I wanted to get back to the studio project that I’ve been working on with Dr. Franks for the last couple weeks and discuss another very important aspect of building a quality recording environment. Now, most of us don’t have the luxury of being able to build a room from the ground up, but if you do, treating the room can be as important as buying the right equipment. The sound control will play a big roll in everything from tracking to mixing. Not all of the techniques discussed below will apply to everyone, but it will be quite obvious after reading about the different treatments, which would work for your environment and which would not. There are a few basic terms that are important to know that will help you identify the problem that you have and how to correct it. There may not be an actual “problem”, instead this may just be a way to improve the sound of your room. They most important things for you to know and consider are:
Diffusion: Diffusion is the act of sending audio waves in different directions. Elaborate diffusers will actually send the audio waves in different directions depending on frequency. A diffuser is used to keep sound waves from grouping, so there are no hot or dead spots in a room. Sound diffusion can widen the “sweet spot” and sense of openness to a room, making it easier to hear all the individual parts of your mix. Sound diffusion can make a small space seem large and a large space seem even larger. For example, proper diffusion of audio waves could make your drum recording sound “bigger” than if you did not employ diffusion techniques. Sound diffusion can eliminate some of the reflections of the sound waves in a control room. This prevents these reflections from interfering with the sound you are hearing directly from your monitors, and therefore allows you to create a more accurate mix.
Absorption: Absorption is a little easier to understand due to the fact that everyone is familiar with the term absorb. Absorption works by absorbing excessive audio frequencies into the sound controlling material. There are several materials that will actually absorb audio waves, but the most common type of material used currently is studio foam. Just for the sake of conversation, the egg crate looking mattress foam doesn’t work. You need specially made high density acoustic foam to actually make a difference in a recording or live sound environment. Absorption is useful to help eliminate or cut down on the excessive frequencies in the room.
Isolation: Isolation is another easy one to understand because we are all familiar with the term. One way you would use isolation in a recording environment would be in a vocal booth or live room. In a vocal booth you create a sound proof and acoustically controlled environment that is isolated from the rest of the studio. This enables you to get the most accurate recording of vocals because you can control the other aspects of sound control in the room. You can employ tactics of diffusion and absorption in a vocal booth to create the most accurate sounding reproduction of a vocal possible.
Another type of isolation would be employed if you want to isolate a specific piece of equipment such as your studio monitors. By placing a piece of high density foam underneath your recording monitors you get a more accurate reproduction of your recording. The reason you would do this is to decouple the speaker from your work desk or mixing console. When you have a speaker that is resting on that surface, the surface effectively acts as an amplifier. There is a major difference in the bass response of a speaker that is isolated or decoupled from your desktop. There are a couple simple ways you can experiment with this to see what I’m talking about. If you’re a guitar player, take your electric guitar and don’t plug it in. Rest the headstock up against a wall or on your dresser (the larger the better) or something similar. Play a few chords, then take it away from the surface while playing. It will be louder when the headstock is pressed up against the wall. If your studio monitors are not isolated from your desk surface, then you will get a false representation of the bass frequencies that are in your mix. The end result would be that you perceive there to be more bass than there is and you would then adjust the mix accordingly. More often times than not, this would cause you to mix the bass too light because you are hearing things that aren’t really in the recording. If you have a sub woofer in your studio it would be imperative that you isolate that as well. Get a bit of high density foam that’s used for absorption, and lay that down on the floor. Then put piece of ply or something down on top of it and put the sub on that. This will decouple it from the floor and not only eliminate the false bass frequencies, but in addition, it will help to prevent transmission of those frequencies to other areas of the room where it could rattle a picture on the wall, or your acoustic guitar strings etc.
In my home studio I even put some high density foam under my Mac tower to help eliminate the amount it amplifies the fan in the computer when it kicks on. You’d be surprised how much these little tricks will help to improve your sound quality in the room and the mixes you create. As always, if you have any questions, give me a call at 800-373-8393 X100 or email bfoley@daddys.com.
Parallel wiring is exactly the same as described in the first post with the examples I provided about PA cabinets. Two matching impedance speakers on the same channel lowers the resistance by half.
The studio live is a 16 channel digital mixer. This mixer has 16 XLR inputs, 4 sub groups and is fully compatible via the fire-wire output with the majority of the DAW software that is currently on the market. One of the other really cool features of this mixer too, is that it has a host of digital effects built in. Remember a few posts ago where I was talking about how less cabling means less signal loss? This is one major advantage of having built in effects. This mixer has compression, limiting, gating, reverb, delay, and dual 31 band EQ’s. These are just a few samples of the features that you get with this mixer. To see it and all the gory details, 