What does acoustical treatment of a room really do? You would have heard different answers to this question.
“It is real important!” – “Oh, it doesn’t really matter!” – “It could take the studio’s production to another level!” –“Nothing really – a good quality playback system and a ‘room correction’ software will suffice” – “All you need is a basic understanding of acoustics to work around it.” – “That’s the last thing you need for the ideal studio.”
11 years on, this acoustician's honest take out from all of it, is that room acoustics does make a HUGE difference. But don’t take our word for it. We are selling this stuff after all! Just get yourself a pair of reasonably good head/ear phones and spend just the next 40 seconds listening to this video with before and after comparison of the same audio tracks in a regular room vs an acoustically treated one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYHgRqizLfM
So, What do you think? We hope you got to listen to the snippets of the ten random popular tunes that we picked, and their difference in quality as recorded before and after room acoustic treatment. The songs that you listened to, were played on a stereo system in the same room, and recorded with one mono omni-directional microphone. Then how can there be such an ocean of a difference? Was there any audio manipulation? Nope, none at all. Allow us to dispel some suspicions.
There was absolutely no tampering with the quality of the two recordings of the same song. No EQ. No Reverb. And no “studio magic” while stitching the tracks together to deteriorate one and enhance the difference between the two.
We have used the same stereo playback system for both versions of the same songs – Equator D8 Monitors and a Fluid S8 Sub-Woofer, universally acknowledged as a current good quality “home-studio-tier” sound play-back system.
The sound card we have used is merely a Saffire 6 USB, which was the talk of the town in its heydays, but outdated now and surpassed in pro-audio technological advancements many times over. Yet, we have specifically chosen it to dispel the age-old myth that the necessity for room treatment is the last link in your studio’s investment priority order, by choosing an outdated audio interface and presenting for your consideration, exactly how much your room’s acoustic tonal quality influences the quality of the sound being played by whichever speaker system you use.
The subwoofer’s volume has NOT been adjusted to control the bass boominess between the two recordings of the same song. No volume level for gain staging or monitoring has been reduced during these tests. The subwoofer gain level was set to a constant thumping -3dB on the Fluid S8 to influence the room to reveal it’s truly acoustic character in the resonating bass frequency region below the room’s Schroeder frequency.
The position of the microphone has not been changed during tests. It was a constant 41 inches from each monitor as per the equilateral triangle law of monitor and listener positioning.
The sub-woofer position and the speaker positions have been fixed and not altered between tests in anyway.
Then, how did this happen? Both recordings were in the very same room; the equipment was the same, as were the test conditions! The reason – the room’s acoustical footprint – before and after treatment of the room and the unchanging laws of physics! The simple truth is that the quality of your room’s acoustics determines your psycho-acoustic interpretation of the music being played in the room, regardless of what pro-audio hardware or home theater system you employ!
The songs recorded in the fully treated room sound fuller because the room’s acoustic character after treatment has improved so drastically ACROSS THE ENTIRE FREQUENCY SPECTRUM – so much so that we can turn up the monitor volume without clipping and distorting any portion of the songs’ re-recording!
And what’s more, what you have just heard is merely the tip of the iceberg. We have used a SINGLE MONO OMNIDIRECTIONAL MICROPHONE in this demo. You could say that it is like listening with just one ear! It gives you no information with regard to soundstage and imaging – the difference between 2D and 3D.
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