The Room Tuning Thread

[MDV]

Thats it really: its reflections and high end coherence. You can work that to your advantage with things like soft stuff behind you.

You should always keep the tweeters at ear level as well, so maybe you moved the monitors up or down to change their interaction with the floor-ceiling modes and they have to fire at your head again. Or, the woofers. All monitors are designed with a line of phase coherence that youre meant to hear them on; check the manual for that. Most are made with the tweaters on the line of coherence though.

Edit - when I say at ear level I mean aimed at your ears level, not ear level on a line parallel with the floor.

[Drew]

Btw, what did you use for a white noise generator and frequency analyzer?

[Soopahmahn]

Originally Posted by Drew

Btw, what did you use for a white noise generator and frequency analyzer?

From my monitor upgrade thread:

Originally Posted by MDV

Behrringer, or whatever the fuck they're called, never did learn to spell that name properly (for some reason), make a linear omni test mic for just this sort of thing that might be the only good thing they make. It costs about 30 quid. If you must use a mic you already have then make sure its as linear as possible or has a detailed frequency chart. It must be onmi or it might just do more harm than good (I use my AT4050 in omni mode, knowing full well the risks of not using a dedicated test mic). Get some white noise (there are loads of files of it kicking round the net), bluecat frequency analyst (free) and play white noise out of the monitors into the mic in the listening position, and record it, and run it through bluecat analyst. It will look like the alps. Move shit around until it looks less like the alps.

Blue Cat's FreqAnalyst - Real Time Spectrum Analysis Plug-in (VST, Audio Unit, RTAS, DX) (Freeware)
Burn-in wave files: white noise, pink noise, frequency sweep, channel mix
Amazon.com: Behringer ECM8000 Condenser Ultra-Linear Measurement Condenser Microphone: Musical Instruments

Best of luck.

[MDV]

Like soop said.

There are others kicking round, but that works. White noise is white noise, but bluecat is the best analyser for the job as its properly linear (some analysers, like voxengos span for example have odd weightings that show white noise as 1/power, so that pink is flat), its accurate, with very small increments in its spectra (dont know how small, but small enough that comb filtering in high end is well represented: many analysers apply far too much smoothing), and it shows you the max/average curve, so you can look at the whole spectra without anything playing and accurately and consistently compare readings. Wintastic.

[Soopahmahn]

Why use white instead of pink?

[MDV]

Originally Posted by Soopahmahn

Why use white instead of pink?

Either would work in principle. The response needs to show correctly as flat, though, since otherwise youre trying to judge linear against a slope and introduce an interpretation error.

Or to put it another way, you use white instead of pink because bluecat reads equal amplitude not power, and its bluecat analyser you want!

[Kim]

Also, John Sayer's forum has an immense amount of info. And if you apply yourself to learn the basics, he's very helpful to correct any errors you might have done in your designs.

[MDV]

Awesome forum Kim, cheers.

[Soopahmahn]

I'm just going to bump this with a tip: if you're into recording and mixing and you're not watching Pensado's Place as Mark has suggested, you're crazy. It's not a super slick show but just watch it instead of Firefly re-runs and you'll surely catch some amazing audio wisdom nuggets.

[MDV]

+1 Pensados place is excellent.

It has a meandering conversational structure to it, but that just adds to the usefulness imo; pensado is a highly accomplished engineer that is often just having a chat about mixing or some related matter with another invariably highly accomplished guest, and you learn loads from it.