Poly experimentation in my live room with excellent results
May 17, 2021 15:41:31 GMT -6
tasteliketape, acegunn, and 5 more like this
Post by bgrotto on May 17, 2021 15:41:31 GMT -6
Hi all,
Posted this over at the purple site and wanted to share here, too. Actually, i mainly wanted to share here but audio attachments are too limited so i gotta double-post. Aaaaanywho, check it:
I've been curious about poly diffusers for a while so I took it upon myself (and my studio partner, who is, frankly, a million percent the carpenter that i am) to build a batch of them and mount them in some key spots in my live room, in an effort to clean up some things that had been bothering me.
My live room (2, in the image below), in its basic rectangular form, is about 28 x 28 ft, with roughly 14 or 15 ft high ceilings. But we built iso booths into two corners (3 & 4), and, there's an adjacent room off to one side (5), with an open wall (though the floor plan below indicates otherwise), that sort of forms an "L" shape, so it doesn't really 'behave' like a 28x28x14 room, with regards to modal weirdness:
The room is, frankly, under-treated, and there were a few gremlins in the acoustics that had been bothering me.
The low end (below 100hz or so) 'hung' a bit long for my taste...it sounds big and boomy and impressive in the room (and virtually every drummer that's ever recorded in there has declared it their favorite live room in town), but for most recordings, it's a bit too much and I found myself fighting the resonances more than I'd like.
The low mids were a bit too murky, often making things feel a bit further away than their mic positions should yield.
Last, there was a bit of 'hash' in the high end, leading to a bit too much 'zing' in the cymbals, 'scratch' in the cellos, and so on. It also meant positioning overhead mics or really any sort of distant stereo pair would result in imaging that felt not-quite-distinct.
I don't want to overstate these issues; we've been making fine recordings in this space since we relocated to it and reopened in 2016. But these issues were nagging at me in varying degrees over the years, and I recently stumbled upon a thread on GS that offered some promising info.
It suggested that polys might be an excellent choice for dealing with all of these problems, so I set about to try it out.
We built four polys total. Construction was simple: I used some 3M 77 adhesive to glue two layers (for a total of roughly 7") of fluffy pink R13 to a 2x4' sheet of masonite.
We mounted that masonite to a 2x3' sheet of 1/2" plywood, by screwing some 2x2" sticks along the sides of the plywood, and bending the masonite into position.
We capped the bottom of the poly with 1/2" plywood, and left the top open (though we may cap the top with some pegboard...not sure just yet).
There's a strip of rubber (like the kind you use to seal a door) between the masonite, and the bottom cap, to prevent rattling and to form a better seal.
We hung one poly over the door to iso 3, and a second poly opposite that, over the door to room 5.
We also hung two polys -- one right over the other -- on the wall next to the door to room 5 (which is roughly the centerline of the room and was where the most prominent and annoying room mode lived).
I've attached a couple pics to illustrate.
Before we hung the treatments, I cleared the room (including all the gobos and other treatments), then set up a couple drum kits. We made some recordings of a simple drum beat, then hung the polys, and re-recorded the same stuff. The difference is, IMHO, profound. I'm blown away with how effective these treatments are; i expected a subtle improvement at best, and instead, got a massively effective one. I'll post the audio and some info on the recording setup in a followup post, after I've had the opportunity to pop the PT session open, and get the audio organized and presentable.
I'm so psyched! I'd been scouring the web for 'real world' a/b-ing of this sort of treatment to no avail, so I'm eager to demonstrate how incredibly effective it was for us.
Thanks for reading!
Posted this over at the purple site and wanted to share here, too. Actually, i mainly wanted to share here but audio attachments are too limited so i gotta double-post. Aaaaanywho, check it:
I've been curious about poly diffusers for a while so I took it upon myself (and my studio partner, who is, frankly, a million percent the carpenter that i am) to build a batch of them and mount them in some key spots in my live room, in an effort to clean up some things that had been bothering me.
My live room (2, in the image below), in its basic rectangular form, is about 28 x 28 ft, with roughly 14 or 15 ft high ceilings. But we built iso booths into two corners (3 & 4), and, there's an adjacent room off to one side (5), with an open wall (though the floor plan below indicates otherwise), that sort of forms an "L" shape, so it doesn't really 'behave' like a 28x28x14 room, with regards to modal weirdness:
The room is, frankly, under-treated, and there were a few gremlins in the acoustics that had been bothering me.
The low end (below 100hz or so) 'hung' a bit long for my taste...it sounds big and boomy and impressive in the room (and virtually every drummer that's ever recorded in there has declared it their favorite live room in town), but for most recordings, it's a bit too much and I found myself fighting the resonances more than I'd like.
The low mids were a bit too murky, often making things feel a bit further away than their mic positions should yield.
Last, there was a bit of 'hash' in the high end, leading to a bit too much 'zing' in the cymbals, 'scratch' in the cellos, and so on. It also meant positioning overhead mics or really any sort of distant stereo pair would result in imaging that felt not-quite-distinct.
I don't want to overstate these issues; we've been making fine recordings in this space since we relocated to it and reopened in 2016. But these issues were nagging at me in varying degrees over the years, and I recently stumbled upon a thread on GS that offered some promising info.
It suggested that polys might be an excellent choice for dealing with all of these problems, so I set about to try it out.
We built four polys total. Construction was simple: I used some 3M 77 adhesive to glue two layers (for a total of roughly 7") of fluffy pink R13 to a 2x4' sheet of masonite.
We mounted that masonite to a 2x3' sheet of 1/2" plywood, by screwing some 2x2" sticks along the sides of the plywood, and bending the masonite into position.
We capped the bottom of the poly with 1/2" plywood, and left the top open (though we may cap the top with some pegboard...not sure just yet).
There's a strip of rubber (like the kind you use to seal a door) between the masonite, and the bottom cap, to prevent rattling and to form a better seal.
We hung one poly over the door to iso 3, and a second poly opposite that, over the door to room 5.
We also hung two polys -- one right over the other -- on the wall next to the door to room 5 (which is roughly the centerline of the room and was where the most prominent and annoying room mode lived).
I've attached a couple pics to illustrate.
Before we hung the treatments, I cleared the room (including all the gobos and other treatments), then set up a couple drum kits. We made some recordings of a simple drum beat, then hung the polys, and re-recorded the same stuff. The difference is, IMHO, profound. I'm blown away with how effective these treatments are; i expected a subtle improvement at best, and instead, got a massively effective one. I'll post the audio and some info on the recording setup in a followup post, after I've had the opportunity to pop the PT session open, and get the audio organized and presentable.
I'm so psyched! I'd been scouring the web for 'real world' a/b-ing of this sort of treatment to no avail, so I'm eager to demonstrate how incredibly effective it was for us.
Thanks for reading!
Attachments:
