Room Acoustics for Small Rooms - Why do small rooms suffer from bad acoustics?
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- Опубліковано 9 вер 2021
- Small rooms can be especially difficult to acoustically treat, and we at GIK Acoustics break down from where exactly the issues originate in small rooms and give tips on how to treat them.
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"How do I get better acoustics in a small room?
Getting the best sound out of a small room can be a tricky endeavor. Acoustically treating a small room requires the same testing and attention to detail that a larger studio does, but with a small room we’re limited in how much treatment we can fit into the room, and by how much time sound waves have to develop.
AS we’ve covered in other videos: Just like in a large studio you’ll want to focus treatment in all the familiar areas: First reflections, corners, and the back and front wall.
Why do small rooms suffer from bad acoustics?
We almost always refer to sound waves by their frequency, or the number of full cycles per second the wave completes, but that frequency is always going to correlate to a wavelength which is just the measurement of the physical length of a complete cycle.
If we play a sound within a room that has the same dimensions as the wavelength then that sound will reflect and overlap itself causing phase interference.
The wavelengths that correspond to your room’s dimensions are called the room modes. We have a whole video on the subject if you’d like to learn more but the important thing to take away is that the smaller the room the shorter the wavelength is for the room modes. In a large enough room the room modes are below the audible range, but as we shrink the room those room modes are pushed into the audible range and start becoming a problem.
To make matters worse, sound waves that are too large to complete a full cycle within the room start to create areas of low and high pressure that will throw off your bass response.
In order to treat these Bass issues we need thick absorbers to soak up the reflections causing the model issues. In a small room we’re already pressed for space, so actually fitting enough thick bass traps in the room becomes a challenge.
Where do you put acoustics in a small room?
In a smaller room, it’s even more imperative that you find the best listening position and speaker placement for your room. The frequency response can change drastically based on small changes to where you place your speakers and workstation, so make sure you experiment and test a variety of layouts.
In a small room you’ll probably get the best results with your speakers close to the front wall, and your listening position at roughly one third of the way from the front wall. We want to make sure our listening position isn’t at the null in the center of the room, and that our speakers aren’t in a location that creates a lot of SBIR issues. You can learn more about SBIR if you check out our video on the subject.
You always want to treat your first reflections, but in a small room the delay time between the direct sound and reflected sound is shorter, so the reflected sound is arriving at the listening position with more energy and close enough to the original sound to cause more phase interference and comb filtering.
With a lack of space for treatment you’ll want to utilize ceiling space, especially by treating the first reflections on your ceiling. Treating the horizontal corners of the room that outline the floor and ceiling can also help mitigate bass issues.
Because small rooms need almost all of the available space to correct the bass issues, using dedicated diffusers or high frequency absorption ends up being a waste of space. Always focus bass trapping in a small room and only add diffusion if it’s part of a combination absorber/diffuser like our alpha and impression series, or after you’ve gotten the bass response to where you want it.
Keep in mind diffusers need a certain amount of space to work effectively so depending on the type of diffuser it might not be practical to use in a small room.
How do I get good acoustics in my room?
Treating a small room so that it’s balanced for professional audio production is never easy. You’ll need to measure, test and experiment to determine where in the room you should focus your treatment, but you’ll start to see improvements as soon as you place your first few bass traps.
If you’d like a detailed breakdown for how to treat your room, fill out our free acoustic advice form and one of our designers will fill you in with tailored advice specific to your room. "
This series is so good! Thanks for sharing that knowledge!
So clear, Straight to the point...Thumbs up!
hahaha nice screen name
The smaller room shown in this video is bigger than my main room 😂😭 I'll keep using my headphones.
A small room is typically considered any room under 15ft in all directions. Of course, feel free to use your headphones if that is better for you personally, although we have found there are a lot more challenges that arise from solely depending on headphones for making important mixing decisions.
What's worse in the room dimensions are the wall and ceiling construction. Homes are not designed to have full range music in them, unless they are designed and built from the ground up by someone that actually understands what they are doing. 2x4 studs with sheetrock and building insulation isn't going to fix any room mode problems, that's why people have to stuff thick, heavy boxes to absorb the low frequencies in order to get rid of the big peaks/nulls..
Go to the big name studios, they don't use sheet rock, they will typically use wood interior. Wood sounds a LOT better than sheet rock.
@@GIKAcousticsLLC measured from the center?
@@Oneness100 We have cement/concrete walls!
@@Oneness100 The reflections from wood walls vs sheet-rocked walls will sound nearly identical. The wood used in studios is for looks. In a studio the goal is to avoid all such resonances because they color the sound.
If 50 x 30 feet (15 meters x 9 meters) rooms are the definition of small, 95% of rooms will be in this category. 15m x 9m (135ms) is HUGE by any standards in a normal house. Such big rooms will definitely benefit from diffusers.
True! I get tired of "big and small" or "good and bad" and other arbitrary binary classifications. 50x30 feet is bigger than the size of most homes in parts of Asia, Africa and south America. I wouldn't call such a room "small" in any case :)
Talking about acoustics, room length as a fraction of 20Hz/56ft makes intuitive sense and simplifies a lot of mental math.
First off, it's the wall construction of homes that's causing a lot of low frequency problems. A 2x4 wall with drywall and building insulation is NOT going to absorb much below 100hz, if anything. It's more rated for 125hz and above. That's why we have so many lower frequency modal pressure problems.
As far as diffusion is concerned, one should have the low frequency problems addressed first. And then you do some treatment of the mid's and high's. Diffusion would or should be last.
THEN, once you figure out how to fix the other problems, you have to figure out what exactly is a diffusor. Those BAD panels aren't really a diffusor. They don't quality because there are 5 requirements for a true diffused sound. Quadratic are the only that I know of that will meet all 5 requirements. Then you have to figure out which Prime Sequence to use and that's based on distance in your room between you and the diffusor because if you don't have enough distance, then you won't be able to hear the diffused sound because it needs distance to fully form. Then depending on your application, you have to figure out which wall(s) you are going to treat with diffusion and how much coverage, and then if you are going to also put it in the ceiling, and again, how much coverage. Then its a matter of are you going to use vertical diffusors for a horizontal sound field, or are you going to alternate vertical and horizontal diffusion to get a 2D sound field.
Either way, I find this video to be missing a lot of information to be of value..
2 by 3 meter here in NL
@@KoenDeJaeger 2 by 3 meter? What's 2 x 3 meter?
@@Oneness100 my room
I like how the desk and the computer monitors block those bookshelf speakers in your video.
I filled out that form in March. I was hooked up with an expert. We iterated through designs of my room using a 3D tool they have. The stuff took months to get to me due to COVID related shortages. The product just sitting on the floor in your room with change how you hear your music. Really great stuff.
Whats the product ?
@@okosbokos1491 multiple alpha bass traps. They are assembled now and have made a night and day difference. I just submitted a form for an upgrade today.
@@mygirlfriendismean thank you, do you have a web shop link or something ?
Ty for this info i know exactly what i am going to do now.
Informative!
Very useful videos thanks
Happy to help!
I totally agree with this video.
In small room avoid full on diffusers as it has limited place for sound to bounce back.
Each room is different so have to play around with the speaker placement.
Thanks for expanding on it. Luckily, we have a video on that exact subject of speaker placement! ua-cam.com/video/T10_MLGOBfc/v-deo.html
@@GIKAcousticsLLC Who did you think I learned this from ? 😊
Not true. Diffusion simply requires the listener be 3x the distance from the diffuser if the wavelength being, for the lowest frequency diffused. So for 1k, (1ft wavelength) you need 3ft between you and diffusion. Easily achieved in a small room.
@@kylegushue But these BAD type panels aren't true diffusors. There's a lot of devices marketed and sold that are being touted as diffusors, but they aren't. The funniest ones are the companies that sell acoustic foam shaped to look like diffusors. That's the biggest joke on the planet…
They need quadratic. But you have to pick the right Prime sequence, they are expensive, and one needs a fair amount of coverage. Plus, it's always better to get the low end taken care of first. Also, I don't know about putting diffusors on all 4 walls AND ceiling. I know there are rooms like this, but they are actually much larger rooms.. s
I believe it depends on the room dimensions and what one is doing in the room to determine which wall to cover with diffusors and which diffusors to use, whether the ceiling has enough distance to put diffusors. etc…
But I would definitely take care of the rest of the room's problems first. Diffusors should be the last thing to introduce into a room, not the first, otherwise they can make the room sound worse...
@@Oneness100 there are a variety of diffusers, polycylindrical being one type. They need not be quadratic, that is just one type. Where you place them depends on the room and if they operate on 1d or 2d planes, and if they are phase grating or amplitude grating or both.
I do agree that the bad panels and what gik sells are not effective scattering devices, rather just band pass absorbers.
The distance between the receiver (mic, listener) and the diffuser is the primary factor in determining the lowest frequency that can be effectively diffused. So their “tuning” will often vary with placement in the room.
There is no room too small for diffusion, just may not be large enough to diffuse a frequency that’s useful, or may return energy with too high a db level within the initial delay time gap.
My home "studio" is tiny, 9' x 14' x 7'. I have 6" thick 2'x 4' rockwool bass-traps with a 6" air-gap on all 12 corners, all walls and the whole ceiling, 25 bass traps in total, lol. I barely have room to move, but still fit a full acoustic drum kit in there somehow! The room of course is not perfectly flat, but sooooo much better than it was, it's usable to mix in now. Getting the low end right is the biggest challenge and I have to check the mix in other rooms and on other systems and come back to me studio and tweak, but the point is it's very doable with a little more work.
What you’ve done to your room is completely unnecessary and ridiculous.
Thank you very much for this
You're very welcome!
@@GIKAcousticsLLC how far away should you be from the GridFusor?
Dampening/controlling the first reflection points are the key to having better sound in small room. I have a small theater room in my house and it took a lot of researching and dampening on my floor (carpet with 8 pound padding under it, rear defuser, heavy curtains to get in under control.
Heavy curtains actually soak up too much of the high frequencies. I've got heavy curtains but I have them pulled to the walls with tiebacks when watching movies. With my blinds down over the windows. And a couple of diffusers on top of the windowsill, it gives you much better performance.
@@C--A another company recommended me acoustic curtains. I always hear this is bad like you said. Gik said to use the gobo stands in front of the window. Why are you using diffusers?
Being 1/3 from front speakers makes good sense for stereo audio listening, but when I exit Spotify and watch a 5.1 surround movie, I'm supposed to be positioned more near the surround speakers. I can't sit in both places at once, and I understand avoiding the middle dead zone, so what should I do? Obviously, I am only interested in my listening environment and I'm not trying to design a recording studio, just trying to understand how do I satisfy both recommendations...sitting about 5 ft out from my rear surrounds , when I'm supposed to be 1/3 out from the front wall, completing the 3rd point of an equilateral triangle?
I will add that prior to painting the room, it was very echoey. I added a lot of sand to the paint for the walls, not for acoustics, but for visual texture. Apparently, the sand did unexpected good things to dampen reflections in the room. Even with the old hardwood flooring, I don't seem to detect much, if any, in terms of first reflections. I'm just getting a lot of window vibrations from the sub. If I move the sub (about an 8' X 12' room) just a little further away from the wall with the window in it, the glass vibrates much less, but then the sub is closer to the open closet, so the closet wood trim vibrates.
if I want more of a "listening room" space but treated? not a dead room but open, for a 3 x 3.5m room? I'm thinking the studio traps/rounded bass traps that will both reflect and absorb...? LMK what u think! I hate dead sounding rooms.
My listening room is 13x19 is this already a small room? I have my speakers on Thea Long side of the Wall an my seatposition is very near to the rearside of the wall. What type of absorbers / diffusors do you think Works best? Thanks
I have 4 panels very similiar to one on the left near the window at 3:43 and I still get quite a lot of room sound when placed next to walls at early reflection points. The other day I got an idea, to put them instead of next to the wall as close to speakers as possible... the listening position feels a lot less verby now, which I like a lot more. But I'm wondering if I might have created some other problems with this solution... can anyone let me know if this is somehow wrong?
Large rooms can sound bad too. Even large rooms can sound good for one application, but bad in another. I was in a large Cathedral which sounded great for voice or pipe organ, but man you wouldn't be able to sing in there, or play rock/pop or mix in there!
Voice but not sing?
Just having moved to an apt with a smaller room, Ive found the room gain makes for enhanced listening. I dont need to incorporate a sub.
What do you do for that bass hump? Treatment on every possible surfacece. 3 feet thick?
I have one doubt kind of unrelated to this video.
If low frequencies (of quarter wavelength longer than room dimension) can't fully develop in a small room, then how does cabin gain work in a car to increase te db of low frequencies?
Vocês entregam no Brasil? Obrigado!
Bruh, your "small room" is my entire house.
At what dimensions is a room considered small? I have a room that's 14 by 21, but I will say it's somewhat oddly shaped and isn't a perfect Rectangle, at least in the back half of the room.
All rooms smaller than 50x30 f.ex. are considered small. Aka smaller than public venues ^^
Fortunately, we have a video on some methods to approach the acoustics in a non-symmetrical room. ua-cam.com/video/wOTAS7ncihI/v-deo.html
@@bloodcarver913 50x30??? where did you get those numbers? that's bigger than my house...
What is the name of the fabric and color of the panel at 1:34?
up up
Where to put more absorbers to treat mid-bass build-up (160hz-300hz)? Low bass sounds kinda ok. I have 6" panels in the corners already and 4" first reflection walls. Ceiling first, or front wall first?
@rollo rodriguez, we'll definitely need more information about your room to give you that kind of advice. Typically you would want to treat the ceiling and then the front and back walls or rear side walls, but this all depends on the overall goal for the room - is it a large or small room? a recording studio? Is it a mastering studio? Is it a podcasting studio? There are different strategies for each type of room. We've got more questions that need to be answered and the best way to get that answer is to send us your room information and the trouble you're having, and we'll have one of our designers reach out to you specifically with advice for your space and which products to go where, based on what you already have in the room. Give it a go at www.gikacoustcs.com/acoustic-advice-form/
My man, I have a shop around 10 feet wall in every side and height of wall is 7.6 feet and shop is located in main market here in India and the place is so loud it hurts my brain 24*7 and I m planing to run a youtube channel also on some place so what's ur opinion on sound proofing and my main work in this shop is that I m running a photography studio🤗
Thanks for reaching out. That's great to hear about your upcoming UA-cam channel. Luckily, we have a distributor in India which can help you all the way from recommending a treatment strategy to delivering our products to your door. Please visit gikacoustics.in
I have 4 inch panels how far from the ceiling should i hang them?
Ceiling panels (or clouds), should be 12" to 24" from the ceiling, but no more than 24".
Are they available in the Netherlands
Yes! Please visit our site www.gikacoustics.eu
@@GIKAcousticsLLC thanks
I live in Zaandam. I ordered 10 panels on monday and I received them on friday. Gik has a distribution point in Poland.
I cannot accept this theory since the 50ft is considere as a small room. Small room is which I believe is 10ft, 12ft or 15ft or maybe 20ft maximum in sizes, that is the most common average people studio size in their house.
Its based on the length of waves, which cannot be changed due to physics. In order to allow all waves to complete a cycle properly, it must be 50ft.
Yes small room here he is talking acoustically not based on your living comforts.😂
Except bass traps do not manage low frequency response. It will do "something" but not in a predictable way. Bass traps are a misunderstood/misused tool. If you could install a large enough bass trap, to actually stop the low frequency wave length where do you go from there? Stopping the wave length doesn't mean you're hearing a developed wave length. How are you tuning a bass trap? That would be interesting to hear.
Agreed. Most "bass traps" are really just corner absorbers
My listening room is small, speakers against one wall, sit against the other. Im pleasantly surprized that the room gain actually enhances the sound in my case. I ended up not installing the sub or treatments. Bass traps and treatments are not always required.
And for voiceover? is it okay?
I'm not in the know. But I would think voice overs would be a sweet test of the room. One can really hear the room air when watching videos recorded in an untreated space. Could be good advice for people think only about music production. We all know voices intimately, a perfect debugging aid. :)
9 foot square room, dedicated for TV and Music. How on earth do i treat a room so small?!
small rooms are tricky, huge absorbers everywhere helps a lot. i got 2.5meter square room, and it sounds really good in here.
Same here! 2.65m cubic room to be more precise. It sucks that it's cubic I know, but with some heavy treatment it actually sounds close to perfect for me. Will get even better after adding a sub!
@@rafaelfreitasmusic at least it's cheap for us with small rooms, every acoustic panels have much more effect, and room gain makes small subwoofers have huge impact.
dual 10" here and i get 10hz output i can feel.
2.5 meter square?? Damn, THAT is small!
@@-MarkWinston- 2.5meter wall lengths that is. you can also measure room size in another way by multiplying 2.5 by 2.5. dont know what you call this.
@@sudd3660 2.5m x 2.5m is a 6.25 meter square room. Now thats better... lol! A 2.5 meter square room is like 1.6m x 1.6m which is extremely small. Lol!
I’ll just treat the whole room
In small room it's better to use headphones! Anyway!
not true. mixes wont translate as well unless you have multi thousand dollar headphones
I'd go with mixing at low volume, on monitors, over mixing on headphones any day. Headphones don't give you a true stereo image and you have to spend a huge amount of money to get the right headphones for the job in hand. I don't think you can mix on any old headphones, as they need to be fit for purpose.
just use speakers that are appropriate for the size of the room, listen at conversation level, and 90% of that is uneccessary.
Incorrect. Standing waves are always present no matter the speaker size.
音は出さないのか？ 説明だけでは音は聞こえない！
You don't need thick bass traps, just more subs. You need 5ft thick of damping for higher frequency bass and lower frequency bass will still pass through it. The reason you use multiple subs is that they act as active frequency levelers, giving you even bass throughout the room. Bass traps are a scam for people who don't understand psychoacoustics. They only work for mid and higher frequencies.
Not if they are thick enough. The GIK traps are way too thin for sure.
you didn't say almost nothing
Small rooms are tough. Thats why your car stereo sounds so.....good? lol.
So we’re supposed to take advice from someone that has his monitors dead center? 😂🤦🏽♂️
I turned this off when I saw the hair .. no
you'll go far in life
@@PeterJaquesMusic I feel better already.
what the... didnt notice it til i read your comment