Hearing is believing – the importance of acoustic treatment in your room
We’ve all been there, you finish up your mix and it sounds killer in the studio. You burn a CD and take it out for the true sound test in your car stereo and… hey, what’s going on? There’s way too much bass in the mix and it sounds, well, muddy… In fact, it doesn’t sound all that great overall so what happened between the studio and the car?
If you’re having this problem or something like it, rest assured that you’re not alone. Many of us do our audio work in rooms that weren’t built with acoustics in mind. The net result of this is that we often don’t hear frequencies in our mixes accurately. The reasons are many and may include things like poor speaker placement, too many reflective surfaces in the room, bass buildup or standing waves, all of which can result in too much of a particular frequency range being heard or too little (nulls). When you hear too much of a frequency range, you begin to compensate by eq’ing it in your mix which ends up making your mixes light in that range. Similarly, if you aren’t hearing enough of a certain frequency you may boost it in your mix and end up with too much when played elsewhere.
So what do we do about it? Unfortunately there is no “one-size-fits-all” answer or solution but there are many great resources on the Internet that can help. I recommend starting with by learning more about acoustics and acoustic treatment and the following sites can get you going:
http://www.auralex.com/acoustics_introduction/acoustics_introduction.asp - the principles of acoustics by Auralex. The Auralex site not only has some good information, they also provide products to treat the problems you may be encountering. They offer free services that provide you with a customized analysis of your room as well as pro-level services where an acoustic technician will travel to your site and diagnose the room. http://www.auralex.com/pcf/http://www.realtraps.com/info.htm - another site with lots of good information about acoustics. Real Traps also sell acoustic treatment products and have tools that can help you learn and understand the problems of your particular room and help to solve them.
There are many more resources available and plenty of forum discussions about the topic of acoustic treatments so I’ve only offered a starting point. I believe its well worth the time spent to learn about acoustic treatment and the benefits thereof. After all, if you spend your hard-earned money on great gear, shouldn’t you be hearing the results of those investments properly?
Next time we’ll look at a real acoustical problem and the solution employed.