anybody know anything about acoustics?

[kel]

i thought my 808 kicks were phased out and thin. they sounded good on headphones so i thought my speakers just sucked. but today i left a 60hz sine wave on blast and walked around my apartment. there was only one place in the hallway where it came out sounding huge (and i had to face a certain direction), and the rest of the time it was pretty much non-existent. does anybody have this problem and if so do you hang towels or have any rules of thumb. unfortunately my lab is in the kitchen, filled with shelves and cabinets and with damn linoleum floors.

[fauna]

i guess i'm not sure what you are trying to do....

if you are working entirely with samples, and you have input an 808 kick directly from a keyboard (or, say an 808 ) then acoustics on the way into the box don't matter that much.

so i guess you are looking for sweet playback sound, then?

i donno what monitors you are using, but i would recommend getting some powered near-field monitors, and placing them as the manual directs (usually in an equal triangle, with speakers as points one and two, and your ears being the third point).

this will not make your 808s (or anything else) sound huge, but it will give you a dry, ACCURATE reflection of what your stuff sounds like. that way you can mix in such a way that it will sound as you intend (or as close as possible) on other people's systems.

does that help at all?

[Platypus Beird]

http://www.gikacoustics.com/education.html

get to readin'

[kel]

thanks guys. that does help and i'll read that ish.

[gigglyfan99]

here's something simple to try. your decription sure sounds like your speakers are out of phase with each other....no i dont mean sophisticated dynamically out of phase...i mean you have your speakers wires crossed.

that will make bass thin...my guess is the onme spot in your place that sounds good to you is where the acoustics phase compensate:)

just go to one of your speakers and switch the leads on that one speaker....easy, cheap.....now does it sound good (everywhere except that 1 place is used to sound good:) ?

[kel]

thanks gigglyfan, i gave that a shot. my speakers were in phase but when i switched the wires, i realized instantly that alot of my old recordings were out of phase, haha. i guess i'll just boost the bass a little for now. wonder if it's because i've got linoleum floors or something.

[gigglyfan99]

odd Kel. i thought the give away clue was you said same material sounded fine when you used headphones (unless you hacked into them, they are phased properly from the factory)

i hope i was clear first time...red out from amp to red in on the speaker and same with black out. its not that reversing one set of wires will hurt anything but you will get thin bass if the polarities are not the same for both speakers.

now i am curious as to your problem.
got more than two speakers? are they all the same model?
somebody 'fix' (repair) the amp at some time?

hmmm.

good luck...probably not a good idea to crank up the bass to compensate: may be overloading either your amp or those speakers:(

here's another cheap 'acoustic' trick if you want more bass....put your speakers right on the floor (normally that is what one doesnt want to do:)

good luck

[gigglyfan99]

maybe you really do have a bad acoustic set-up. i re-read your original post more carefully and also remembered when i helped design a 'studio' on the cheap out of a garage.

If the room (you say is kitchen?) is where this all happens then all appliances (especially the frig or anything of that size) that is NOT resessed into a wall will act like a bass absorber. Big curved free standing surfaces are best at attentuating bass, but big objects that have 90 degree edges are also going to absorb some of the bass. The shelving you mention might also contribute to that effect to a degree. I dont think the floor type is your particular problem.

Not much you can do about these room effects, but what you could do and would be better for the signal chain is not to boost the bass leave it flat CUT the high and mid-range and then boost the volume (assuming your amp and speakers have the power handling for it). Not sure what kind of EQ your amp has or if you have a multi-band EQ unit ahead of the power amp....the later processor (dual 15-band EQ about $100-150) would be a less expensive way to go that remodeling a kitchen:)

[cartesia]

do the speakers actually have good sub frequency response?

[tape smoke]

i just go by the level meter , or the red blinker , after i juice up my sample I use a fx limiter on it so it doesnt go over. but all my beats are diferent levels , so i should probably read that thing.

[kel]

thanks gigglyfan. i think the idea of cutting the highs is a clever idea for making the bass more pronounced, rather than turning up the lows. i think it made a noticable difference

[PHeMoX]

thanks gigglyfan, i gave that a shot. my speakers were in phase but when i switched the wires, i realized instantly that alot of my old recordings were out of phase, haha. i guess i'll just boost the bass a little for now. wonder if it's because i've got linoleum floors or something.

Did you try EQ-ing and making beats with your monitors instead of on your headphones? Headphones tend to cut sounds at certain frequencies, something that sounds fat on your phones, might not (or will not) sound fat at all on your monitors...

Someone once told me I should never master a track with my headphones and he turned out to be very right about that in my case. I never could get it sound right when I used only my headphones.

Monitors tend to give the best representation of the true sound, very much contrary to headphones, especially cheaper or less sophisticated headphones. (My Stanton DJ 2000s for example do color the sound, too much bass.)

In most if not all cases reverberation (ie. the main acoustics) is really quite negligible when it comes to how the original sound quality will be experienced though. Use your hardware to EQ your sounds so it sounds good on your monitors and go from there. It's not your monitors that define your sound thickness.

[Øyenstikker]

a simple way to check speaker phase, is to observe the bass-speaker movement while playing a commercially produced, not your own stuff or demos from the internet, music. if the kick makes the membrane pop out of the cabinet, its ok, if the membrane moves into the cabinet, its out of phase, as no-one produces a record with kick-drum out of phase

your room affects the sound as well. a room has three possible causes for peaks and dips in volume. the distance between paralell walls determines what frequencies are affected.

if your room has identical distance from floor to ceiling, rear wall to front wall or/and left wall to right wall, you will get identical frequencies for peaks and dips, and the problem will be much worse. this also happens when length, heigth or width is identical when multiplied or divided by two.

an easy way to determine what frequencies will peak in your room, is to measure height, width and lengt.

Frequency = Speed of sound/Wavelength.

Speed of sound= 344m/s
wavelength=2x wall to wall length

do the maths and add harmonics up to 300hz, (just multiply the frequency by 2) just to check if your room has some potential peaks or dips. if you are able to sine-sweep with your monitors, you will find about the same numbers as you calculated, at least I did

if you cant afford to modify or treat the room, moving the speakers closer to the rear wall, or further away from it, and possibly altering the horizontal angle will affect where the peaks and dips will appear, and your sweetspot is the only place who needs to be relatively flat. although ideally the placement of speakers and you ears is in each corner of a triangle with 60degrees in all corners.

good luck

[PHeMoX]

Very true, but remember that the (negative) effects of a room become less the bigger the room is. A 3m by 3m by 3m room is the ideal environment for a studio (at least I was told when it comes to acoustics and vocals), but anything bigger won't have issues of amplification and annoying sound reflections.

In fact, turn your monitors down and you won't have that issue at all.

If you're in a bathroom just make a loud sound and a small sound, you'll see what I mean instantly. And of course, bathrooms tend to reflect sound a lot, so it'll be less in a room with a carpet and furniture and other things like that.