Room Treatment and Open Source Room Evaluation

Its hard to improve something you can't measure.

My studio space is much much too reverberant. This is not surprising since its a basement room with laminate flooring and virtually no soft, absorbant surfaces at all. I planned to add acoustic treatment from the get go, but funding made me wait until now. I've been recording doing DI guitars, drum samples, and synth programming, but nothing acoustic yet until the room gets tamed a little bit.



(note: I get pretty explanatory about why bass traps matter in the next several paragraphs. If you only care about the measurement stuff, skip to below the pictures.)

Well, how do we know what needs taming? First there are some rules of thumb. My room is about 13'x11'x7.5' which isn't an especially large space. This means that sound waves bouncing off the walls will have some strong resonances at 13', 11', and 7.5' wavelengths which equates to about 86Hz, 100Hz, and 150Hz respectively. There will be many more resonances, but these will be the strongest ones. These will become standing waves where the walls just bounce the acoustic energy back and forth and back and forth and back and forth... Not forever, but longer than the other frequencies in my music.

For my room, these are very much in the audible spectrum so this acoustic energy hanging around in the room will be covering other stuff I want to hear (for a few hundred extra ms) while mixing. In addition to these primary modes there will also be resonances at 2x, 3x, 4x, etc. of these frequencies. Typically the low end is where it tends to get harder to hear what's going on, but all the reflections add up to the total reverberance which is currently a bit too much for my recording.

Remember acoustic waves are switching (or waving even) between high pressure/low speed and low pressure/high speed. Where the high points lie depends on the wavelength (and the location of the sound source). At the boundaries of the room, the air carrying the primary modes' waves (theoretically) doesn't move at all. That means the pressure is the highest there. At the very middle of the room you have a point where air carrying these waves is moving the fastest. Of course the air is usually carrying lots of waves at the same time so how its moving/pressurized in the room is hard to predict exactly.

With large wavelengths like the ones we're most worried about, you aren't going to stop them with a 1" thick piece of foam hung on the wall (no matter how expensive it was). You need a longer space to act on the wave and trap more energy. With small rooms more or less the only option is through porous absorbers which basically take acoustic energy out of the room when air carrying the waves tries to move through the material of the treatment. Right against the wall air is not moving at all, so putting material there isn't going to be very effective for the standing waves. And only 1" of material isn't going to act on very much air. So you need volume of material and you need to put it in the right place.

Basically thicker is better to stop these low waves.  If you have sufficient space in your room put a floor-to-ceiling 6' deep bass trap. But most of us don't have that kind of space to give up. The thicker the panel the less dense of material you should use. Thick traps will also stop higher frequencies, so basically, just focus on the low stuff and the higher will be fine. Often if the trap is not in a direct reflecting point from the speaker then its advised to glue kraft paper to the material which bounces some of the ambient high end around the room so its not too dead. How dead is too dead? How much high end does each one bounce? I don't know. It's just a rule of thumb. The rule for depth is quarter wavelength. An 11' wave really will be stopped well by a 2.75' thick trap. This thickness guarantees that there will be some air moving somewhere through the trap even if you put it right in the null. Do you have a couple extra feet of space to give up all around the room? Me neither. But we'll come back to that. Also note that more surface area is more important than thickness. Once you've covered enough wall/floor/ceiling, then the next priority is thickness.

Next principle is placement. You can place treatment wherever you want in the room but some places are better than others. Right against the wall is ok because air is moving right up until the wall, but it will be better if there is a little gap, because the air is moving faster a little further from the wall. So we come back to the quarter wavelength rule. The most effective placement of a panel is spaced equal to its thickness. So a 3" panel is best 3" away from the wall. This effectively doubles the thickness of your panel. Thus we see placement and thickness are related. Now your 3" panel is acting like its 6" damping pretty effectively down to 24" waves (~563Hz). It also works well on all shorter waves. Bass traps are really broadband absorbers. But... 563Hz is a depressingly high frequency when we're worried about 80Hz. This trap will do SOMETHING to even 40Hz waves, but not a whole lot. What do we do if our 13' room mode is causing a really strong resonance?

You can move your trap further into the room. This makes it so there is a gap in the absorption curve, but it makes the absorption go lower. So move the 3" panel to have a 6" gap and you won't be as effective at absorbing 563Hz but now it works much better on 375Hz. You are creating a tuned trap. It still works some on 563Hz but the absorption curve will have a low point then a bump at 375. Angling the trap so the gap varies can help smooth this response making it absorb more frequencies, but less effectively for specific ones. So tradeoff smooth curve for really absorbing a lot of energy at a specific frequency if you need.

The numbers here are pretty thoretical. Even though the trap is tuned to a certain frequency a lot of other frequencies will get absorbed. Some waves will enter at angles which makes it seem thicker. Some waves will bounce off. Some waves will diffract (bend) around the trap somewhat. There are so many variables that its very difficult to predict acoustics precisely. But these rules of thumb are applicable in most cases.

Final thing to discuss is what material? Its best to find one that has been tested with published numbers because you have a good idea if and how it will work. Mineral wool is a fibrous material that resists air passing through. Fiberglass insulation can work too. Rigid fiberglass Owens Corning 703 is the standard choice but mineral wool is cheaper and just as effective so its becoming more popular. Both materials (and there are others) come in various densities, and the idea comes into play that thicker means less dense. This is because if it's too dense acoustic waves could bounce back out on their way through rather than be absorbed.

Man. I didn't set out to give a lecture on acoustics, but its there and I'm not deleting it. I do put the bla in blog, remember? There's a lot more (and better) reading you can do at an acoustic expert's site.

For me and my room (and my budget) I started out building two 9" deep 23" wide floor to ceiling traps for the two corners I have access to (The other 2 corners are blocked by the door and my wife's sewing table). These will be stuffed with Roxul Safe and Sound (SnS) which is a lower density mineral wool. Its available on Lowes online, but it was cheaper to find a local supplier to special order it for me.

Roxul compresses it in the packaging nicely

I will build a 6"x23" panel using whatever's left and will place it behind the listening position. I also ordered a bag of the denser Roxul Rockboard 60 (RB60). I'm still waiting for it to come in (rare stuff to find in little Logan UT, but I found a supplier kind enough to order it and let me piggy back on their shipping container so I'm not paying any shipping, thanks Building Specialties!). I will also build four 4"x24"x48" panels out of Roxul Rockboard 60 (when it finally arrives) which is a density that more or less matches the performance of OC703.  These will be hung on the walls at the first reflecting points and ceiling corners. Next year or so when I have some more money I plan to buy a second bag of the rockboard which will hopefully be enough treatment to feel pretty well done. I considered using the 2" RB60 panels individually so I can cover more surface (which is the better thing acoustically), but in the end I want 4" panels and I don't know if it will be feasible to rebuild these later to add thickness.

my stack of flashing

I more or less followed Steven Helm's method with some variations. The stuff he used isn't very available so I bought some 20 gauge 1.5" galvanized L-framing or angle flashing from the same local supply shop who got me . They had 25ga. but I was worried it would be too flimsy, considering even on the rack a lot of it got bent. I just keep envisioning my kids leaning against them or something and putting a big dent on the side. After buying I worried it would be too heavy, but now after the build, I think for my towering 7.5' bass traps, the thicker material was a good choice. For the smaller 2'x4' panels that are going to be hung up, I'm not sure yet.

I chose not to do a wood trap because I thought riveting would be much faster than nailing where I don't have a compressor yet. Unfortunately I didn't forsee how long it can take to drill through 20ga steel. I found after the first trap its much faster to punch a hole with a nail then drill it to the rivet size. Its nice when you have something to push against (a board underneath) but where I was limited on workspace I sometimes had to drill sideways. A set of vice-grip pliers really made that much easier.

Steven's advice about keeping it square is very good, something I didn't do the best at on the first trap, but not too far off either. They key is using the square to keep your snips cutting squarely. Also since my frame is so thick it doesn't bend very tightly, so I found it useful to take some pliers and twist the corner a bit to square it up.

Corner is a bit round

a bit tighter corner now

 Since my traps are taller than as single SnS panel I had to stack them and cut a 6" off the top. A serrated knife works best for cutting this stuff but I didn't have an old one around, so I improvised one from some scrap sheet metal.

 I staggered the seams to try to make a more homogenous material.

With all the interior assembled I think the frames actually look good enough you could keep them on the outside, but my wife preferred the whole thing be wrapped in fabric. I don't care either way.

Before covering though I glued on some kraft paper using spray adhesive. I worked from top to bottom, but some of them got a bit wrinkled.

The paper was a bit wider than the frame, so I cut around the frame and stuffed it behind a bit, so it has a tidier look.

I'd say they look pretty darn good even without fabric!

Anyway, so all that acoustic blabber above boils down to the fact that even following rules of thumb, the best thing to do is measure the room before and after treatment to see what needs to be treated and how well your treatment did. If its good leave it, if its bad you can add more or try to move it around to address where its performing poorly.

So as measuring is important, and I'm kinda a stickler for open source software I will show you today how to do it. The de-facto standard for measurement is the Room Eq Wizard (REW) freeware program. Its free but not libre, so I decided to use what was libre. Full disclosure: I installed REW and tried it but couldn't ever get sound to come out of it, so that helped motivate the switch. I was impressed REW had a linux installer, but I couldn't find any answers on getting sound out. Its java based, not JACK capable, so it couldn't talk to my firewire soundcard. REW is very good, but for the freedom idealists out there we can use Aliki.

The method is the same in both, generate a sweep of sine tones with your speakers, record the room's response with your mic, and do some processing that creates an impulse response for your room. An impulse signal is a broadband signal that contains all frequencies equally for a very very (infinitely short) amount of time. True impulses are difficult to generate so its easier to just send the frequencies one at a time then combine them with some math. I've talked a little about measuring impulse responses before. The program I used back then (qloud) isn't compiling easily for me these days because it hasn't been updated for modern QT libraries and Aliki is more tuned for room measurement vs. loudspeaker measurement.

I am most interested in 2 impulse responses: 1. the room response between my monitors and my ears while mixing, and 2. the room response between my instruments and the mic. Unfortunately I can't take my monitors or my mic out of the measurement because I don't have anything else to generate or record the sine sweeps with. So each measurement will have these parts of my signal chain's frequency response convolved in too, but I think they are flat enough to get an idea and they'll be consistent for before and after treatment comparisons. I don't have a planned position for where I will be recording in this room but the listening position won't be moving so I'm focused on response 1.

The Aliki manual linked above is pretty good. For the most part I'm not going to rehearse it here. You make select a project location, and I found that anywhere but your home directory didn't work. It makes 4 folders in that location to store different audio files: sweep, capture, impulse, and edited files.

We must first make a sweep, so click the sweep button. I'm going from 20Hz to 22000Hz. May as well see the full range, no? A longer sweep can actually reduce the noise of the measurement, so I went a full 15 seconds. This generates an audio file with the sweep in it in the sweep folder. Aliki stores everything as .ald files, basically a wav with a simpler header I think.

Next step: capture. Set up your audio input and output ports, and pick your sweep file for it to play. Use the test to get your levels. I found that even with my preamps cranked the levels were low coming in from my mic. It was night so I didn't want to play it much louder. You can edit the captures if you need. Each capture makes a new file or files in the capture directory.

I did this over several days because I measured before treatment, then with the traps in place before the paper was added and again after the paper was glued on. Use the load function to get your files and it will show them in the main window. Since my levels were low I went ahead and misused the edit functions to add gain to the capture files so they were somewhat near full swing.

Next step is the convolution to remove the sweep and calculate the impulse response. Select the sweep file you used, set the end time to be longer than your sweep was and click apply and it should give you the impulse response. Be aware that if your levels are low like mine were, you'll only get the tiniest blip of waveform near zero. Save that as a new file and then go to edit.

In edit, you'll likely need to adjust the gain, but you can also adjust the length, and in the end you have a lovely impulse response that you can export to a .wav file that you can listen to (though its not much to listen to) or more practically: use in your favorite impulse response like IR or klangfalter.

But we don't want to use this impulse for convolving signals with. We can already get that reverb by just playing an instrument in our room! We want to analyze the impulse response to see if there's improvement or if something still needs to be changed. So this is where I imported the IR wav files into GNU Octave.

I wrote a few scripts to help out, namely: plotIREQ and plotIRwaterfall. They can be found in their git repository. I also made fftdecimate which smooths it out from the raw plotIREQ plot:

to this:

I won't go through the code in too much detail. If you'd like me to, leave a comment and I'll do another post. But look at plotMyIRs.m for useage examples of how I generated these plots.


You can see the big bump from around 150hz to 2khz. And a couple big valleys at 75hz, 90hz, 110hz etc. One thing I decided from looking at these is that the subwoofer should be turned up a bit, since my Blue Sky Exo2's crossover at around 150hz, and everything below that measured rather low.

I was hoping for a smoother result, especially in the low end, but I plan to build more broadband absorbers for the first reflection points. While a 4" thick panel doesn't target the really low end like these bass traps, they do have some effect, even on the very low frequencies. So I hope they'll have a cumulative effect down on that lower part of the graph.


The other point that I'd like to comment on is that the paper didn't seem to make much of a difference. Its possible that since it wasn't factory glued onto the rockwool it lacks a sufficient bond to transfer the energy properly. It doesn't seem to hurt the results too much either, in fact around 90hz it seems like it actually makes the response smoother, so I don't plan to remove it (yet at least).

The last plots I want to look at is the waterfall plots. These show how the frequencies are responding in time so you will see if any frequencies are ringing/resonating and need better treatment.

Here we see some anomolies. Just comparing the first and final plots, its easy to see that nearly every frequency decays much more quickly (we're focused on the lower region 400hz and below, since thats where the rooms primary modes lie). You also see a long resonance somewhere around 110hz that still isn't addressed, which is probably the next target. I can try to move the current traps out from the wall and see if that helps, or make a new panel and try to tune it.

Really though I'm probably going to wait until I've built the next set of panels.
Hope this was informative and useful. Try out those octave scripts. And please comment!