Why Your Room Is Lying to You
(And How to Fix It)

[00:00:00] It is Monday again, time for another Mix Session. Thank you for being on board today. The topic today, we want to look at acoustic treatment, and that continues the discussion that we started last week. So just to fill you in again, last week we spoke about room problems that. Can lead to bad mixed decisions and that's really not on you.

You can be fooled by the room acoustics, and this can lead to wrong decision making. So last week we raised the awareness and if you haven't watched it yet, I warmly recommend to just go back to Mix Artist Academy slash blog and go to last week's episode. There's a lot of gold in there for you. Today we would like to focus on acoustic treatments and practical solutions that help you to improve the room acoustics, uh, once you've made yourself aware of the problems.[00:01:00]

And that's where we wanna start with today. So let's have a quick look at what the problem is. Again, the problems lie in three different areas in general. One of 'em is caused by standing waves and room modes. Those typically manifest themselves in an, yeah, a bumpy base response where some notes stand out more than others, and most importantly, in a patchy pattern in the room where some.

Musical notes stand out more in one place, and then you step away and suddenly this note is way too quiet and another note is too loud. So that's typically room modes, also known as standing waves. Then of course, there's a speaker boundary interference, which can happen when speakers don't have the right.

Distance to the war. They're either too close or too far, and when low frequencies are thrown backwards and [00:02:00] then reflect of the war behind and start traveling forwards again, they can now lead to a second wavefront following the first one, just briefly after which together can lead to really nasty effects.

Some people call it comforting. We could go really technical there, but just trust for now that this speaker placement has a humongous effect on how well especially the low end translates. But this can also span into the mid range. It often depends on the size of the room. Lastly, there's the issue of clarity, which we typically find in the mid range.

This could be a problem with steroid imaging or just the intelligibility or a buildup of certain ranges. Uh, and that is often, um, influenced by reflections of that. Now, scatter through the room, we call room tone or reverb, whichever you like. And that can also add to the room, especially if the [00:03:00] rumor rings longer in some frequencies, but not so long on others, which is definitely something we want to look into.

So those are the key principles that we need to look at today to deepen our understanding how we can treat them. Okay. So let me just briefly shine some light on, um, what we can achieve and what we cannot. If you live in a normal standard house, there's a very good chance that you cannot achieve the acoustic treatment typically found in, let's say, space like this, a professional studio.

That's simply not realistic. So soundproofing is another phrase that I hear people throw around. And also this is. Maybe not something we can achieve here today because sound proofing, if we really want to go deep here, is an extremely expensive process [00:04:00] and it might not be a problem that you need to address.

So we will look into that a little bit deeper. So just to be very clear upfront, sound proofing is not on the agenda today. Um, what we do here today actually has more to do with what stays inside the room. Good. Um, let's look at the underlying principles over here. If a speaker sounds in a room, you play a mix or, and just music to, for enjoyment, doesn't matter.

It will travel through the room and eventually reach a boundary such as a wall, a window, a door, uh, a ceiling or the ground. And once sound hits one of the walls for surfaces, one of the room surfaces, there are actually three different options of what can happen. First and foremost, the sound energy can bounce off the wall and then [00:05:00] reflect back into the room.

In this case, the, the sound energy stays inside the room and is now redirected back at you. Just to go a little bit deeper here, uh, I trust you are generally familiar with the principle of frequency response. That means the sound energy of different frequencies. Um, once a sound bounces off a surface, it's rather unlikely that the frequency response of the reflection is identical or linear with the incident sound.

The process of bouncing off a surface typically means the frequency response changes, and that's also what explains why reverb tails in a room can be dominant in certain frequency ranges. Hold onto this thought for a moment. We will cycle back to it later, so that's one of the three options. Sound could be reflected back [00:06:00] into the room.

Then it can also be absorbed by, uh, a wall material. That's another option. And this realistically happens, it's usually a plant of all of these things. So, uh, if sound, uh, is absorbed by, um, a surface such as a window or a wooden door, or plasterboard or whatever your room is made from. Sound energy is actually transformed into heat.

There is a little bit of friction or motion, I should call it, motion going on. It moves the material form back and that actually develops a tiny little bit of heat, not enough to burn your fingers, but with scientific measurement devices, we can actually detect those things. So that's a proven concept.

The beauty is that everything that is turned into. Absorption or absorbed into and turned into heat is not going to reflect back into the room. [00:07:00] And then of course there's a third principle. It's the transmission. So sound that isn't a reflected back into the room and is not fully absorbed by the wall material will travel through the wall and continue on the other side.

And that's the amount of, or that's the kind of sound that annoys your neighbor. So when you mix at midnight and crank the baar really badly and you hear the banging on the wall, well that's due to transmission. So let's recap those one more time. Sound can either be reflected or absorbed or transmitted, uh, through the wall.

And it's typically a blend of all three. So steering back to the concept of sound proofing, that's when we want to reduce the transmission dramatically. And we do this twofold. We increase the other two reflection [00:08:00] if that's what we want, if we can afford it or most. Importantly, we would probably dramatically increase the, uh, degree of absorption so soundproofing to achieve proper soundproofing.

A significant transmission loss between sound on one side of the wall and on the other side is very expensive, and it's not something I recommend you focus on if you just wanna mu uh, record your music at home. So why is that those things are reserved for high-end studios like this space over here? In a domestic setting, this will become ridiculously expensive and it pretty much means to build new walls and probably sandwich the walls in many layers and build room and room concepts.

We are talking about really big, big dollar spending here, and I just assume this is really not what we're here for today. So if you want to, uh, work in a space like this for recording, for example, [00:09:00] that's really important. You might be better off just hiring a local studio. I'll check it out. I'm sure there's some, uh, some great spaces around.

So let's go back to your situation. Your problem is mixing and in mixing well, is transmission um, a problem for you? Well, I guess the next question you need to ask yourself is how much trouble have, are you in with your neighbors? And if the answer is, that's not a problem. We live on a rural property and we have.

I dunno, hundreds of meters to the next neighbor. Or you might be in industrial state and noise is not a problem, or maybe you are just in a forgiving environment. Well then it's cool. Or maybe you're just mixed during the day, only not at night. In this case, transmission loss is not your biggest concern.

So it comes back to the two others. We need to increase the amount of absorption. In order to reduce the [00:10:00] number of reflections, that's the underlying principle that we need to achieve here, and that can be done. On a manageable budget without spending thousands and thousands of dollars over here. So that's a really good, uh, starting point.

But I just wanted to point this out because it's important to manage, manage expectations. Soundproofing is not what we're doing today. We deal with how it sounds inside the room, and that means we first need to look at the reflections and reduce those to, um, the appropriate degree. Good. Let's move on to a couple of practical solutions.

There are some standard solutions that are often recommended, but I gotta be extra careful here because I haven't been to your room yet and only you know what it sounds like. So you [00:11:00] probably wouldn't trust a doctor Pres prescribing medicine without having examined you. And the same thing applies here as well.

So I'm going to lay out a couple of journal workflows in front of you. And consider those to be an advice buffet from which you then pick and choose, uh, what you like or what applies to your situation particularly. Okay. Now that we've got this out of the way, let's look at the most typical and most common, uh, solutions.

Let's move straight onto the biggest problem, the base range and the low frequencies. You will typically have too many base frequencies in some places and not enough in others. And one way to treat them is to use broadband base traps, those you can purchase from renowned manufacturers. And most music shops, especially online, uh, retailers.

And [00:12:00] you know, why don't you just ask your local music shop, uh, as well. I live in the Byron Shire, and I would not typically go to my friend Nick at Byron Music and check what he's got just saying. But you probably have a local music retailer around the corner, so reach out to them and just see what they've got in stock and what they recommend, what the options are.

A word of caution right away. Not every salesperson is good at prescribing the right medicine for acoustic treatment, so they might just recommend a blanket solution without knowing your problem. So be extra careful here. Ask a couple of follow-up questions. Don't just buy product A or B. But instead ask, uh, them about their absorption coefficients.

This is a numeric value to describe at which frequency range, uh, the device absorbs more than others. [00:13:00] Well, look, I don't wanna get too technical and physical right now, but if the sales person doesn't really know what you talk about or doesn't really know how to get those. Well, that's a warning sign. And maybe just maybe a, a look at, uh, other solutions as well.

Just saying, look, uh, don't wanna bitch about salespeople here. I know many of whom are really genuine people, and I just mentioned my friend Nick here in bio music. He's an absolute legend and you know, you would be in very good hands with him, but my point is, go to somebody you trust. I guess that's sums it up.

Yeah. Okay. Base traps should typically be placed in the corners of a room that could be all four corners left, right, front and left, right back. It could also be only the bottom corners or the ceiling corners or all of them. [00:14:00] How many bass traps do you need? Well, that's a difficult question to answer, but just go back one episode.

When you did the little track of playing sine waves through, let's say, a sampler instrument of different musical pitches, how dramatic a difference did you hear? Generally speaking, if you found really significant volume differences with, with some notes being super loud and others being super quiet, you need a bit more base treatment.

If you found there were pretty close to one another with minor differences, then I wouldn't treat every single corner straight away, but maybe start with two of them only. If that wasn't enough, you can purchase some more later. That's just to make sure you don't overspend and buy things you don't need because overtreatment is a real thing.

If you apply too much of something that's not good. It's a bit like salt and cooking. If it's [00:15:00] not enough, it's too bland. But if it's too much, don't let me go there. Okay, back to the base traps. The front, uh, left, right corner. So you always wanna do left and right together, so whatever you apply to the left, also apply to the right.

That's where we start.

As a general method, we probably need to go through revision cycles. What do I mean by that? That means we start with one uh, concept. We define a problem, let's say low frequencies. Then we prescribe a solution. Let's say we get some base straps, then we install them, and then we go back into evaluate. And there's a very good chance that we have fixed some problems, but definitely not all of them.

That would be highly unlikely. So we start the same circle again. We evaluate what has changed and what problems remain. We find the right solution and we go circling around. You see where I'm going with that? [00:16:00] The underlying principle is that we always focus on the biggest problem first. The biggest, most prominent problem.

Once we get this dialed in, we focus on the next smaller problem and keep going. For a professional studio, you would go around the circle many, many times. You probably don't have to do that at home, but from experience, it is very likely that the low frequencies are the biggest problem. That's why I want you to start right there.

So now that we've dealt with the base traps, let's move on to the next problem, which is reflections. And the answer for treating reflections cannot be form everywhere. That's a myth. Also, myth is a cartons they do next to nothing except for looking, looking ugly.

So that's not an option for us either. Don't use egg cartons and don't foam everything, please. That's not a wise idea. Instead, you want to apply absorbent material [00:17:00] in the right places. And that can be just a few little spots. We will see that in a moment. So what type of absorbers should you, uh, buy again, do a Google search for?

Um. Absorb us for the purpose of absorbing reflections. That's really important. If you cla your hands in your room and you have a gut feeling to where the reflections are most offending. Could be a metallic ring in the upper mids or a boomy dark ring in the lower mids. Once you figure that out, you can also look at specific absorbers that are more effective in that range, and your salesperson should be able to back this up and give you the appropriate absorption coefficients for their devices to make sure you don't get sold something you don't need or that doesn't have the right effect.

Okay, so where do you need to apply it now? Well, there are a [00:18:00] few critical spots that you need to cover first, and you can find those with the help of a friend and a mirror. How does it work? Take a comfortable seat in the listening position. Now ask a friend to take a little mirror and. Put it against the wall.

Turn your head and look at the mirror sideways and ask your friend to move the mirror up or down or left or right until you can see your speaker's tweeters. Those are the high frequency drivers in the mirror. Once you found this point, make a little mark on the wall because that's the place where reflections come from, the speakers to the wall and bounce off to hit your ear.

We wanna do this for the left side and the right side. Your camera would be back to front, so that's your left side. That's your right side. And mark those two places. We could go another step further and this becomes a little bit trickier. [00:19:00] If you can look above, there's a good chance that sound also travels upwards to the ceiling and bounces back down towards you.

In this case, absorption, uh, applied above you to the ceiling. It can be very effective. A little tip here, if possible, angle it slightly downwards so that you know, uh, the, the reflections don't, or the absorption abs absorb of material is not parallel to the wall, but slightly tilted to reflect backwards to the back.

We can get into this a little bit later, possibly. Good. So now we found the most important reflection points, and if you apply an absorption panel on each place, you will get the absolute maximum reduction of irritating reflections for the least amount of money. And that's really what we're here for.

Good. Let's go, uh, to the next step. Now that we've [00:20:00] sorted the base problem and very critically, the most prominent early reflections, let's dig a little bit deeper. If you can apply further, further absorption behind the speakers means. Uh, probably at the wall that you look at behind the speakers because those areas, again are the areas from which sound bounces off the wall and can lead to further reflections.

And, uh, of course to know, um, uh, speaker boundary interference. There's a very good chance you won't be able to treat this entirely, but if we shuffle it in the right direction, that's definitely a good thing. Alright, what else? We can look at the room's symmetry and have a quick look at the distance between the left and the right side.

How far away from the walls are the speakers? If you can achieve symmetry, in most cases, you'll actually get a better sound that way. [00:21:00] Asymmetry is something we try to avoid if we reasonably can. So that means that if on one side of the room you might have a plaster bir and of the other side, you might have, I don't know, uh, a balcony door and, and curtains well.

Closing the curtains might already be an effective step to reduce reflections, but now we have an asymmetry between, uh, an absorbent curtain on one wall and reflective, uh, plus the bolts on the other. So see if you can generally match that. And it might be that you also wanna apply a curtain to the other wall.

One that you can pull in and out. It's just an idea. But improving symmetry, not just in the space but also in the wall surfaces has got a great deal to do with stereo accuracy and clarity in what you hear, and that's really what we want to achieve here today. We want to get closer to how it actually sounds.

Uh, we already spoke about the equilateral [00:22:00] Triangle last week, which I just would like to brush up one more time. So measuring the distance between the speaker's, tweeters and your ears is a great starting point. And then from there you can fine tune it, uh, to your liking. A little tip here. I find that personally, I often like the speakers to be just slightly more narrow than that because it makes, uh, my mixes sound maybe s switch more mono.

And to remember how it is, you always try to get the opposite effect, which points me towards working stronger on achieving a great stereo balance. But that is sort of like me not tuning it to match my personal imperfections and my personal character, which of course is something that you can do if you feel like it.

Also, I find that aiming the tweet is straight at my ears is often not the best sound, but this also really depends on the speakers. So [00:23:00] although the s spaceman or the the spacing of the speakers is now set, the actual angle of the speakers can still be played with and personally in many situations alike, the.

Angle of the tweet is to me, sort of somewhere just behind my head rather than exactly on my nose. But, um, give it a try. So what you can do is if you look at your speakers from above and you just tilt them inwards or outward slightly, uh, see that makes a difference and particularly to the top end of find.

So upper mids and highs, definitely worth trying. Lastly, I would like to, um, introduce you to the concept of calibrating your speakers. What does that mean? Well, when you take speakers out of the box and put 'em on, they should be pre calibrated, calibrated from the factory, but sometimes it goes out of calibration and it might need a manual tuneup.

How do we do that? It depends on the speakers you use. Have a look what [00:24:00] settings you have at the back. There's a good chance you have a volume control of some sort, and that's where we typically wanna start with. But you can also look at other settings. Some speakers have inbuilt queues, and if that's the case, I would typically get them as flat as I can so that there's no change in tonality introduced by the speakers at first in most situations.

That's a great starting point. That's what I would do before I find my right placement. And the acoustic treatment. From there, you can now dial in a little bit deeper and find that you might need to bring the base or highs on the speakers up a smidge, but be extra careful here. You don't want to color it too much.

It's typically that you want to tame something that is still too prominent. Could be the low mids, and if you have a low mid reduction. Give it a try, but in the end, play [00:25:00] some music. We'll talk a lot more about music next week, how to use music to calibrate your ears. And this is sort of foreshadowing building the bridge to the next episode.

Um, for calibration, I typically use a pink noise, play it from my DAW and play it to only the left speaker and only the right speaker. Then you can use a simple app on your phone, uh, to measure sound pressure level. Just have a look, noise level. Uh, there are a couple of free apps and they will actually be a good starting point.

Place the, the phone or right where you sit now, don't move it sideways, of course, and then play the pink noise through one speaker at a time. For maybe half a minute and watch the numbers. They don't always show the same value. They soft usually fluctuate a little bit, but you wanna see what the middle range is and often you find that even if the [00:26:00] volume pot on the back of the speakers are set exactly the same, it doesn't guarantee that they actually produce the same volume.

Sometimes there's a manufacturing toler tolerance. Not ideal, but that's what this dial is for, to compensate. Or it might be that there's still an asymmetry in your room. So from one side you might hear more reflections from the other, giving you the illusion that the speaker is actually louder, and that's where calibrating the volume can really help.

So you want to calibrate the volume so that each speaker is exactly as loud as the other. That's the overall goal. So sometimes you need to go phone back and tweak it a little bit. Good. Alright. Now that we've done that, let's just sum it up one more time and focus on typical mistakes that I would like you to avoid.

The big picture is that we always start with the biggest problem first. Don't get lost in detail. Big picture. Remember what we spoke about in the mental Zoom [00:27:00] episode, if you forgot. That was episode two, A great watch. So the big, big picture first. Then treat that and move on to the next smaller problem and so on.

So you wanna start with a hammer and end up with sandpaper, if that makes sense. Yeah. So work your way through it from the biggest problem to the smallest problem. And of course, eventually you have to stop. You could go on forever, but that's not what we're here for. So let's rule out the myths. No egg cartons won two.

No form everywhere is a terrible solution. So don't do that. Also be extra careful taking advice from somebody who has not been to your room and listened. A mate just telling you what they did at their house. That's not a guarantee. It'll work for you. Extra care for you also. Be careful with people who suggest software [00:28:00] solutions.

I don't wanna say that's a bad idea, but it's not what you want to start with that you can possibly use later on if needed at all. But the big picture where the money is, is the acoustic treatment tuned to your specific problems.

Also be careful with advice from salespeople who don't seem to know all that much about the subject. Find a great salesperson, somebody who knows their stuff, ask a lot, a couple of clarifying questions and see if they can respond to that. It usually, it helps a lot. Speak to the right person here. Okay.

Also, don't cut corners. Jump online and buy the next product off the shelf. There's a very good chance that you might be buying something that doesn't actually fix your problem or might fix a different problem, or might even overtreat your problem. So if you just [00:29:00] jump at the very quickest solution, you might be wasting your money here.

Careful with that. Don't want you to do that. A one size fits all solution always raises an eyebrow. If somebody says, we've got this one product and it does whatever you want, uh, be careful. My, in my experience, that's rarely the case, so take that with a pinch of salt. Whenever you feel suspicious, ask clarifying questions and then trust your sense of whether you, the other person knows what they talk about.

Good. Uh, also things to avoid is placing treatment in the wrong spot. We spoke about where to place base straps. Remember the corners absorption. Remember those reflection points and how to find them. So if you just go quickly and put something up on the wall somewhere, that might not be the right choice for you.

Good. Um, calibration [00:30:00] software. One more word on that. Yes, it can be useful for fine tuning later on, so I don't wanna, uh, don't want you to be discouraged for it. And I've also used calibration software or room queue software for headphones, particularly 'cause of the room acoustics aren't involved. Patchy spots like basey in one place and less basey in another does not become an issue.

So, um, personally I found that my results were mixed and to me, eventually I decided to move on working without room correction software. But other people have successfully applied it. As the fine tuning, uh, tool later down the track. So this is something that you can experiment with. Get yourself a free demo before you buy it.

All right? And then very carefully think whether you really need it before you actually buy it. Good. Okay. Let's wrap it up slowly. [00:31:00] A few things. That I would like to go in a little bit deeper at as we finish, you don't need to spend humongous budgets on acoustics. We are not soundproofing here. We just nudge a room in the right direction so that you can make better mixed decisions.

You don't need to have an absolutely perfect room that's for professional studios like this place, but if you just mix your own music at home, that's probably a bit overdone and probably too much expense for, for the outcome. You know what? If you feel like you need the best place to mix in, reach out to the local studios in your area and see if you can rent it for a day.

Just same. Also another idea, do [00:32:00] work with headphones and speakers if you can both have imperfections. None of 'em is perfect by itself, but I find that when I spread my decision making across both, I tend to make better decisions together.

Okay, basic sound control. And calibration and your awareness. That's where the money is, that you don't need to spend all too much. Just a little bit. I guess it's time to wrap it up for today. I hope you got something valuable out of this episode. The acoustic problems that we are dealing with today, were discussed last week.

So if you wanna dive a little bit deeper, maybe go back and listen to the previous episode and you'll find it of course at Mix Artist Academy slash blog where all the full episodes are available for free. If you'd like to please leave your email behind subscribe [00:33:00] so that you get a notification every time one of these episodes is out, and you'll be the first one to get notified, uh, to watch it.

Thank you for sticking around with me.

I hope you have a wonderful day. Speak to you next time.