Great! I saw the photos now, so that makes things quite a bit clearer.
Okay well I'm totally open to your input for a "new school" design.
I think it's no secret that I'm rather partial to the RFZ design concept ("Reflection Free Zone"), as the basis, but then there's some things I like to do a bit different, since RFZ isn't easy to achieve in small rooms, for several reasons. Pretty much all home studios and project studios are "small", in the acoustic sense, so there's a few modifications that I do, to help with that.
But at the time just built some stands filled with sand that are pretty great, just a little bulky and want a minimalist studio.
That can certain work, yes, but there are limitations on how good you can get it. Flush-mounting removes those limitations, and the overall improvement is quite something. Here's a quote from a client for whom I designed flush mounting system for his room, similar in size to yours. After he built the soffits, but before completing the rest of the treatment, he said: "
...music playing in the room already sounds loads better. ... the imaging with soffit mounting is fantastic. What surprised me the most is how much more even the room is already - whereas before moving my head even a little bit made a difference, I can walk around the room and still hear an excellent image and fairly stable bottom end." A few weeks later, when he finished the rest of the treatment he added this: "
... I’m ... loving using the room - mixes translate brilliantly, imaging is awesome and it works great for tracking guitar and vocals too." And that's in a room where he had been using his speakers on stands before...
Many people on a tight budget do just put their speakers on stands, and manage to work fine like that. But after you try soffit-mounting, you'll never want to go back again...
Also, I am pretty set on staying with front ported monitors with them pushed all the way up to the front wall, or soffit mounted.
Soffit mounted!
Speaker porting isn't really an issue for soffit mounting: even rear ported speakers can be soffit mounted successfully. Studio 3, for example: those SC407 monsters are rear ported, thus according to some, supposedly cannot be soffit mounted... and yet there they are, soffit mounted, and performing fantastically. Before I did that, I spoke to the chief engineer at Eve Audio, and he gave that arrangement his blessing, after seeing the design. He also agreed that mounting them vertically was the best method for that room, even though they are design to be mounted horizontally, preferably. Anyway, the point is that pretty much any speaker can be successfully soffit-mounted, with few exceptions. The only ones that cannot be mounted like that, are ones with drivers facing out the sides, top or bottom, or ones with very complicated cabinet shapes. Everything else is fair game. Even the famous egg-shaped Genelec speakers can be soffit mounted.
I'm probably going to go to the bigger kali's due to such great price and sonarworks, but if I wanted to spend more, I love the adam a7xs, as well as the nuemann line.
Now you are speaking my language! I'm a fan of Adam, for sure (I own some of those myself), as well as their close cousins from Eve, and the Neumanns are just incomparable. Especially their subs. I'm working on a room right now in New Orleans, where there are a pair of KH-805 subs, that we are using as a plane wave bass array. Tuning is in progress right now, and looking very good. Probably e posting some results from that in a few weeks... If you add a sub to a pair of mains, then you can do some "magic" with that combination, not just in filling out the low end, but also in using them together to deal with some of the acoustic issues in the room. SBIR and some modal issues can often be tamed with a good sub and careful tuning. If you really wanted to go that route, I would definitely recommend it! Not cheap, but the results ca be really good. The KH805s are great for that, because of the power, accuracy, and low end extension. Neumann claims they go down to 18 Hz, but that's not true: in reality, they are still doing good stuff down at 15 Hz! And still very much measurable down to 12 Hz. That's REALLY impressive for that size sub, and that price range.
Yes I have read this. I feel like my room is a really good size and want to avoid wasting space and want my position as close to the front wall as possible
Right, but don't get too close! The optimum range for the mix position is around 32% to 44% of the room length. If you get outside of that area, you run the risk of being in major modal problems. There's a procedure that I call the "walking mic" procedure, that can help you identify the optimum location in your room (once you have the speakers set up correctly). Here's how to do that:
viewtopic.php?f=9&t=24 . Its a very slow, boring, maddeningly repetitive process, but it produces a wealth of data about your room. It's then much easier to find the best spot for the listening position. Its a compromise, of course: you'll notice that as you move around, one parameter improves while another gets worse. But the data allows you to balance those against each other, trading off one for another, and find the overall smoothest spot.
I am building a new desk right now that has way less surface area compared to my last and want a really clean setup
:thu: I'm not sure if you have seen this, but it might give you some ideas to help build yours:
https://www.digistar.cl/StudioShowcase/ ... SK-CMP.mp4 I call it the "M1" desk. I designed it to be very low profile, and open, but still with plenty of rack space, and comfortable to work at.
Based on your suggestion of having the monitor spread 55% of the room's width that would place my monitors 6.765' apart, but I don't want my listening position to be 1/3rd of the room back so I'd like some guidance here.
I guess the question here is: how accurate do you want your mixes to be? How well do you want them to translate? There's an optimal layout for that, which gives you good stereo imaging, a broad sound-stage that extends across the full width of the speakers, a true and stable "phantom center", as well as the usual acoustic clarity, tightness, etc. The further you move away from that ideal mix position, the further you also move away from all of those desirable characteristics. If you get too close to the front wall, you get into a region where the bass and modal response will be unpleasant and inaccurate, and you'll also have the sound-stage and stereo imaging too broad and unrealistic. I would try to not go further forward than about 32%. Theoretically, the best spot is at 38%, but that's not written in stone, and there's a decent range to play with there: about +/- 6%, thus 32% to 44%. As long as you are OK with losing accuracy and not having good mix translation, then you could go another couple of points beyond that each way.
If I don't do full soffits right now but the wall is framed as big panels, what's your stance on have my lp6s wall mounted vs on the stands? I have a feeling your going to shoot this down but again this is me just going for a clean look and my beefy stands aren't successful at that minimalist look...
Maybe you could draw up a rough sketch of what you have in mind, as I'm not certain that I understand what you are saying.
Let me give you some "brief" (!) background here, that might help you make the decision.... here's how it works technically:
If you have a speaker inside the room (not soffit mounted) then some of the sound is focused like a cone coming straight at the mix position, and some of the sound expands around the speaker in all directions, in a sphereical shape. The reason for that is very simple: at high frequencies, the wavelengths are short, and the front baffle of the speaker (the front panel) is much larger than the wavelength, so the baffle forces all of the sound to go straight towards you. And at low frequencies, the wavelengths are large, much bigger than the width of the baffle (cabinet), so they "wrap around" the speaker and go backwards behind it as well. This is called the "baffle step" problem, and it happens with ALL speakers, simply because of the way sound works: a sound wave is not affected by objects that are a lot smaller than the wavelength, but it
IS affected by objects that are a lot larger than the wavelength. So a wave that is 10 feet long is not affected by much at all by things in the room, but a wave that is 2 inches long is affected by pretty much everything.
That's the basis. ALL speakers suffer from the baffle step problem. The only difference is the frequency where things change over from "focused forwards" to "wrap around". For physically small speakers, that happens well up in the mid range, while for very large speakers it can be down a lot lower. The ONLY factor that influences this, is the size of the front baffle. In the ideal situation, the front baffle would be larger than even the lowest frequency wavelength, so there would not be any problem! In other words, if the baffle could be "infinitely large", then there would be no baffle step problem, and ALL of the sound would be focused directly towards you.
And that's exactly what a soffit does! It emulates an "infinite baffle". It gets rid of this problem by putting a much larger baffle around the speaker, replacing the small one that is the front panel of the cabinet itself. So the baffle step problem is forced down to a much lower frequency, ideally below the bottom end of the speaker's range. That's why small speakers are really good candidates for soffit mounting, precisely because the "baffle step problem" with a small speaker occurs at a rather high frequency, somewhere in the mid range!
OK, so you might wonder: "What's so bad about having some sound focused forwards and some wrapping around?". Why is that a problem at all?
Actually it is not just one problem, but SEVERAL problems.
First, is power imbalance. Think of this: If ALL of the power put out by the tweeter is heading towards you, but HALF of the power put out by the woofer is NOT heading towards you (it's going the other way: away from you, off behind the speaker), then you have a power imbalance problem! The highs are 6 dB louder than the lows, because half of the lows wrapped around behind the speaker and went away from you. So there's a major issue here! Therefore, the speaker manufacturer has to pump
TWICE as much power into the woofer, so that it puts out the
same amount of sound heading YOUR way, as the tweeter, and you hear them at the same level. Have you ever wondered why speakers always have much more powerful amps for the woofers, compared to the tweeters? This is why: the "power imbalance" problem.
So there's the first problem: power imbalance. But put the speaker in a soffit, and now ALL of the energy is going straight to you, NONE is going backwards, and you don't need to waste all that power any more. So you can roll-off the bass, because the built-in compensation is not needed any more, and the entire speaker is acting the way it should: sending all of it's power to you.
Next problem: If the speaker is not in a soffit, then think about what happens to that "half of the low end" that went behind the speaker: it hits the front wall, and bounces back! And now it comes towards you again, but delayed a little (because it took a little bit of time to reach the front wall and come back again.... This is clearly NOT a good thing! It will interfere with the direct sound, causing phase cancellations, comb filtering, and other nasty problems. This is called the "SBIR problem", where SBIR means "Speaker Boundary Interference Response". It means what it says: the frequency response of the speaker is now all messed up, because the sound that bounced off the "boundary" (front wall) is "interfering" with the sound that came straight out the speaker. Not a good thing at all. It totally screws up the frequency response, and causes a very large dip in the spectrum at a frequency that is related to only one thing: the distance between the speaker and the front wall.
If the speaker is more than a few inches away from the wall, then you cannot get rid of SBIR by using treatment, since the frequency is way too low for that. There's basically nothing you can do about it.... except mount your speaker in a soffit! If your speaker is soffit-mounted, then there is no SBIR problem with the front wall! Because NO sound gets around behind the speaker anyway, and even if some did, it can't come back into the room again, because the soffit baffle stops it.
So there's another problem killed. SBIR from the front wall is gone. Impossible.
Then there's "edge diffraction", which is a bit more complex. It goes like this: remember that waves that are a lot shorter than the width of the speaker (higher frequencies) all go directly towards you, while ones that are a lot longer wrap around behind? OK, so what happens to the ones that are roughly the SAME width as the speaker? Well, they sort of try to wrap around, but they can't quite make it... and they also can't quite go directly forwards either! The problem happens at the edge of the speaker cabinet, just where they waves are reaching that edge. They sort of want to go around, but they sort of can't, so there's a kind of "push pull" fight going on right at the edge, with part of the wave almost getting around the corner, and part not quite making it.... (OK, for the technical purist acoustical reading this; yeah, I know that isn't accurate, but its a great way to get your head around the issue, and see visualize what is happening...) That creates all manner of ugly stuff, right at the edges of the box. So that's why it is called "edge diffraction". It's a problem, because it messes up the frequency repose, and the power response, and the phase response, for all frequencies where the wavelength is similar in size to the dimensions of the box. It creates interference patterns that mess things up. That's why many speakers have beveled or rounded corners and edges: to reduce edge diffraction, and some speakers (such as many Genelec's) are even egg-shaped, totally curved, to reduce it even more. But you can't get rid of the problem completely. ... Unless you mount the speaker in a soffit! Since the front baffle of the soffit is basically an extension of the front of the speaker box, there is no edge! So there is no edge diffraction!
That's yet another issue that soffit mounting eliminates.
The list is growing:
- Power imbalance
- SBIR
- Comb filtering
- Edge diffraction
All of those are eliminated by putting your speakers in soffits. Gone. Not there. There are other things that soffit-mounting fixes too, but those are the main ones.
But what does that mean, in terms of how it sounds? Major, big-time improvements! First and foremost, the bass is much tighter and smoother, and extends down lower. None of those artifacts are there, so they cannot distort the bass response. All you hear is the pure, deep, focused, rich bass of your speakers. And since the low end is extended by the infinite baffle, the speakers actually sound bigger than they are. Then there's the mid range: since it is no longer muddied by the edge diffraction problem, that is cleaner, smoother, and better defined as well. And for the high end, the soffit helps with yet ANOTHER problem, which is impedance mismatch! I haven't mentioned that yet, but in brief simple terms, it works like this. The tweeter cone is a hard, rigid, massive solid object, and it is trying to transfer energy to a softy, mushy, springy, compressible, floppy fluid, called "air". That energy transfer is VERY inefficient, because the the two materials are so very different! Try flapping your hands up and down in air, and see how well you can move it around.... But if you flap your hands up and down underwater, you do a LOT better! You can swim in water, but you can't swim in air, because the "impedance" of the water is closer to the impedance of your hands, but the impedance of air is very different. So you can transfer your "flapping hand" energy to the water, much better than you can transfer it to the air, because the impedance is better matched. If you wanted to transfer "flapping hand" energy into air, then you could attach ping-pong paddles to your hands, or better still, big pieces of cardboard or thin piece of plywood: That would improve the impedance of your hand a lot! It would be much more closely matched. The bigger the sheet of wood you used, the better it would be. You'd have to work harder, but you could move a LOT of air if you attached a really large piece of wood to your hand.... maybe the size of a soffit baffle, for example!
Speaker manufacturers go to a lot of trouble to carefully design the "wave-guides" around the tweeters of their speakers, to improve the impedance matching problem, so that the tweeter cone can transfer it's energy more efficiently into the air. That's the reason for the curved shaped plastic or metal "thingy" around the tweeter: to improve the impedance matching between the tweeter and the air... but that wave-guide is limited by the size of the box that the speaker is mounted in: it can't be bigger than the box! Unless you put it in a soffit....
Yup, you guessed: The soffit also improves the impedance matching of the tweeter to the air. Not by a lot, but enough to be useful. So the high end is also cleaner, smoother, crispier, more "airy", better detailed, ... because the tweeter can do a better job of transferring all of its energy into the air..... (If you have ever heard what a tweeter sounds like when it is taken out of its wave-guide , and just working in the open, air, you have certainly noticed how tiny, thin, tinny and ridiculous it sounds!)
In other words, the soffit does many, many things a once to greatly improve the full spectrum of sound coming out of your speakers.
It's the best single thing you can do to our room, and your speakers. Everything else is "icing on the cake", but soffit-mounting your speakers is the cake itself. It makes a huge difference.
And smaller speakers benefit from it much more than large speakers.
what's your stance on have my lp6s wall mounted vs on the stands?
Wall mounted, as in attached to the wall with some type of bracket? I'm not a big fan of doing that. Maybe if the wall is thick concrete or brick, it might be acceptable, but not for a stud-framed wall.
this is me just going for a clean look and my beefy stands aren't successful at that minimalist look...
Soffits are clean! And minimalist! In fact, they are so clean and minimalist that technically, the speaker aren't even there! Acoustically, they are not in the room. so minimal that the only part of the speaker visible, is the front face... and you could even hide that behind suitable fabric, if you wanted to, so the speakers would be absolutely invisible... You can't get cleaner than that!
I really get this. I guess I really need a design and for now focus on the rear wall bass trapping as well as my front wall.
Yup. Those ate the two biggies, in pretty much all small rooms.
I agree with putting my resource and supply into the rear wall. I just want my front wall panels at least up, so I am not looking at the studs. Even if the front panels aren't even filed with anything, just fabric wrapped frames that can pop off when its time to fill them up. Is that okay? This could even end up being the panel behind the front wall that gets built down the road depending on the design.
Yes, that's fine.... I think! But it would be good if you could do that rough sketch of what you have in mind....
Regarding the REW can I use Sonarworks XREF20 Measurement Mic?
That should work fine. I've never tried with one of those, specifically, but the specs are pretty good. Do you have he calibration file for that?
The designing is fun! But the measurements are going to be boring
So true! Very much... But still necessary!
- Stuart -
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