As you might know room acoustics are probably the biggest factor in how you experience mixing in your room. Acoustic issues exist in every room and will affect your mixing decissions. If your room is bass heavy, you will compensate for the emphazed bass, if your room is cancelling waves, you will probably hear no bass at all and add unnececary bass, which will makes your mixes bass heavy when played elsewhere.

If it sounds good, it is good, is the biggest pitfall you can have in room acoustics. Because if you don't know where you stand, do don't know what your listening at. "Great bass response" might as well be coming from room nodes, instead of monitor performance.

Luckily there is free help. first of all, there are 3 ground rules
- always place your speakers on the short wall
- your ideal seating postion is room length * 38% (counted from the monitor wall.
- You can NEVER have enough bass traps (in order to catch standing waves, they don't make your room "dead" they just make your room lenght appear infinite from a low frequency soundwave perspective.

If you want to know what your room looks like, you can download

Room EQ Wizard
REW has a very comprehensive setup guide, which will take u step by step through the process of measuring your room.

Once measured there a 2 graphs of special interest: the SPL response and the Waterfall. make sure you apply 1/3rd octave smoothing, in order to look at the big picture first. You will probably very quickly spot areas where you always found it harder to get things right. Now you know why. speaker positioning wil also help, further from the walls, less bass, closer to the walls, more bass, toe in for focus and stereo seperation, etc etc. I will post some of my measurements soon, curious about yours as well.

There are several areas where you can pay attention to, all are ofcourse important, but not all are practical to address in a bedroom. I would probably suggest to focus on the <300hz are first, which you can address with rockwool panels from your local DYI

another area is flutter echo which you can use absorbers for and also reflections which you will need to make diffusors for.

There are several topics on Gearslutz which will explain how u can easily make these yourself with goods from your local DYI store.

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Analogue Mastering
Esoteric sound for the discerning ear

Last edited by Raphie on Mar-21-2011 at 15:21