My Journey with Stuart

[Dove]

A couple of years ago I started work on converting and exiting timber frame outbuilding into a dedicated control room to act remotely from our two live rooms. I have done this before so knew that I would need some acoustic advice which came in the form of a mate who had studied acoustics but had little experience and offered to consult pro bono for experience. Everything was done on the cheap, me being a "tightass", and when the room was finished and I tried working in it something felt very wrong. Aside from what my ears were telling me it was physically exhausting just working in there. Some measurement revealed a mess!! two massive nulls and various other anomolies.

I turned to forums to see what could be done and eventually came across Stuart an acoustician who was working half way round the world and seemed to be picking up clients on forums.Felt risky but after extensive correspondence I felt reassured enough to send a payment to a total stranger with no real way of knowing what would happen.

As instructed I bought a measurement mic and downloaded REW. Took baseline measurements as per instruction and waited..........

Diagnosis of the mdats was extensive and made alot of sense but starting from scratch was what was needed.

Stuart recommended using a large part of the vaulted ceiling for bass trapping,a reflection free zone arrangement for the front wall with soffit mounted speakers. Our Mackies were not designed to be soffit mounted but Stuart showed me ,with solid evidence,that they could and should be. A reflective front wall concerned me.He was also suggesting a Behringer (yes Behringer!!) FBQ across the main outputs for what he called digital tuning. My anxiety levels were through the roof! These recommendations were going against all my instincts and I've been working in studios for 30 years. However by this time he had convinced me that he knew what he was talking about which is NOT the case with all acousticians,believe me.I have the contact details for half a dozen that I have used over the years in my book!

And so I decided to put my trust in this guy on the other side of the planet, downloaded sketchup and waited.........

After a short wait the drawings arrived. Incredibly detailed and specific,alot of work had gone into these. I won't post the sketchup
files at this point but am happy to share them with consent from Stuart.

I completed the work in around 2 months. I think this freaked Stuart out a bit as I was constantly emailing for details but it's a commercial studio and although we could still operate while doing the work it was not ideal.

So,room complete and equipment installed and initial mdats looking much better but with no real time for extensive appraisal the first client arrived. Felt ok and most noticable was the lack of fatigue working in the new control room. I wanted to stress this point as I hadn't realized how a bad room has the side effect of being so exhausting.It's obvious really as you're brain is constantly compensating for room anomolies.
This is why we have all been able to create decent mixes in bad rooms, our brains are amazing with experience. Sure we are used to 10 and 12 hour sessions but we assume that it is the hours spent that exhaust us when this isn't the whole picture.

Anyways the time for the first mixing session arrived and this is when I knew I had made the right choice in Stuart. It's been a joy to work in from day one. I'm going to skip all the testimonials from clients,other engineers and our team and just say WOW it works.

I did all the work myself,it may not be in everybody's capabilities, but more than possible for anyone who is a bit handy. Overall I've spent less than a pair of Neumans for example and am a happy bunny.

We are about to start digital tuning to fine tune the room which should make it even better . I have racked the Behringer out of site so I don't have to look at it!!!!!!

So I have attached the orignal Baseline mdats of the room as it was ,and a current mdat as is,as well as some photos of the construction and a 360deg of the almost completed room.

I hope this is of interest to the forum it has certainly been a journey for me and it wasn't always a smooth one but now it's done the difficulties are forgotten................thank you Stuart!

360deg of almost complete control room here.

https://kuula.co/share/7qMhW? fs=1&vr=0&autorotate=0.55&thumbs=1&chromeless=0&logo=0

[Soundman2020]

Welcome to the forum, Julian! It's great to have you here!

And I'm really pleased that YOU are pleased with the room. In the end, that's all that really matters.

... most noticable was the lack of fatigue working in the new control room.I wanted to stress this point as I hadn't realized how a bad room has the side effect of being so exhausting.It's obvious really as you're brain is constantly compensating for room anomolies.

A very important, and very big point, often overlooked!

As you mention, you often see people talking about "learning the room" to be able to mix in a deficient environment, and even claims that it is possible for good engineers to mix in a bad room if they concentrate and mentally compensate.... but those claims fail to mention the toll it takes on your health. Sure, you can mix in a bad room... but at the end of the day, you end up mentally and even physically exhausted, and the work you put out isn't as god as it could have been.

By the same token, it is certainly possible to still ride a bicycle with the rear tire flat, the front fork bent, and the saddle on backwards... you can absolutely ride that thing! But it wears you out in no time, you can't go very fast, and you can't keep it going in a straight line.

As you yourself have experienced, a good room makes all the difference! You can mix much better, do it faster, enjoy it more, and get to the end of the day still feeling good.

And your clients notice, too.

It just makes sense to treat a room, any room, as well as it possibly can be treated, to make your life easier. Even a small, less-than-ideal room can be improved. Every small thing you do to improve the room, makes your life that much easier in the end, and improves your mixes by that much as well.

I know of some studio designers who refuse to even consider a room that isn't at least a certain size, with certain minimum dimensions, or certain minimum volume, or if it has a door or window in an inconvenient place, or if the shape is not ideal... to be honest pretty much ANYBODY can design a successful studio if the room is already large and ideal! That's a piece of cake. When it turns out well, that doesn't really mean that the designer did a great job: it just means he choose a room that was simple to do. The real challenge comes when the room is NOT ideal: too small, wrong shape, doors/windows in bad places, bad ratio, doubtful construction, or a bunch of other restrictions and limitations that put it at a handicap. It's no wonder that some of the big-name studio designers won't even attempt such rooms, and flat refuse to even try: because getting them to sound good is not easy. I've even seen some of them belittle people with non-optimal rooms, saying that they are wasting their money for even trying: suggesting that they should just give up and forget about it.

But your place is clear proof of the contrary! It is absolutely worthwhile investing resources in pretty much ANY room: the majority of home studios and project studios really can be made pretty darn good, with the right design and right treatment. Maybe not perfect, but still very, very usable, with vast improvement that makes it easy to mix, with no fatigue, where the mixes translate well, the clients are happy, and keep coming back for more.

Some comments on your place, Julian, for folks who might be following your thread:

My anxiety levels were through the roof! These recommendations were going against all my instincts and I've been working in studios for 3o years.

Yep, I remember some of your comments from around then! Traditional "wisdom" and rooms from the past aren't always applicable to different situations. Your room was a tough one to deal with, for several reasons, so there's some additional and unusual stuff I had to do to make it work for you. It's a smallish room, there's practically no space on the bottom two thirds of rear wall for any treatment, which is what all rooms need, the ceiling is vaulted, the room is slightly asymmetrical, and the console is large and strangely angled. So I had to get a bit creative... The rear wall issue was a biggie: there's no space there for treatment, because of the couch and the door, so what we had to do was use just the very top part of the rear wall, where there was an opening to an unused storage space beyond the room. Not ideal, but it helped a lot.

The biggest single issue in the room was a very loud, long, degenerate 40 Hz. modal issue (lengthwise axial mode), and there was no place for bass trapping on the lower rear wall, nor in the rear corners (since the room is not very long, and Julian needs a client couch at the back, it was out of the question to do anything back there: the couch has to be tight up against the rear wall). So I did that deep bass trap in the upper part of the rear wall, extending that into the storage area, as well as deep bass trapping inside the front soffits, and in the ceiling area at the front of the room. Still not enough to really kill that mode as much as I'd like, but plenty to get it under control. Then careful positioning of the sub helps some more with that, and we'll probably be able to take a little more out of it with the digital tuning.

The other major, key "secret" to taming this room (and almost any room), is the modified RFZ style overall concept, based around flush-mounting ("soffit mounting") the speakers. Many people don't realize what a huge difference this makes. Flush mounting in soffits like the ones you see in the photos above, is the single biggest improvement you can do in almost ANY room, and for almost ANY speaker. Soffits solve so many problems all at once. Even rear-ported speakers, or strange shaped speakers can be flush mounted like this, and the results speak for themselves. I'm working on an article about soffit-mounting, but its not ready yet. The proof that this is the right approach, especially for small rooms and unusually shaped rooms, is right here: Julian's room and his comments are clear evidence that this approach just works.

There's a lot more I could say about the room, and we'll probably mention some of that in this final stage, but for now I need to shut up and start analyzing the REW data that Julian has posted!

He was also suggesting a Behringer (yes Behringer!!) FBQ across the main outputs for what he called digital tuning.

Insanity! Who would do a thing like that! Crazy!

A quick word about that: "Don't try this at home, kids!". It's not as easy as it looks, and if you don't understand the underlying principles, you can emd up making things worse, not better.

Yes, I do use the Behringer FBQ for the final digital tuning in many rooms. The reason for that is because it has a whole bunch of filters available for each channel, independently, with reasonably good precision, and a good range of adjustment for each one. There's 20 filters on each channel. By carefully tuning many of those filters, it is possible to improve the acosutic response of the room in the low end, correct some frequency response issues (but NOT all of them), improve the frequency balance between the left and right channels, and apply an overall response curve to the entire system. So that little box can do quite a few things at once, if you use it correctly. There are other "DSP" and "EQ" boxes that you could use, but some of them are ridiculously expensive, or have far fewer channels, are complicated to use, or are limited in some other way. The Behringer box is inexpensive, has plenty of channels, and can be controlled via MIDI to set the filters.

That's the good news. The bad news is that its a Behringer! And therefore suffers from the typical Behringer maladies. One issue is that, even though you can use MIDI to send it all of the filter settings, the MIDI connection is flaky: Behringer didn't do a good job of implementing MIDI on this box, so sometimes you see filters changing at random, that you didn't even change! For example, you might send a new set of filters where you only changed filter number 5, but then when you check, you see that filters number 3 and 8 also changed! So you have to be careful. I have developed a work-around for that, but I won't be going into details in public on how I do that...

Then there's the issue that that the frequencies set on the Behringer box do not coincide with the frequencies that REW reports. For example, REW might show a modal issue at 41.7 Hz, so you set a filter at 41.7 Hz on the Behringer, but when you test again with REW, it shows that your filter is actually acting on 43.1 Hz... or 39.8 Hz... Which is part of the reason why you CANNOT use the automated filter-setting process inside REW! It will set your filters in the wrong place.

Another reason why you can't use the automation in REW: it's just software algorithm. It makes mathematical adjustments, but it doesn't understand what that SOUNDS like to human ears, in the room. Also, the test mic is located at the center of where your head will be in the room, which is NOT where your ears are, and there's only one mic but you have two ears. So all of that has to be taken into account when doing the "digital tuning" that Julian mentioned.

So this process has to be done manually. If you try to do it automatically (with REW or any other "room correction" system), you will be disappointed. You very likely get flatter frequency response curves on the graphs, but the room still won't sound right. Because a flat frequency response curve is not the real goal here! Many people make that mistake, chasing after "flatness", then wondering why the room is still "off".

I'll talk more about this as we go through the process with Julian's room, but the simple truth is that automated "room correction" doesn't work too well. It is manual adjustment, with understanding, that does the job, and even then it only works if the room has already been treated acoustically, to the point where digital tuning is possible.

In other words: "Don't try this at home, kids!" ... and don't believe the hype in the glossy brochures about software an hardware that will "fix your lousy room"....


- Stuart -

[Dove]

Thanks Stuart and looking forward to the digital tuning. A quick thought in reference to you comments above about more bass trapping in the lower third of the rear wall.Would a bespoke "sofa bass trap" be worth considering?

[Soundman2020]

Source of the post n reference to you comments above about more bass trapping in the lower third of the rear wall.Would a bespoke "sofa bass trap" be worth considering?

It's certainly worth trying, if you'd like to do that. Another thing that could make a difference is a second sub at the rear of the room, set up as a "double-bass array" or "plane wave array". But I don't think there's enough space to fit one in there at the back, and it would need a precision time delay and more tuning to get that right. That's a lot of extra expense, and maybe not worth it (unless you happen to have a spare sub hanging around, and a precision time delay of some type?).

But the "sofa bass trap" is worth pursuing. You can get quite a bit of porous absorption inside a typical sofa-sized object. That could make a noticeable improvement.

By the way, I downloaded the REW data, and I'm looking at it now.


- Stuart -

[Soundman2020]

I just sent you some filter sets to try, Julian, so please load them up and see how it goes.

- Stuart -

[Dove]

Thanks for the first set on filters Stuart,they look promising to me! Just wanted to mention that although we spaent time positioning the sub the actual volume of it I set as best I could using REW as a basic tool. I have attached a photo of the setting on the sub for reference.Reverse polarity seemed better to be and very low volume.