New room setup, and room equalization

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Toloache
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New room setup, and room equalization

Post by Toloache »

Last week i worked a lot on my bedroom, the floor was a 20 years old moquette that was asking to be changed. So in the process, i painted the walls and placed tiles on the floor.

I was terrified that the new tiles would break havoc in the already bad acoustic of the room, so i made some test before and after with Room EQ Wizard.

Turned out that the moquette was damping the high frequencies in the time domain, meaning i had highs decaying in 0,4 s and lows three times slower (!!!). This caused a super boomines in the bass.

So i took the plunge, placed a speaker in the corner of the room, pointed it at the conjunction angle beetween walls and floor to excite all room modes, and started doing measurement in the room to find the most resonance-free and with most even decay times spots.

When i found the best listening spot i experimented with monitor positioning and then equalized the frequency response to make it flat (ok, this is a hot topic, some swear for room equalization, other say it does more harm than good. Well i tried it and im very much pleased with the results, i suggest you try it because it made huge improvements to the sound).

Aniway, here some before and after graphs:

Before EQ, room already with tiles

Image

After EQ

Image

Decay times with moquette and bad positioning

Image

Decay time with tiles, good positioning, and after eq. Note how much more even they are across the frequency spectrum

Image

I even applied a gentle fletcher munson-like equalization curve and setup the level to monitor at 85-90db with k12 metering. If i don't apply the curve, the response it's even flatter, but i prefer how it sound like this.

Well, i listened to some shackleton albums and now it seems a different system altogheter, bass is more tight, imaging is almost like wearing headphones. I know there are better graphs around, but keep in mind my room is untreated, so i think this is a notable result.

In short, before changing monitors, or even if you want to simply improve your listening experience, i strongly suggest you give it a try and do some measurement and correction with REW. I'm sure you will be pleased.

Cheers
kdgh
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Re: New room setup, and room equalization

Post by kdgh »

that looks pretty fucking good!
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blizt
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Re: New room setup, and room equalization

Post by blizt »

Hey, try asking at the gearslutz.com forums, search for their acoustic sub-forums. There are some high qualified acoustician that hang there to help people. 8)
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hydrogen
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Re: New room setup, and room equalization

Post by hydrogen »

Could you please post the information about the techniques you used to do this? been scowering the REW forums but can't find exactly what you are doing. :)
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