so that you aren't inadvertently EQ-ing the song to cancel out peaks and valleys in your room because then that will imbalance the sound in other rooms. And you want to cover the full frequency range so you can hear everything others will be able to hear. If the songs sounds great in your room, but it sounds like garbage for everyone not in your room, it definitely is not great.
Most articles about monitor placement tend to assume the goal is 2 more than 1. These days, the line is blurry because many musicians and producers are also doing a lot of the mixing.
According to the research done by Harman/Samsung, listeners generally prefer a curve that's gently sloping by one decibel per octave.
IE, if you want a pleasing sound, a loudspeaker that's playing 90dB at 100Hz should be playing 83dB at 16,800Hz. And the response curve should be consistent from point A to point B.
This recommendation can be impacted by the power response of the speaker, but that's another subject...
There are HiFi speakers that are designed to provide the correct frequency response when placed near a wall and sound wrong otherwise. "Klipschorn" would be an extreme example of this category.
There are other speakers (actually the majority) that are not designed to be placed against a wall, but, if you use digital room correction features in your HiFi receiver, they still have to be placed against the wall, so that there is less work for the DSP to do.
There are also so-called "electrostatic speakers" (e.g. "Quad ESL 2912") which absolutely must not be placed near the wall, because the rear wave is in counter-phase (unlike the traditional speakers), and will cancel the front wave exactly.
There are some problems that cannot be corrected through room correction EQ, namely the Speaker Boundary Interference Effect, which happens when the reflection from a wall is out-of-phase with the signal that you want to hear, and produces a deep valley in the frequency response.
You could try boosting at the frequency that the valley is at, but that makes both the signal _and the reflection_ equally as loud. Therefore, they cancel out in almost the same manner for basically no net gain.
Their influence can be be diminshed with absorbers, construction of a room without parallel walls or so big that they can't be heard (eg Concert halls)
>There are HiFi speakers that are designed to provide the correct frequency response when placed near a wall
Another example may be the Ohm Walsh line of loudspeakers. I've only ever heard positive things about how close-to-life it sounds, and that's accomplished with the unique upward-facing driver and using walls and corners to an advantage.
I know zero about this topic. Are there dynamic audio sensors that could provide real time adaptions to the room audio profile? Something like a light meter in photography?
Only for the trivial cases. You could tell if the speaker is placed in a drastically bad place, ie it sounds bad everywhere, but you wouldn't be able to tell if the speaker sounds good where the listener is. For that you need to put a microphone (which itself would need to be of relatively good quality) where the listeners ears are.
Even with measurements like that, it's pretty nontrivial to compensate for it. It's technically a proven problem[1] (solvable for some convex shapes) but its a little more complex than just adjusting the volume or phase of a given frequency. A room -and by extension all the little nooks and crannies of a room- acts as a resonator, and will gather and sustain notes. You need to counter that sustain ahead of time.
Beamforming is a way of taking an array of drivers and manipulating their phase and frequency response to direct the sound in a calculated direction. IE, you can have seven drivers in a ring, and you can direct the sound in ONE direction instead of ALL directions.
Amazon Alexa does the same thing, except with an array of microphones.
That's exactly what the digital room correction is that the comment you replied to mentioned, except it's not real-time, since the profile doesn't change rapidly. You push a button to run it every time you make major room changes like moving the speakers.
I was (and still am) in the same situation as the author two years ago. I bought a pair of JBL LSR 305 that I placed at each side of the screen, roughly 120cm away from each other and at arms length from me. They're about 30cm away from the back wall.
The problem I have is with the bass. Standing in the normal position to interact with my PC, the bass strength is low. Now, the moment I move back about 1 meter, the bass strength becomes great (the one I'd expect from this pair of speakers).
Take a look at the back of your LSR305. There's a switch marked LF Trim. (There's also a HF Trim.) It has three positions: cut, normal, and boost. It's a built in EQ designed for handling room boundaries.
This, plus you could place isolation pads underneath the speakers to prevent the low frequencies from causing resonance in the desk or other platform they're on if they aren't already. You can find some pretty cheap options these days that should do the trick.
You're probably in a room null when in your "normal position to interact with the PC".
Try moving them closer to the back wall.
Or there are room treatments like adding some kind of absorption panel to the problematic wall(s).
If it's a room mode, you might experiment with where your desk is in the room and by extension where your ears end up being within that space. Or add a subwoofer whose placement you can optimize independently from your speakers.
Taken to the extreme is the "Geddes Approach" which use multiple subwoofers placed around the room and lots of EQ provide a smooth low frequency response at the listening position.
Waves don't work like that. Otherwise it would be impossible to hear bass through (good) headphones.
The issue is that, because of reflections, waves whose wavelengths are on the same order of magnitude as the distance from the speakers to the wall are getting cancelled out, depending on where you listen from. It is a well-known phenomenon.
(Higher frequencies which are multiples of the missing bass frequencies will also be attenuated, but this is less immediately noticeable.)
For instance, if OP has his speakers located 57cm / 22 inches from the back wall, there is going to be a very deep null at 150Hz, due to the reflection from the back wall. (150Hz is 227cm long.)
If OP is listening in the nearfield, that dip will be obnoxious.
On the other hand, if OP is listening at a distance of two meters, the dip will be LESS obnoxious because there will be dozens of dips and peaks in the response, contributing constructive and destructive interference, simultaneously.
This is one of the reasons that loudspeakers are generally measured under two conditions:
1) very very close. For instance, a woofer can be measured with the microphone less than a centimeter from the cone
2) But the preferred method of getting a full range measurement is to measure the speaker outside, far away from any reflective surfaces.
> there is going to be a very deep null [...] due to the reflection from the back wall
That's exactly what I said.
I read the grandparent to imply that distance from the source was the only factor, that one needs to be a certain distance from a source to hear bass frequencies at all, which I'm sure you'll agree is incorrect, as we both seem to have a correct understanding of the physics involved.
This takes me back to working in a few (slowly going to way of the buffalo) "professional" or "big" studios. Both of the A studios I worked in had a big set of Genelecs in the bulkhead and two or three more mid and near field monitors just above or behind the console meter bridge.
Each served it's own purpose and all the mixing guys I saw wound swap between them fairly regularly. In that situation it was about emulating different scenarios, from the 4" block speakers to get a feel for what someone would hear on an old car stereo to mid field Dynaudios that were more flat than hyped to get a feel for what the home audiophile might experience.
That's not a practical approach for a small studio (either in size or budget) but having been out of that world for a long time it makes me wonder if someone would be better served with two or three pairs of reasonably priced pair of speakers rather than trying to perfect the sound of one pair that aren't going to reflect (no pun intended) other playback environments that aren't acoustically optimized.
Astute. The goal isn't to get the mix sounding good on one particular listening system, but being able to hear the raw, unadulterated signal as well as possible with knowledge of how it will or won't translate in other environments. Always good to have multiple sets of speakers to test those assumptions out in real-time. Interestingly, even the geometry of your specific ears will color the resulting sound that is heard, which is why referencing to commercial tracks is so helpful in the process.
I think many people don't realise is that 'ideally' (generous use of ideally) there is no front wall (the wall behind the speakers. This is why large recording studios have soffit mounted speakers, some experts actually encourage pushing the speakers closer to the wall to try and get as close as possible to approximate this. Obviously there is a lot more nuance in this - Always take measurements and use your ears too.
As always, Hi-Fi and Studio set-ups/advice are not entirely inter-operable, and a lot of online chat can be both camps talking simultaneously which is difficult for a reader to parse.
This is a really important article if you want to get the most out of your speakers or studio monitors. When I was working on my home studio, I found that the position of the monitors had a huge impact on how they sounded.
It took a good few days of moving the monitors & measuring the response, but I believe I was able to find a position that is usable & makes up for some of the deficiencies of my room.
Same goes for hifi to be honest. I didn't spend that long fiddling with speaker position, because I just don't have that many degrees of freedom in my living room without rearranging the whole room around the speakers[0], but after two or three hours spread over a couple of days or so I did get to what I think is the best compromise in terms of sound quality vs. the speakers being in the way. A few weeks later I added a subwoofer into the setup and, again, probably spent another 3 or 4 hours spread over several days fiddling and listening to get that to sound the best I could at my typical listening volumes (what I wanted was to support the low end without overwhelming it).
I haven't even got to the room that I use as an office/studio, which is a small spare bedroom. The room works well as an office now that I've redecorated it and put in new floor and shelves, but I need to finish off power routing and suchlike before I start on speaker placement.
[0] Many serious audiophiles would argue that you should do just this for the best results but I don't have the space and I want a room that's usable for things other than just listening to music. I often think this is one of those situations where the perfect really can end up as the enemy of the good.
Haha, I think your [0] is pretty much the common case for most who care for good sound. I had that setup once (35m² dorm room with a bed, a couch+small table, cloths rack and a desk - and two 1,40m/4.5ft speakers in the middle of the room). Yes: There is a VERY good point to arranging the room around the speakers. But that's difficult to explain to an SO who doesn't care for good sound and/or who prefers a more multi-functional living room.
If you're listening alone, and don't care for a small sweet spot: In our study room I'm VERY happy using a DIY FAST/WAW system with a large full range speaker. The 4" FR (Tangband W4-2142) has some heavy beaming at higher frequencies. The sweet spot is rather small (I put it in front of my main display) - but reflections are a non-issue. The result is a very good sound stage. I implemented the cross over into a DSP (Beocreate Amp) and have one channel for each of the two drivers per side. But the only "real" correction I apply is at the low end (less room modes & extension to 40Hz at expense of ~9dB less SPL_max. Pretty nice for 4l encased volume and two 4" drivers).
For anyone else who is unfamiliar with “monitor” in this context, found this on Wikipedia:
> Among audio engineers, the term monitor implies that the speaker is designed to produce relatively flat (linear) phase and frequency responses. In other words, it exhibits minimal emphasis or de-emphasis of particular frequencies, the loudspeaker gives an accurate reproduction of the tonal qualities of the source audio ("uncolored" or "transparent" are synonyms), and there will be no relative phase shift of particular frequencies—meaning no distortion in sound-stage perspective for stereo recordings.
The main issue with speaker placement in a typical home recording studio is standing waves, and in this case placing speakers against the wall is going to amplify the problem, and no room EQ can fix it.
Generally, you want your speakers to be a half wave length away from the wall for the first order standing wave in your space. This is so the wave output by the speaker will cancel with the wave resonating between your walls, which will help the issue quite a bit (though it's not perfect either).
With something like the Klipschorn you're basically giving up on solving this issue with speaker placement and will have to resort to room modifications to ameliorate it. That said, you get a lot of benefits from the khorn also : )
There are different opinions regarding standing waves, at least regarding subwoofers. Some say they can actually be pleasant and beneficial, as they can boost perceived bass responses for smaller setups, depending on frequency and intensity.
Yea if you have one specific location where you listen to your music then you can certainly use the standing wave to your advantage, or even EQ the boosted response out at that frequency, but as soon as you move you will encounter problems.
It's pretty remarkable to play a sine wave at the frequency of your room's standing wave and then just walk the length and hear it go from completely silent to very loud and back again. Makes you realize how much distortion this is actually causing
To anyone else enjoying this video, this man, Steve Guttenberg, is a high-profile audio tech reviewer, and his reviews, "complete system recommendations" and musings on hi-fi are excellent. For many people, reviewers of hi-fi gear is the closest they can get to having an idea of what they're buying now that brick-and-mortar stores with listening rooms are harder to reach.
I don't like everything he says, and I'm sometimes disappointed to see him refer to people who think Ethernet cables make no difference above $20 as "cable deniers" (though analogue cables can make a difference, especially interconnects) - but I don't think he's being dishonest, I think he's misinformed, and there's more than his "whatever works for you" takes on engineering matters. At least in my experience.
This article is unnecessarily complex, and offers solutions that are (mostly) applicable to older speakers.
Most modern studio monitors put the tweeter in a waveguide. By doing that, it accomplishes two things:
* The loudspeaker frequency response is consistent, no matter whether you're standing directly in front of the speaker, or to the sides. IE, the placement of the loudspeaker is less important than with older designs.
* Most importantly, a waveguide takes the energy radiated by the driver and it focuses it into a narrower beam than a conventional tweeter. By doing this, reflections off of the sidewalls, ceiling and floor are less of an issue.
To make a long story short, modern studio monitors with a waveguide are less fussy about placement.
Reflections off of the sidewalls, ceilings and floor can still cause issues with lower midrange and midbass response, but these issues can be fixed with EQ to a large extent.
The reason that EQ is less effective at high frequencies is because the wavelengths are so short. For instance, 5khz is 6.8cm long. Because it's so short, equalizing that frequency for one point in the room can screw it up at ANOTHER point in the room.
Low frequencies are much longer, and because they're longer, EQ is more effective. For instance, 500Hz is 68cm long. Because of this long length, if you EQ a speaker to flatten out a peak at 500Hz, that EQ will be effective over a broad range of positions in the room.
The article is about low frequencies, and it is far from clear that putting tweeters in a waveguide avoids the issues raised in the article - in fact, just about everything you say that is applicable to low frequencies was covered in the article.
> Reflections off of the sidewalls, ceilings and floor can still cause issues with lower midrange and midbass response, but these issues can be fixed with EQ to a large extent.
I don't really believe this. Ever put speakers in an empty, stone-walled, wood-floored room? No EQ in the world is going to fix that. You need acoustic treatment in some shape or form, unless your walls are made out of cotton.
A typical room with drywall, carpet (or rug) and upholstered furniture is going to be EQ'd pretty well. I suppose that could be considered "acoustic treatment" but most people just call that "normal"
If you use a 31 band EQ on the sound going to the monitors isn't that going to alter the phase in each frequency band? So what you hear will have a different phase response than what is being recorded. Maybe an FIR EQ would be better? I believe that's why the mini-DSP boxes are popular, you can EQ without introducing phase changes.
For people who have put significant effort into setting up a room with good acoustics and speakers; is the sound quality significantly better than good headphones?
I can understand the other reasons speakers are nice; being able to hear other things besides the audio playback, sharing the sound with other people at the same time, etc.
Depends on your definition of better. A lot of the time this will be done in a mixing room with studio monitors yielding as flat a response curve as possible (and without any room reverb). You will get a better sound in that it's precise, but it's not necessarily more pleasant to listen to.
As for precision: it's easier to hear the panning / stage in good headphones just because it's so augmented. The low end - no matter how good the headphones are, you can't rely on them to mix it properly, you need good monitors. If you mix the low end on headphones, there's always a high probability that it will only sound good on this pair of headphones and not translate to other setups.
I'm not a musician, but got recently a pair of Presonus Eris 3.5 monitors as my desk speakers. I find that more pleasant to use than headphones I have (AT BPHS1 and Bose QC35).
> You know those mono-to-stereo mixing tricks that you’re not “supposed” to do because of mono compatibility, but you end up doing all the time anyway? You know, like the one where you double the track, pan the two versions out and delay one side?
Is there a name for this effect? I'd like to hear an example!
I can't help you with a name, but it's one of the tricks that YouTube guitarist/instructor Paul Davids details in this video [0] - doubling down on it. (Basically he double-mics his guitar, sending each of the mics hard to one side, then again delayed and attenuated hard to the other side as well. What you get from that is a pretty good simulation of opposite-wall reflection from a larger space.)
The only thing that matters is what sounds best to you. You should place them where they sound best for your listening position. This is not a scientific process. It is a trial and error process.
There's a bit more to it that's been hinted at in this article. Briefly put, you don't want to be in the nodes of your room, the points where low frequencies bouncing off the walls cancel themselves out. For instance, no matter where you put the speakers, if they're in a cubical room [0] and your ears are in the centre of it, you'll hear very little bass.
The real answer is: unless you have an anechoic chamber, you wanna have an EQ to tune out the room effects. It's not as expensive as you might think too.
Umm... it kinda seems the author actually got it wrong.
Obviously, any information directed at people with no knowledge in area is simplified and possibly also intentionally incorrect.
The simple articles on the internet and brochures assume you are stupid and you need safe way to set up your speakers. So that's why they ask you to place them far from wall. It would be stupid to try to explain physics of wave propagation and interference to people who need to read a leaflet to be able to set up their speakers.
But if you have bit more knowledge it is not difficult to control your situation while also having speakers closer to the wall.
Sound is distorted when you receive multiple waves that are out of phase and especially, as it usually happens, when different wavelengths are received at different phases (some in phase, some completely out of phase).
While it is not possible to remove all reflections in a closed room (and some reflection is actually welcome because we want to feel being in a room rather than void) it is possible to make sure that the ratio of the wave from the speaker to the one from reflections is high enough that we do not perceive them as distortions.
When a speaker is placed close to a wall, any energy radiated from the back of the speaker is reflected. There is also some energy from the front of the speaker, but because of the speaker itself only little of it reaches the wall behind and by the time it is reflected in the direction of the listener there is just not enough energy to be perceived as distortion.
It is important that a lot of this is due to relative distances of sound sources (or reflections). If you sit 1m from the speaker that is 50cm from the wall, the sound from the speaker travels 1m but the reflection travels 2m to reach you. This means the reflection is attenuated by 6dB by distance alone (assuming omnidirectional emission from the speaker and that it is perfectly reflected from the wall).
When a speaker is emitting very close to the wall and uses back port to emit bass, that back port is very close to the wall and not only gets distorted (due to being closer to the wall than wave length) but also reflected with a power very close to the original wave but out of phase, depending on frequency. That's what gives horrible result.
Back ported speakers sound better because they elliminate sound of moving air, but they have disadvantage in placement close to walls. Just use front ported speakers when placing close to wall (see bookshelf speakers) which are designed exactly for that use case.
More tips:
- don't place speakers close to the wall if you are going to sit far from them, because this causes relative ratios to be close
- it is ok to place front ported speakers close to the wall if you are going to sit close to them (for on your desk)
- don't just focus on what's in front of you, if there is a wall behind you it is going to cause reflections that can cause powerful distortions if you are relatively close to it compared to the distance of speakers.
- you can put something soft and permeable behind your speaker and behind your head to reduce high frequency distortions
- you can play with some types of shapes around speakers and behind your head to reduce low frequency reflections distorting your sound. By having different parts of the reflection arrive at different times you reduce perceived effect of the distortion.
Your advice seems to match exactly what the article says, rather than opposing it. Can you explain the differences between your advice and the article's?
(admittedly I read both quickly, with distractions, so I almost certainly missed something...)
The mistake the author made is saying the advice given in speaker manuals is wrong.
Well, it is not necessarily wrong to omit a lot of complexity when explaining something to someone who is new (ie. speaker buyer who had to look at the leaflet). Even if the advice is not strictly correct, it is not wrong.
We do this constantly, especially with children. We feed them with not strictly correct information because the alternatives are to not give them any, to give too much or to give information that is not useful.
You would not tell your kids their uncle committed suicide by blowing his head off because he was unsatisfied with his miserable life because he made a bunch of lousy choices and because of this aunt left him for a younger guy which caused severe depression. That is way too much information for a child to handle.
People who know better will know why the advice is structured this way and will know to ignore it.
There is also incentive for producers to give information like that, because it is easier to require you to put your speakers far from any wall than to delve into particulars of your speaker placement. "We guarantee our product offers excellent quality if you put it far from walls, but should you decide to ignore that advice you are on your own"
It seems like the bigger issue is the amplification of the standing waves in the room when the speaker is close to the wall, not the out of phase nature of the back and front sound. Could be wrong though.
I also don't think placing objects around the speakers is going to help much with the main issue which is the low frequency is it?
Standing wave forms when significant part of the original energy is caught in a geometry that reinforces one wavelength and allows the wave to be reflected multiple times before being dissipated.
For example, when you have two bare, parallel walls.
Since you can't move the walls to not be parallel (although some people actually did it) what you can do is to look at other parts of requirements:
-- ensure energy can be absorbed or dissipated before it can bounce multiple times
-- ensure there are other objects that cause distances as seen by the wave to vary, this means there will be no single dominant wavelength that is going to be reinforced and if there is any standing wave it is going to be weak (will start with less energy and have much less of wall surface -- much smaller angle in which it can initially gather the energy).
Absorbing bass is very difficult because, as mentioned by somebody else in another comment, it would require very thick material. And so the other way is to cause the energy to be reflected in various different direction so that it is not perceived as single sound.
And so, putting objects in your room helps a lot as any person that has removed all their furniture from their room can attest.
When you remove furniture the room acoustics suddenly becomes very noticeable due to powerful reflections and standing waves from bare, parallel, hard wall surfaces.
You can, but fundamentally the absorbent material needs to be as thick as one quarter of the wavelength of the frequency that you are trying to absorb. Deep bass, like e.g. 30Hz, has a wavelength of 8.6 metres. If you end up putting two metres of absorbent material on every wall, you don't have room for your studio anymore!
This is why acoustic panels only work for mid-range frequencies and higher. Alternatively, you can also use bass traps with a membrane tuned to a specific frequency, which can attenuate said frequency without taking up ridiculous amounts of space.
That's why you actually don't want deep bass in your speakers if you have tight constraints.
It is better to have less deep bass (you can add more of it if you want) than have deep bass that is very distorted.
Also, as I have added later after you posted, you can play with objects around your speakers to have the reflection broken and arrive at different time, effectively reducing its impact on the main wave. But as you pointed out that will only work for waves up to some length depending how large objects we are talking about.
Isn’t that why all these minispeaker systems (like you see for sale at Costco and Best Buy) all have a separate subwoofer and low pass filters on the speakers?
Easier to place one subwoofer than to tune five speakers.
- producing low end requires large speaker, and large == costly
- large speaker == lots of space required on desk, restricting your placement. Having small speakers on desk is a functional compromise. People working professionally with sound will buy studio monitors which take way more space but they can take it because sound quality is important because it is their job.
- multiple speakers producing low end == timing and interference issues. When you have multiple speakers producing low end, you will hear interference as you move your head around as different lengths of waves cancel or reinforce at difference places.
Since you don't need stereo for low end (your brain can't discern direction of very low end sound anyway) it is better to avoid that issue by having single speaker.
Now, single speaker avoids those issues and allows you to be basically anywhere in the room and have acceptable sound, but adds discontinuity between your low and mid range. Audio professionals will prefer studio monitors because they care for for the sound to come undisturbed so much, they can place their speakers symetrically and keep their head at exactly right spot when listening.
I see a lot of people putting up ugly "sound absorbing panels." What they don't realize is that it takes a LOT of material to absorb sound. 100Hz is over three METERS long.
There are ways to reduce the impact of reflections, but sound absorbing panels are probably one of the least practical ways to do it.
First thing about most HIFI speakers is that they have to be at least 0.5m from the back wall. Otherwise you lose sound stage depth and get bloated bass. Its such a shame to see people giving 5-10k$ on pair of really good speakers and putting them 20-30cm from the wall (i see that ALL the time on various FB groups).
I have mine floorstanders around 1.2m away, where they sound the best. Is always a compromise between room and speakers placement.
Depends on the speakers I think. My floor standing speakers have front-firing woofers so putting them close to the wall doesn't matter that much for the sound.
One thing I would mention is that rigid fiberglass corner traps seemed to do a lot in my studio.
Also if you are going to talk about room modes, you are also going to want to think about the permeability of your walls and whether they are going to even reflect the frequency in question and set up a mode.
And also we may want to make a distinction between making a listening environment that sounds amazing, and one that has utility. It can be easy for an intermediate or beginner at mixing to get really tricked by a great listening environment in to doing things that won’t translate.
On the other hand, life is short, and listening to a beautiful set up is just a better quality of life if nothing else.