Day 177 (one day off half a year!)
Last night I worked until 11.30pm trying to get to a stage where I could stop being covered in fibreglass and sawdust. I put the last two hangers in, cut holes in sides of the rack mount parts of my desk (as per Stuart's desk design), attached large wheels to the desk and sanded the floor ready to apply some varnish.
Finished hanger wall. The biggest hanger is about 64cm deep and 2m tall.
Prototype desk construction
Front of room
I also did some more REW tests and the results are below. The MDAT is attached.
SPL: baseline test (empty room) vs now - left speaker
SPL: baseline test (empty room) vs now - right speaker
RT60: comparison between baseline, soffit wall, ceiling treatment and then now (rear wall). Note the 100Hz ish thing that's disappeared. I wonder if that's due to the cloud type absorber I hung?
Waterfall for soffit and ceiling treatment:
Waterfall for rear wall (now) treatment - quite a bit smoother, but still some really low rings to look at - I wonder if that could be related to having the fan on?:
Spectrogram for soffit and ceiling treatment:
Spectrogram for rear wall (now) treatment:
I also repeated my sound reduction test with the correct settings on the level meter. It was still loud outside at 9.30pm with birdsong etc (around 58dBC background noise next to the house). 98dBC at the desk 68dBC stood next to the door, dropping to 60dBC when the bass in the track stopped. Because the birdsong etc was so loud I'm still not convinced this is a true reflection so I'm going to have to repeat it at 1am or something!
BUT HOW DOES IT SOUND? It sounds pretty good. The bass is quite even as you move up and down the room, which is a great relief. It does sound dead when talking, as demonstrated by the RT60 graph, so I need to see what that feels like to work in before deciding what to do.
It does still sound quite bright and I'm hoping that at some point soon Stuart will return and be able to apply some digital tuning to the room which can include a HF roll off. Again, I'm going to use the room a bit and get used to it before doing anything else.
The only issue I noted was related to the treble. Stood in front of the desk, around 1/3 of the length of the room, if I moved my head up and down I heard a phasing going on with the treble. I rolled the desk out the way and it wasn't as pronounced, so I don't know if that was something strange to do with the desk. Again, once there is a screen, keyboard, mouse etc on the desk perhaps there'll be some natural diffusion. The only other thought I had was whether this is some kind of edge diffraction from where the speaker stops and the front of the baffle starts. I might try putting some backer rod in that really small gap to see if it makes any difference.
Has anyone experienced anything like this?