The Ultimate Guide to Acoustic Treatment

By Tommy Flemm 4 years ago

When getting started, among the biggest hurdles for novices when it comes to a home recording is that they grossly underestimate the role room acoustics play.

It would be prudent to get acquainted with acoustics before starting acoustic treatment, in the event you are thinking about starting an acoustic treatment. You can start by looking at a bs8233 noise assessment.

Fortunately, to run a recording studio, you really don’t need an acoustic engineering degree.

All you require are some simple concepts. Beginning with:

1. How Sound Travels in a Room

When sound is produced in a room, here is what occurs or happens to it:

  • A small part of it, referred to as direct sound, travels to the microphone in a straight line.
  • The remaining one, also referred to as reflected sound, bounces between the room surfaces randomly.
  • In a few moments, some parts of the reflection will reach the microphone just by chance.

Now…

Considering that direct sound doesn’t make any interaction with the room, the balance of its frequency stays pure, and its tone unaltered. And with every reflected sound, every new reflection has the ability to change the original sound just slightly. Depending on the room’s size, and the reflective surfaces within it, the resulting change can either be good or bad, small or large.

2. Why Most Rooms Have Poor Acoustics

Have you ever visited a grand cathedral? And if this is the case, have you noticed how absolutely incredible the sound in there is? Well, this is because rooms such as these aren’t only designed to look beautiful – they’re made to sound beautiful too.

The issue is: rooms with impressive acoustics need a lot of space and a lot of cash to build. And because the majority of us have neither, here’s how to do it:

3. How to Fake a Great Room Tone

Sonnox oxford reverb; back in the 1960s…

Somebody created a machine referred to as the Echo Chamber. This machine allows engineers to simulate a room’s reverb other than the room it was being recorded in. And as the years progressed, tech grew to be more sophisticated, and today…

Software programs referred to as digital reverb have the ability to simulate sound in any acoustic environment imaginable.

Soundproofing vs. Acoustic Treatment

Many a time, musicians will use these terminologies interchangeably, mistaking one for another when, in the real sense, each is totally different.

Soundproofing is meant for minimising the sound levels travelling in and out of your room by:

  • Inhibiting them with dense and heavy building materials.
  • Sealing up air gaps in doors/windows.

The advantage here is that you can record when you want, without having to worry about you or your neighbours conflicting.

On the other hand, acoustic treatment aims at controlling sound reflections in the room, making better sound recordings.

Both are valuable, but neither does the work of the other.

And although soundproofing can be integrated into your acoustic treatment plan, technically speaking, it’s not acoustic treatment by itself.