Sound Proofing a room

[kontak80]

This question is to home producers obviously. I produce, mix and record in my room, a barracks room to be exact. Anyway, all of my walls are brick and its manipulating the perception of what I hear from my monitors. Does anyone else operate in a similiar environment and what did you do to eliminate some of the echo. I obviously cannot put studio foam all over the wall, because I live in the barracks.

I also went to GC yesterday and bought some of those foam pads that go under your monitors. Hopefully that will have positive effect on my sound.

[neubonic]

you could always mount the studio foam on something like a piece of cardboard that you could hang on your walls less permanently

[hel]

Putting 'foam" all over your walls in most cases, will actually dull the sound. The idea is to counteract certain problematic wave frequencies. Diffusers and char combos (random placed, random height wood cuts) will dampen certain freq and/or change the direction of them, to prevent standing waves and early reflections (echo alternation reaching your ear, before the actual sound). Absorbers dampen the sound also, to a greater degree, and actually absorb the frequencies, and ends in no reverberation (reflections). Traps, like the monitor pads, absorb low end freq and vibration.

The pads you bought are a good start, as they will keep local objects from vibrating and influencing your perception. Basically, your desk or pens, what have you, would be doing the vibrating. The next step would be corner bass traps, and likely diffusers, since we're dealing with brick reverb. A few well placed book cases, with variable height, lengths, and protrusion/pertusion of books and themselves, could create the same effect, though maybe not as well. I'd say go for absorbers, only in or near the corners, if you mixing desk is near the corner.

Get a tape measure, and find out the dispersion angle of your monitors, follow this to the wall, these are likely problem spots. Diffuse. Bass will be over hinted in corners, use bass traps. Use 1 or 2 absorbers, on differing walls near corners to cut mids and highs (10kHz and up). 2 inchers are fine.

If your floors are not carpeted (ideally), use some grande absorbers, (hanging sheets type, or tiles).

Also, make sure your monitor tweeters are horizontal with the ear, rather than the woofer, and the the sub-woofer isn't pushing the same frequencies as the woofer. Dedicate frequencies 60Hz on down to the sub-woofer entirely, if you have one, and can calibrate. Make sure the nearfields are in a V shape, and are pointing at you, where your head is at the intersection of the V. In theory,in a rectangle room, one monitor should be along the length of one wall, and the other along the length of a shorter one. The monitor along the short wall, should be farther, the one along the long, can be closer.

I'm by no means a guru, and all environments are different; yours in entirely different from mine, even by description, but hopefully this helps.

edit: It's not too hard to take down the combo floaters/char combos and bass traps, so you may want to combine them and some bookshelves for temp room treatment.

[kontak80]

Hel, wow how much do I owe you. Great info you got there. Thanks

[hel]

Nothing. I'm just a vice, passing what I've learned from being in studios and watching people install our treatments. With my new studio, I finally got around to doing it myself (except the booth treatment).

For real guru advice, check out these sites, and the RSD Forum on John Sayers.

www.johnlsayers.com
www.saecollege.de/reference_material/index.html
www.computermusic.co.uk/tutorial/hearnoevil.pdf