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nandoph8 7 October 2004

I got an idea for my live room, The ceiling and floor are wood, the walls are brick. What if I covered all the walls with plywood?

Comments

redrabbit Tue, 10/12/2004 - 00:43

Or how about hanging a hundred plastic Holloween bats on strings from the ceiling - to get that fluttering visual effect without the echo..........or guano.

Seriously, once it's live enough hang a thick curtain against the wall on a track, so when you don't want it so live the curtain covers the wall, and when you do want to liven it, the curtain slides along the track and tucks away behind another piece of wood.
=RR=

anonymous Sat, 10/16/2004 - 03:47

Walls

My only tip would be to NOT use THIN stuff on the walls for dampen a live room. What you end up with is Hf/Mid damping and not any damping in the lows. Hang thick stuff some distance away from the wall.

Hinged panels is a great trick. Just remember that you need to change about 20% of the walls before stuff really starts to change.

Toby

anonymous Mon, 10/18/2004 - 12:55

Nandoph8,

The room described sounds like an excellent starting point for a live room. That is to say an alive live room (isn't that the whole point anyway?).

I've got a similar live room, all wood panels (3m high), and a rough surface stone-brick wall (we had to put that in ourselves!).

The idea is diffusion for mid and high frequencies and absorption/trapping for low freqs and room modes.

By breaking up the sound waves into ever more complex pathways sound energy is reduced. Most live rooms aren't big enough to really have a proper reverb in the common use of the term. So the idea is to have an acoustic "presence" with an even frequency bandwidth and fast but natural decay time.

Diffusion wants hard, dense materials (like stone) which are not smooth - but rough, irregular, random in shape/texture. So you'll probably need to cover the brick walls with some wooden diffusors.

Quadratic Residue Diffusors can be used to give very flat frequency response diffusion. Here's a link to a DIY site for them:

http://www.mhsoft.nl/diffusor2.asp#calcul

Another option would be to add bricks directly to the wall in a kind of checkerboard or fractal-like pattern. This could be done by drilling a small hole into the brick wall, putting a post or screw into the brick to attach and then pushing the post/screw into the hole (there are special screws for doing this, should be a very tight and solid fit).

As for bass absorption...

Make simple corner bass traps by cutting slabs of rockwool or fiberglass into triangles that match your corners. Stack them from floor to cieling. Cover with fabric. This will do wonders for the room with minimal effort. You can also make some panel traps, here is a link to good acoustic webpage, jump down to the section on bass traps:

http://www.ethanwiner.com/acoustics.html

Have fun!

-Arrow

Davedog Mon, 10/18/2004 - 16:28

As was said....you definately want to get those corners knocked down in the bass frequencies and control the flutter echoes with an alternating pattern of absorbers.This will not greatly affect the 'live' vibe of your room but will allow the source to have a more definate and clearer character to it.Dead dead rooms are good for some things but not good for everything.My view of a quality tracking room involves a variety of surfaces since in most cases there will be a variety of sounds involved in recording music....remember that diffusion is at times much better than absorption....

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