Aloha guys,
This is a kind of a ‘Mission Impossible’ thang.
Your mission Mr. Phelps: (if you decide to accept it)
‘Mix one song’
Scenario:
House bedroom/Office room with NO furniture at all.
Twelve feet long
Nine feet wide
Ten feet high
No windows
One door
Lo pile carpet
Dry wall surfaces (walls and ceiling)
Your tools consists of:
One Mixing desk
Two monitors
One chair (if needed)
The mixing desk and each monitor is placed on its
own ‘stand’ which is on wheels and can be
moved, lowered, raised, to any height and placed
anywhere in the room.
All necessary cables are also provided.
Along with input to the desk from the DAW and
input to the speakers.
No additional materials are allowed into the room.
Now the big question:
Where/How do you set-up in this horrible room?
Examples:
1-At one end facing the long way (bowling alley style)?
2-Dead centre facing the long wall?
3-Dead centre facing the short wall?
4-Facing one of the corners?
5-Or in a corner facing out?
6-Do you sit in the chair or stand?
7-At what volume do you mix?
8-etc etc etc
Keep in mind this room is very very bare so
reflected sound/bass etc traps will be the enemy.
How can one best minimize this enemy and get
the best mix possible under the circumstances?
Maybe the best solution. Can’t be sure without experimenting the actual room.
Definitely not. That’s where all nulls and peaks meet each others.
Not in a corner. Worst (or the best depending on the definition) possible place to catch all early reflections.
I would rather sit. No matter which may sound better. Standing up for a long period would piss me off enough so I wouldn’t care about the sound anymore.
Doesn’t matter … or more precisely … it’s a subjective thing. The myth about “room modes come into play in higher levels only” is just a myth. The myth orginates from human physiology: we are not so sensitive on low frequencies as the mid ones. So it gives us false impression of low-frequency response being right when playing at lower levels while it’s not: we only hear the room mode peaks which are loud enough to break the hearing threshold.
Would be nice to know, which kind of acoustic treatment you will able to implement. I would recommend at least some absorbers for direct reflections and some bass traps.
One cycle (just one) of a 20Hz waveform is 56 feet in length.
In a room that size, that one wave is going to bounce, rebound, fold, and otherwise propagate in distorted ways.
Now add all the typical waveforms and wavelengths in your music playback to this room and imagine what it would look like if you could see them all bouncing, rebounding, folding and otherwise propagating through all those boundary planes, angles, and corners.
Sobering, isn’t it?
As a practical matter, in the absence of sound control (absorption, diffusion, gobo’s, clouds, bass traps, etc) there is NO way to get anything approaching a decent mixing environment in that room. Sorry to be the bearer of that news.
If you line the walls with pineapples, it would diffuse the sound. Ya gots plenty of em on Oahu!
Seriously though, a room with that dimension with no treatment will be a tougher room to mix in. The reflections will destroy what you are listening to.
If I was setting up in a room like that, I would put the mix desk on the long wall so the reflections would be far away. At the very least I would hang a comforter or something to absorb sound directly behind you. I would move the monitors as close to me as I could (arms length or so) and mix at a low volume so not to build up sound pressure levels in the room.
Yes. The side reflections would be further away, but the back reflections would be closer.
Didn’t I already tell this in my previous post: this is a myth! Your perceived total low-end content may be quite right while mixing at low levels, but only because all you hear is the room modes.
Do you need acknowledgment of being someone? Who the heck are you, the “Outter of Myths”???
I wasn’t even talking about low end content or even saying a static room doesn’t behave linearly. Rooms do behave linearly, at whatever volume.
When you mix at loud levels with no treatment, the spls build a lot more than with treatment to trap sound and this causes your ears to compress the sound. Our ears do not behave linearly.
Uh, THAT is a myth. Elvis was actually an okay guitarist, and a much better pianist. He also knew Karate and would whip yer ass if he knew you were spreading myths about him
