Matthew J Poes
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- Oct 18, 2017
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I'm curious what others like to use for assessing a rooms sound quality. Do you use objective measurements or rely primarily on your subjective impressions? What have you disliked in a room?
I've mentioned my acoustics credentials else where, so I won't repeat, but I thought it was worth starting this with what I like to do myself and what experience has brought me. I'm still learning (as should anyone really) and continue to find things in practice that surprise me as they seem inconsistent with what I would expect based on my understanding of the physics. Those are always good learning experiences, to do something, measure its effect, see what you expect, but not hear what you expect.
My own room design, development, and assessment process starts with my ears. I'm sure that is true of anyone. I listen for speech clarity initially, try to hold a conversation in the room. I intentionally use certain words and stop the short to listen to the decay and reverberations. I listen for signs of flutter echo. I then move on to the warmth of the voices, which tells me how lower frequencies decay. I may clap my hands, snap my fingers, or even make a sound to get a better feel. If the room has a sound system installed I listen to some music I know very well that is very simple in nature. I usually follow that up with something more complex. I'll then take measurements in various locations in the room, but primarily the area where the MLP should be. I'll usually use impulse measurements to assess the rooms RT60 down to the point where the room transitions into a steady state. At that point I'll use measurements to explore bass decay (waterfall) and look for signs of ringing. I'll often take measurements of the rooms dimensions and draw a sketch. I'll use this to calculate the room's expected modes and match anomalies in the response with modes. Anymore I use REW for this, the room simulator makes my life so much easier in this regard. I also take measurements of the noise floor and listen with my ears for ambient sounds (HVAC, Dishwasher, Cars, etc.)
I dislike an overly reverberant room for a listening space. I find it hard to hear details in the music. My preference is to dry a room out substantially to a very low RT60 value and then bring back the ambience/life of the room through strategically placed reflective surfaces. I haven't played around with diffusers much, mostly MLS type. I hope to use more and plan to add QRD's to my room. I have used QRD's in studios before and think they make for a cool practice space.
Things I didn't expect: A very dry room sounds very warm. Harsh sounding speakers often don't sound harsh, but the warmth can be significant. I can imagine people not liking he balance. My speakers have a mellow voicing and when I brought my rooms reverberation time down from .5 seconds to .2 seconds, I found it became very warm and intimate.
I hate dealing with room modes and bass problems. There is probably nothing hard to deal with than the bass. Especially in the 100hz to 300hz range. Mode density is very high, it is above where the subwoofers typically operate, but the room still dominates the response to a great extent.
I've mentioned my acoustics credentials else where, so I won't repeat, but I thought it was worth starting this with what I like to do myself and what experience has brought me. I'm still learning (as should anyone really) and continue to find things in practice that surprise me as they seem inconsistent with what I would expect based on my understanding of the physics. Those are always good learning experiences, to do something, measure its effect, see what you expect, but not hear what you expect.
My own room design, development, and assessment process starts with my ears. I'm sure that is true of anyone. I listen for speech clarity initially, try to hold a conversation in the room. I intentionally use certain words and stop the short to listen to the decay and reverberations. I listen for signs of flutter echo. I then move on to the warmth of the voices, which tells me how lower frequencies decay. I may clap my hands, snap my fingers, or even make a sound to get a better feel. If the room has a sound system installed I listen to some music I know very well that is very simple in nature. I usually follow that up with something more complex. I'll then take measurements in various locations in the room, but primarily the area where the MLP should be. I'll usually use impulse measurements to assess the rooms RT60 down to the point where the room transitions into a steady state. At that point I'll use measurements to explore bass decay (waterfall) and look for signs of ringing. I'll often take measurements of the rooms dimensions and draw a sketch. I'll use this to calculate the room's expected modes and match anomalies in the response with modes. Anymore I use REW for this, the room simulator makes my life so much easier in this regard. I also take measurements of the noise floor and listen with my ears for ambient sounds (HVAC, Dishwasher, Cars, etc.)
I dislike an overly reverberant room for a listening space. I find it hard to hear details in the music. My preference is to dry a room out substantially to a very low RT60 value and then bring back the ambience/life of the room through strategically placed reflective surfaces. I haven't played around with diffusers much, mostly MLS type. I hope to use more and plan to add QRD's to my room. I have used QRD's in studios before and think they make for a cool practice space.
Things I didn't expect: A very dry room sounds very warm. Harsh sounding speakers often don't sound harsh, but the warmth can be significant. I can imagine people not liking he balance. My speakers have a mellow voicing and when I brought my rooms reverberation time down from .5 seconds to .2 seconds, I found it became very warm and intimate.
I hate dealing with room modes and bass problems. There is probably nothing hard to deal with than the bass. Especially in the 100hz to 300hz range. Mode density is very high, it is above where the subwoofers typically operate, but the room still dominates the response to a great extent.
