|
Post by kcatthedog on Jan 4, 2022 13:59:12 GMT -6
excellent progress, and the proof is in the pudding how do you find mixing in the room now ?
|
|
shawnh
Junior Member
Posts: 59
|
Post by shawnh on Jan 4, 2022 14:49:49 GMT -6
It's a huge improvement. As you can see in the first graph I was unable to hear anything between 80 hz and 180 hz accurately - that's a big problem. I can't believe it took me so long to realize. Mixes are translating much faster and honestly it's way more enjoyable just to listen. I've been having a blast just listening to all my records.
|
|
|
Post by Guitar on Jan 4, 2022 15:01:54 GMT -6
It's a huge improvement. As you can see in the first graph I was unable to hear anything between 80 hz and 180 hz accurately - that's a big problem. I can't believe it took me so long to realize. Mixes are translating much faster and honestly it's way more enjoyable just to listen. I've been having a blast just listening to all my records. I cheated: Sonwarworks found a huge 150 Hz spike in my listening position and dialed it out. All my speakers sound better, and I've been using the headphone correction also.
|
|
|
Post by kcatthedog on Jan 4, 2022 15:51:08 GMT -6
shawnh. So in step 2 did you move your desk out of the way and just move speakers and resweep until you found the best spot ? Also did you compare rt60 by 1/3 octaves, to compare/confirm what happened to decay times? as my decay times other then really low freq are good, considering reconsidering Sonarworks has done merit as it will offer freq correction and sone phase correction which would complement the rt60 decay times and offer the speaker and headphone correction.
|
|
|
Post by jhamm80 on Jan 4, 2022 18:11:12 GMT -6
I'm staring down the same rabbit hole right now wondering if it's worth measuring with REW. I'm reluctant to use it and get caught up in measurements instead of working on music. But if it makes working more enjoyable and productive, I can see the value. My new room is only 12.5 x 11 x 8ft and has more flutter echo and low end issues than I had hoped, but I lucked out and picked up some used GIK stuff for a steal the other day. 6 x 5.5" traps, 1 x 7.5" trap and 3 x 3.5" broadband panels. I'll add them to my 4 homemade traps and 3 cloud panels and it should definitely improve things. Feels like I hit the lottery.lol
|
|
shawnh
Junior Member
Posts: 59
|
Post by shawnh on Jan 4, 2022 18:23:58 GMT -6
I'm staring down the same rabbit hole right now wondering if it's worth measuring with REW. I'm reluctant to use it and get caught up in measurements instead of working on music. But if it makes working more enjoyable and productive, I can see the value. No doubt it killed a lot of hours for me in the last month or so where I might have otherwise been working on music. And there were moments when I felt like I wasn't even getting anywhere and that was tough. But in the end I think it was worth it. If you don't measure - then you have no idea really what you have or what you are accomplishing. My original measurement was what I ended up with by just sort of blindly following the "standard" on speaker placement, listening position, and treatment. I had a fair amount of time already invested in DIY treatments and I'm sure they were helping with flutter and with the response above 300 Hz - but below that it was a mess. Much happier now - but I won't be going down that hole again anytime soon.
|
|
|
Post by Guitar on Jan 4, 2022 18:26:02 GMT -6
You can always just use your ears, no measuring. I'm sure I've done that before.
|
|
|
Post by kcatthedog on Jan 4, 2022 18:33:15 GMT -6
@jhamm I may be selling a measurement mike with a calibration file, will know tomorrow. REW is free or shareware, you can just make a contribution.
The video series I posted above is 5 easy parts to go thorough that fully explains how to plan and do room measurement testing etc..
I’ll let you know tomorrow about mike if you are interested?
|
|
shawnh
Junior Member
Posts: 59
|
Post by shawnh on Jan 4, 2022 18:37:34 GMT -6
shawnh . So in step 2 did you move your desk out of the way and just move speakers and resweep until you found the best spot ? Also did you compare rt60 by 1/3 octaves, to compare/confirm what happened to decay times? as my decay times other then really low freq are good, considering reconsidering Sonarworks has done merit as it will offer freq correction and sone phase correction which would complement the rt60 decay times and offer the speaker and headphone correction. So my speakers were on the desk at the beginning - probably around 3 ft away from the front wall. My first step was to put them on stands behind the desk very close to the front wall and wider (bigger equilateral triangle - which the 310s benefit from anyway). This made a big improvement to the null around 100Hz and to the giant peak I had at 140Hz. Good news for you is looking at your response it looks pretty good above that big null at 100 Hz - but that could change when you move things From there the tweaks were much smaller - played around with width and my listening position - but of course there are limits - you still have to be able to use the room. you also will have to use the bass EQ on the speaker if you go right up against the front wall (most likely). Up against the front wall is kind of like the poor man's soffit mount. RT60 shouldn't be impacted too much by these position shifts. That has more to do with the total absorption in your room and if you are in that 250ms range I'd bet they will stay there. RT60 in small rooms doesn't really exist and I still haven't completely understood the topt metric in REW. Mine's generally around 250ms above the bass frequencies and I guess that's good for critical listening in a small room. EQ and/or room correction like sonarworks I would only really want working on low frequencies - below 1000Hz for sure and probably lower. If you can limit it to cuts only rather than boosts that is preferable too I think. The big nulls are the toughest problem. So much fun
|
|
|
Post by kcatthedog on Jan 4, 2022 18:58:11 GMT -6
Thx.
I have my monitors on separate wooden stands, against a diffuser and 4 inch absorber so around 2 feet off actual front wall and they could be wider.
I’ll experiment and see if I can get that low null down. My table is wide too so may measure with out it just to see.
No harm in some experimentation.
In smaller volume rooms is it impossible for rt60 to happen or why did you make that comment? Since introducing my treatment even a clap test indicates much shorter reverberation times and much dryer/crisper sound.
|
|
|
Post by jhamm80 on Jan 4, 2022 19:52:23 GMT -6
@jhamm I may be selling a measurement mike with a calibration file, will know tomorrow. REW is free or shareware, you can just make a contribution. The video series I posted above is 5 easy parts to go thorough that fully explains how to plan and do room measurement testing etc.. I’ll let you know tomorrow about mike if you are interested? Definitely. I'm in Canada and I thought I saw you mention you are too.
|
|
shawnh
Junior Member
Posts: 59
|
Post by shawnh on Jan 5, 2022 8:49:19 GMT -6
In smaller volume rooms is it impossible for rt60 to happen or why did you make that comment? Since introducing my treatment even a clap test indicates much shorter reverberation times and much dryer/crisper sound. So my understanding is that a room has to be large enough to have a diffuse sound field for true RT60 to be measured. That's not the case in most of the rooms we are talking about. You will probably notice that REW isn't giving you T60 - just topt, t30, and t20. But that being said the topt graph can be of some use I guess. Adding absorption in your room def has a noticeable effect - bringing the values down. Could let you know if your room was getting too dead also I guess. I've used it more like a quick check to make sure nothing is way off. I'm still not sure I totally understand it to be honest. I find the waterfall and spectrogram graphs to be of more use when thinking about/working on decay times - spectro esp.
|
|
shawnh
Junior Member
Posts: 59
|
Post by shawnh on Jan 5, 2022 9:02:12 GMT -6
Spectrogram (20Hz - 1000Hz) Before: Spectrogram after: If you want to experience a room mode in full glory just play a 24Hz sine tone in my room with the new setup and roll the chair from one end of the room to the other. Crazy. Sound is amazing, strange, fascinating.
|
|
|
Post by kcatthedog on Jan 5, 2022 14:31:48 GMT -6
Thx, what’s topt ?
|
|
|
Post by kcatthedog on Jan 6, 2022 3:22:27 GMT -6
Got it. I reset Aurora N to default, used chan 8 for loopback and used 44.1. sweep with 1/24th smoothing and rt60 by 1/3 octave showing ms of delay not perfect but more accurate, my lower bass problem makes sense in a small rom, but my upper trough at like 16K is curious this was a sweep of both speakers so I will redo for each speaker and see . Attachments:
|
|
shawnh
Junior Member
Posts: 59
|
Post by shawnh on Jan 6, 2022 8:05:58 GMT -6
Soundcard loopback looks good now. Def measure each speaker separately to find out what's going on in the mid and high range. You can use more smoothing there too - that's how we perceive those frequencies. Doing an overlay of left vs. right from 250Hz to 10,000Hz with 1/6 smoothing is a helpful thing to look at I think.
Topt is an REW thing - specifically for looking at verb/decay times in a small room. It seems to be pretty accurate when compared to the spectrogram etc. It also tracks pretty closely with T20 and/or T30 which makes sense. Your room looks pretty dead overall - kind of weird how it jumps right around 1000Hz. Do you see that in the waterfall or spectrogram?
|
|
|
Post by kcatthedog on Jan 6, 2022 9:03:21 GMT -6
Thx, ya, there are a couple of anomalies.
I’ll run the l,r speakers higher freq tests and see how they appear.
I’ll remeasure actual speaker distance off walls first to make certain they are the same.
|
|
|
Post by kcatthedog on Jan 6, 2022 9:04:11 GMT -6
Where do I find topt in REW?
|
|
|
Post by kcatthedog on Jan 6, 2022 9:12:50 GMT -6
|
|
|
Post by kcatthedog on Jan 6, 2022 9:30:04 GMT -6
REW doesn't guess, approximate, invent or otherwise fiddle the RT60 figures They are derived in the usual manner by applying linear fits to the Schroeder integral, REW uses an iterative procedure to estimate the best starting point for the integration, often called "Lundeby's Method" (from the paper by A. Lundeby, T. E. Vigran, H. Bietz, and M. Vorländer, “Uncertainties of Measurements in Room Acoustics,” Acustica, vol. 81, pp. 344–355 (1995)). The correlation coefficients for the linear fits can be viewed to get a feel for how reliable any particular octave or 1/3 octave band figure is. On the specific RT measure displayed, you can choose from EDT (line fit from 0 to -10dB), T20 (fit from -5 to -25dB), T30 (fit from -5 to -35dB)and what I have chosen to call "Topt", which is an "optimal" decay time estimate based on the slope of the Schroeder curve over a variable range chosen to yield the best linear fit. If the early decay time is much shorter than T30 (often the case in small rooms) the Topt measure uses a start point based on the intersection of the EDT and T30 lines, otherwise it uses -5dB. REW then tests every end point in 1dB steps to the end of the Schroeder curve and chooses the one which gives the best linear fit. I find that to give more reliable and repeatable results, particularly in small rooms where the early decay can go through a couple of slope changes before settling to something more linear. __________________ REW Author
|
|
|
Post by Tbone81 on Jan 6, 2022 9:36:11 GMT -6
Two important lessons I learned using REW:
1) you have to balance what you see in the graphs with what you hear in the room. Use the graphs to get you closer to the way you like to hear things. It’s doubtful that you actually enjoy listening to a perfectly flat freq response. How often have you ever actually been in a room like that? Most of us don’t have the money or resources to make things perfect anyway, so don’t chase perfection…rather, just work to make things better…and “better” is (somewhat) subjective.
2) the size of your peaks and nulls is directly proportional to the volume you’re listening at. The louder the volume, the greater the energy in the room, and the greater the peaks and nulls become from peak to trough.
|
|
|
Post by kcatthedog on Jan 6, 2022 11:40:00 GMT -6
two excellent points: Know your room, don't chase perfection and lower volume is your mixing friend. I am curious about this than anything and have started reusing monitors after almost 3 years of not As I have a fair amount of treatment cup and had been tweaking the room for like 5 years I felt I knew it well, but if I could improve it without login anything drastic I likely would. Anyway just did separate l and r measures 1\6th smoothing at a higher volume. The problem below 100 is to be expected in a small room: the rest livable I rechecked rt20 and 30 graphs , understanding the problem with small rooms but my MS of delay are sub 300 too,
|
|
|
Post by Tbone81 on Jan 6, 2022 11:50:46 GMT -6
two excellent points: Know your room, don't chase perfection and lower volume is your mixing friend. I am curious about this than anything and have started reusing monitors after almost 3 years of not As I have a fair amount of treatment cup and had been tweaking the room for like 5 years I felt I knew it well, but if I could improve it without login anything drastic I likely would. Anyway just did separate l and r measures 1\6th smoothing at a higher volume. The problem below 100 is to be expected in a small room: the rest livable I rechecked rt20 and 30 graphs , understanding the problem with small rooms but my MS of delay are sub 300 too, View AttachmentAre checking the waterfall graphs? They’re much more telling when it comes to peaks and nulls
|
|
|
Post by kcatthedog on Jan 6, 2022 12:15:20 GMT -6
Yes can post those as well
For fun just activated a Sonarworks demo extension
Honestly does sound very balanced and present.
|
|
|
Post by kcatthedog on Jan 6, 2022 12:36:37 GMT -6
REW waterfall graphs won't load too big but here is the Sonarworks.
|
|