The 5 key places to put acoustic panels in a home studio include behind the studio monitors, where two surfaces meet, and throughout the room. The rear sidewalls and back wall also need acoustic panels to prevent flutter echo. Good quality acoustic panels can make a huge difference to any studio.
Can you put acoustic panels behind studio monitors?
One of the most important places to put acoustic panels is behind your studio monitors. Sound can reflect off the wall and affect the speakers. Since acoustic panels can absorb sound, putting them behind your monitors can help reduce any weird feedback. This placement is especially useful if your studio monitors have bass ports on the back.
What is the best acoustic treatment for a home-studio room?
This diagram shows how to apply basic acoustic treatment to a typical home-studio room. The absorber panels shown in purple are the most important, but adding in the orange absorbers would improve the situation further. Acoustic foam is a common choice of absorber in this application.
How do I know where to place my acoustic treatment?
An easy way to test where you should place your acoustic treatment is by using a mirror or the camera on your phone in selfie mode. Get someone to help you hold it on the surfaces where you think there may be reflections and then if you can see your monitor speakers that’s how you find the reflection points.
How can I reduce the sound of a room with acoustic panels?
By installing acoustic panels on opposing, parallel walls, you can reduce the echo or eliminate it entirely. Adding acoustic panels to the rear side walls can help absorb more sound than just the corners.
Where does acoustic treatment go in studio?
Apply treatment to the ceiling and all walls of your room, if you can. To prevent slap / flutter echo you usually want to avoid any large areas of bare wall or ceiling. Aim for left-right side wall symmetry whenever possible.
Where should I place acoustic panels?
Place acoustic panels at the first place on the wall where sound waves tend to hit before reaching the listeners ears. 2. Place 3' to 6' up from the floor in areas where much of the sound is produced by people sitting or standing in enclosed spaces.
Where do you put the acoustic foam recording?
0:496:51The Importance of Placement of Auralex® Acoustical ProductsYouTubeStart of suggested clipEnd of suggested clipAround your room. If you have the luxury though of having quite a few panels to mount it's a goodMoreAround your room. If you have the luxury though of having quite a few panels to mount it's a good idea to largely dampen this entire wall.
Where should room treatments be placed?
0:582:02How should I position my acoustic panels? General tips how to space ...YouTubeStart of suggested clipEnd of suggested clipRoom corners for better base response. But most of your treatment. Will likely work best at ear.MoreRoom corners for better base response. But most of your treatment. Will likely work best at ear. Level if you want a better idea of where exactly in your room you should place your acoustic.
How high should I hang acoustic panels?
For rooms with standard height walls, panels are usually placed at roughly 24″ (60.9cm) up from the floor for sitting (control room) and 40″ (101.6cm) for standing (music studio). For rooms with longer walls, the height of panels will often be staggered in effort to spread out the acoustic treatment on the wall.
How much space do you need between acoustic panels?
The minimum perimeter occurs if all 4 panels are placed so that their long sides are touching, with only 48′ of perimeter. By spreading them out with 4′ gaps in between the panels, the perimeter of the entire set of panels increases to 72′, and the efficiency of the layout increases by 50%.
Should I put acoustic panels behind monitors?
One of the most important places to put acoustic panels is behind your studio monitors. Sound can reflect off the wall and affect the speakers. Since acoustic panels can absorb sound, putting them behind your monitors can help reduce any weird feedback.
How do you arrange soundproof foam?
Install foam on the walls on walls opposite of your speakers. Installing foam on the wall across from your speakers will minimize how much sound bounces back into your recording device. Place panels in areas directly across from speakers to minimize how much the sound bounces.
How do you put acoustic foam on the wall?
1:134:55How to Mount Acoustic Foam Without Damaging Your Walls - YouTubeYouTubeStart of suggested clipEnd of suggested clipI got some a one sized mail boards these are nice and heavy cardboards designed for mounting artworkMoreI got some a one sized mail boards these are nice and heavy cardboards designed for mounting artwork on walls for display. They don't warp too much when you glue the foam on which is the next step.
Does acoustic foam soundproof a room?
Acoustic foam will not soundproof your room. Acoustic treatment products treat the room the absorbing materials are placed in. The materials treat the room by reducing reverberation, echo and standing waves etc. Absorbing materials such as acoustic foam and mineral wool do not stop sound from leaking out of the room.
Do acoustic wall panels work?
Acoustic panels improve the sound quality of your existing speakers by reducing the amount of sound waves reflected off the walls. They can be extremely effective with even a few panels, as long as they're placed correctly.
Soundproofing vs. Acoustic Treatment
Very often, musicians will use these two terms interchangeably, mistaking ONE for the OTHER…When really, each one is completely different.Soundproo...
Evaluating Your Bare Room
Too often, when novices first hear of the supposed benefits of acoustic treatment…They immediately go out and buy stuff, without first diagnosing a...
The 3 Elements of Acoustic Treatment
Getting your room to sound great with acoustic treatment requires of a combination of 3 items: 1. Bass Traps – to absorb the low frequencies 2. Aco...
3 Great All-In-One Packages
If you haven’t figured it out by now…buying all this stuff individually can be a HUGE hassle.Which is why companies like Auralex and Primacoustic o...
The 3 Key Points in Any Room
Once your acoustic treatment has arrived in the mail, you’re almost ready to start putting it up.First though, there are 3 key areas of the room wh...
Control Room vs Live Room Strategies
In pro studios, where control rooms are used for mixing and live rooms are used for recording…different acoustic treatment strategies exist for eac...
What to Do If The Money’S Already Spent
When setting a budget for your studio, you should ideally set-aside a BIG chunk of the money (possibly as high as 50%), for acoustic treatment alon...
What are the three areas of a studio?
When you treat your room (we’ll get to the how in a bit), there are three spots you need to deal with first: trihedral corners, dihedral corners, and the walls . You'll need to focus on these studio problem areas since they can create room modes, or an altered sound wave that's created when a sound reflects off of one wall onto the opposite one. For example, a sound wave reflecting off of the ceiling and floor or a sound reflected between left and right walls would create room modes.
What is a trihedral corner?
Trihedral corners are where the walls meet the ceiling and the floor (two walls + ceiling = three surfaces AKA trihedral). Dihedral corners are where the walls meet each other (two surfaces AKA dihedral).
What test do you need to know before getting acoustic treatment?
Before you decide what acoustic treatment materials to get, you’ll want to test the sound of your room. You may have heard of the “ clap test. ”
What is soundproofing in music?
Soundproofing is focused on keeping the sounds out of a home studio.
What are the four types of treatment?
And the four main types of treatment that deliver absorption and diffusion are bass traps, acoustic panels, diffusers, and vocal reflection filters . Remember that they key goal of an acoustic treatment tool is to produce the preserve the natural tone possible from an instrumentalist or vocalist in a recording.
Why is acoustic treatment important?
Why is it so important? Well, in an untreated room, sound can appear distorted. Sound waves leave the monitors, bounce around the room, and and make the music sound inaccurate by the time it reaches your ears.
Why is room treatment software important?
If you're using studio monitors, make sure you understand how sound travels trough the speakers and and make sure your listening position is optimized to hear both left and right monitors equally. This is particularly important so that you can have an accurate perception of your song's stereo image.
Where to Place Acoustic Panels in a Home Studio?
These areas highlight where acoustic panels should go in the studio.
How High Should Acoustic Panels Be?
Home studios with standard-sized walls should have acoustic panels positioned at approximately 24” or 60.9cm up from the floor for sitting and should be 40” or 101.6 cm for standing (music studio).
What Are the Critical Acoustic Treatment Points?
There are three stages of perceiving sound in a studio. First, one that comes straight from the speakers, i.e., direct sound. Second, early reflections from hard boundaries of your desk, walls, floor, ceiling, or screen. Third, you hear the reverberant field of the sound which is the aftermath of heavy interaction between the studio and the original sound.
Why do untreated reflections cause problems?
Normally, untreated reflections create problems because they get trapped in one spot, amplifying some frequencies, while canceling out others. This is how the natural frequency balance gets destroyed. Diffusors work by scattering reflections so nothing gets trapped, and the natural tone is preserved.
What is digital reverb?
Software programs known as digital reverb can simulate the sound of virtually any acoustic environment imaginable.
What is the first element of acoustic treatment to add to your room?
The first and most important element of acoustic treatment to add to your room is bass traps.
What is the difference between #1 and #2?
The closer it is to #1, the more absorption you will need to make the room sound as dry as possible. The closer it is to #2, the less acoustic treatment you will need in general, although virtually any room will still benefit from a little.
What is control room in pro studios?
In pro studios, where control rooms are used for mixing and live rooms are used for recording…different acoustic treatment strategies exist for each purpose.
What is the best sound absorber in your house?
Often times, the best natural sound absorber in your house is a mattress.
How many steps are there in setup?
The typical setup process consists of 4 basic steps which I’ll show you now.
How to get rid of bass resonance?
The easiest way to treat bass resonances is by using bass traps in the corners of your room because this is where the bass builds up where two boundaries meet. So where the two walls and the ceiling meet you’ll have three different points meeting and it therefore creates big bass build-up. So you’ll want to put bass traps (thick acoustic treatment) in the corners of the room. This can really effectively absorb that low-end and hopefully get a flatter response across the frequency spectrum. When you’re working with the corners of your room you generally want a kind of triangular shape where you use loads of treatment that goes right into the corner and the easiest way to do that is by buying bass traps.#N#The Bass traps I would recommend are the Tri-Traps from GIK which are triangular shaped floor to ceiling traps that you can just add to the front and rear corners of the room. The GIK panels are triangle shaped and they’re full of material going from floor to ceiling. This is the most effective way to treat the corners, but you can also use air gaps. By just adding air gaps of about 5 to 10 cm (2 to 4 inches) behind the absorbers whether they’re a flat panel, corner trap or ceiling panel you can absorb a lot lower frequencies than you would be able to, compared to if the panel was just flat on the wall.
What is a standing wave?
In any room, you get a buildup of certain frequencies and these are called standing waves or resonant frequencies. In basic terms, it’s just an increase of volume at certain frequencies so we might have a sudden peak at 90 Hz because of the dimensions of the room or where our speakers are positioned or what speakers we are using etc. Now generally these major issues tend to be in the low end anywhere from 20 Hz up to 600/700 Hz. This is where we want to focus our energy when it comes to finding standing waves. By treating them we can make quite a big difference because that’s where we tend to get a lot of issues with translation.#N#If you’ve got a 90 Hz peak in your room and you’re mixing and it sounds like 90 Hz is way too loud in your mix. So you turn that down but then you take it to your car and suddenly the low-end is missing. That’s an example of what can happen when you don’t treat your room. But when we use bass traps (which are just larger panels with thicker material) that can actually trap some of that low-end and absorb it. This will hopefully create a more accurate listening environment.
What is a diffuser panel?
There are dedicated acoustic elements for this, called diffusers. Diffusers panels are most often made of wood or other sound reflecting materials, deliberately shaped into an irregular surface.
What is the purpose of acoustic treatment?
So the first question is: What is the purpose of acoustic treatment? There are two ways to approach acoustic treatment you can treat a room to make it sound good when you’re recording or you can treat a room to make it sound good when you’re mixing. Quite often in a home recording studio though we have an overlap of both those things.
Do speakers reflect the mid frequency spectrum?
For the front wall behind your speakers, you probably won’t get a lot of reflections in the high and mid frequency spectrum as the speakers/monitors will be facing away from the wall. You might, however, get reflections in the low-mid and low frequencies as they are more omnidirectional frequencies. The Bass traps in the front corners should help that but I would also recommend using broadband absorbers panels behind each of the monitors to cover about 30% of the front wall.
Why is it easier to hear EQ tweaks?
It gets so much easier to hear small EQ tweaks because you’re in a much flatter sounding room. Also, your mixes are going to translate better because your room isn’t tricking you into thinking that there’s too much or not enough bass for example.
Where to put bass traps?
So you’ll want to put bass traps (thick acoustic treatment) in the corners of the room. This can really effectively absorb that low-end and hopefully get a flatter response across the frequency spectrum. When you’re working with the corners of your room you generally want a kind of triangular shape where you use loads of treatment ...
How to use barrier mat trap?
Photo: Richard Ecclestone There are many variations on the 'barrier-mat trap' theme, but the general idea is that you hang the material a few inches from a wall and then hang or fix a porous absorber in front of it to absorb the high frequency energy that the surface of the sheet would otherwise reflect back into the room. Using this technique, an effective full-range trap can be created in a box-shaped space less then 12 inches deep. The greater the surface area, the more energy the trap will absorb. Where the back wall of the studio is less than around 10 feet from the monitoring position, this can be a useful way to treat the entire back wall.
Why are bass frequencies cancelled?
Depending on the room dimensions, some bass frequencies will be cancelled due to reflections coming back off the wall out of phase with the source , whereas at other frequencies the reflections will be in phase , leading to a boost in level at that frequency.
What are the two main categories of room problems?
Room problems can be broken down into two main categories: reflections of mid-range and high frequencies from hard surfaces; and peaks and troughs in the room's low-end response caused by the room's dimensions and the reflectivity of the walls at low frequencies.
How do high frequencies reflect from plasterboard?
Mid-range and high frequencies reflect from hard surfaces such as plaster or plasterboard walls in a similar way that light reflects from a mirror. The effect is not quite as exact as with a mirror, as some of the sound energy is scattered, and a little is absorbed, but in simple terms you can think of hard walls as approximate acoustic mirrors. If you put a mirror alongside a light bulb, you see the light bulb itself and also its image in the mirror. Both act as real sources of light as far as you, the observer, are concerned.
What is a halfway house?
A halfway house between the absorber and non-rigid-sheet approaches is used in some of the Real Traps products, where a thick slab of absorber has a thin, non-porous sheet fixed to one face. Simply put, the sound energy tries to make the sheet move, but the damping material to which it is fixed dissipates the energy.
Why is it important to have a desk surface lower than a monitor?
It is important that no hardware, such as computer screens or racks, comes between you and your monitors, and that the desk surface is significantly lower than the monitors, so as to avoid strong reflections bouncing off the desk and into your face.
Why does low frequency energy bounce off walls?
The main reason that low-frequency energy bounces off solid walls is that the walls don't move significantly — they neither absorb much of the bass energy nor allow much to pass through. The outcome is that most of the low frequency energy ends up back in the room. Of course sound doesn't really 'pass through' any airtight panel, but sound does cause that panel to vibrate, those vibrations producing sound at the other side of the panel. This gives us another clue as how we might absorb bass energy.
What Is Acoustic Treatment
Room acoustic treatment is a process when you transform your bad-sounding room into a professional recording environment. This is done by hanging acoustic panels on walls and other specific areas for your room.
What Type Of Acoustic Panels Exist
Acoustic panels are made from different materials such as foam or fiberglass. But more important is the type of acoustic panel. In general, they absorb the sound to make the room more recording-friendly.
Acoustic Treatment For Home Recording Studios
As long as you understand how different types of acoustic panels work, it’s time to learn how to place them in our room. The proper placement is critical for a good-sounding environment. In this guide, you will learn how to treat the recording room acoustically.
Floor Treatment And Furniture
Many home studio owners have discussions and argue about floor treatment and furniture placement in studios. There are no right or wrong ways to do it and debates will continue. Because it may work in one studio but fail in another one.
Conclusion
The proper acoustic treatment for a home recording studio is critical. Because houses and rooms are not designed for recording, you have to make it great for recording and mixing. And acoustic panels are the best way to treat recording rooms acoustically.
What is reverberation echo?
Reverberation and flutter echo is the simplest problems to recognize in any room and are especially common in rooms with a lot of empty wall spaces and hard surfaces. Both issues can be handled with simple solutions.
How to decide where to place panels?
In order to decide where to position your panels you need to find your monitoring or mixing position, this is your listening position . Most recommend experimenting by setting this position approximately 35 to 40% into the room.
What should you hear when sitting in a monitor chair?
What you should hear when sitting in your monitoring chair should be mainly the direct sound from the monitors. However, we know there will be some room reflections. The strongest of these should be either absorbed or diverted before they reach your prime listening position. This can be achieved through wall angles to divert reflections. However, most likely your studio is set up in a rectangular room, and that is not an option.
How to place a monitor in a room?
Don’t lie them on their side. Put them on stands at head height when possible and pointed towards your head. Read the manufacturer recommendation on how far from the walls and then set there symmetrically within the room.
How deep should ceiling clouds be?
We suggest ceiling clouds be at least 12 inches deep.
How is the quality of sound determined?
Remember our perception of the quality of sound is determined by the way that sounds works within the studio. If our walls are massive most of the audio will be reflected back to us one it strikes them. On the other hand is the room is too dead it won’t be the most pleasant environment to create or listen to the music.
What is a good sounding room?
A great sounding room will inspire the artist whether they are recording instruments, sampling, vocals, mixing and editing. A lousy space will give you a headache and be uninspiring.
How to create singular waves at multiple frequencies?
to create singular waves at multiple frequencies. as opposed to multiple waves at fewer frequencies. This is done by varying the distances between your monitors and each wall. That way, the impact of each wave at each frequency is minimized, and the frequency response of the room remains as flat as possible.
What is the principle of in phase and out phase?
The “ in-phase“ frequencies get amplified, and the “ out-of-phase“ frequencies cancel out. This principle is known as the boundary effect.
What frequency is a studio?
In a typical-sized home studio, you only see problems with standing waves below frequencies of 300 Hz.
Why can't you vary the width of a room?
When it comes to the width of your room, you really can’t vary the distances from the side-walls, because you still need to maintain a symmetrical stereo image.
Why pull out measuring tape and notepad?
At this point, pull out a measuring tape and a notepad, because it’s time to compare some distances.
Where are the initial reflection points?
Imagine that the walls and ceiling of your room are mirrors. From your seated mixing position, the initial reflection points are the spots on the wall where you would see the reflections of your monitors.
Where is the majority of energy focused?
The MAJORITY of that energy is focused directly at you …and the wall behind your head.
Summary
Choosing your studio space is an integral part of creating an ideal monitoring environment, and you should aim for a ‘fat rectangle’ shaped room.
Dimensions and Symmetry
So the first thing to take into consideration is the massive sonic influence the room itself is going to have on your overall monitoring situation and recorded output. This is the same whether you are setting up in a spare bedroom at home or scouting potential spaces uptown.
Measure your studio setup
Next it’s time to introduce our old friend, the tape measure. Taking some simple measurements of your room will help inform you of where things need to be placed. This is as simple as measuring the length, width and height of your room. Ideally, you want to have your speakers firing longways down the length of the room.
Simple Treatment and other practicalities
Now that the room dimensions have been measured and the ideal monitor and mix positions have been established we can move onto some basic acoustic treatment.
Calculated studio setup results
As the old adage says, prior planning prevents poor performance and when it comes to studio location, monitor setup and basic acoustics, this is very much the case. Understanding these few basic rules of thumb can take your space to the next level, allowing you to mix with more confidence.