The fundamentals of room acoustics

Have you ever been watching TV and regardless how loud you made the volume, it was still hard to hear? Have you ever walk down a long, narrow hall and clap your hands to hear a strange echo?

Okay, those are just some of the effects that rooms have sounds on and yes, they do play a role in your recordings. Hence, it is vital to first consider the acoustic quality of a room before you commence recording your awesome songs. Once the tracks are recorded, it is very hard or almost impossible to undo the effects of the room in blending and honing stages. Hence, deal with this before you commence recording.

There are volumes of information written on the subject of room acoustics and most of us don’t have energy or time to absorb that. The emphasis here is to give you sufficient information to realize what makes a bad room for recording and how to recognize issues before the record button gets pressed. Ways to repair room acoustics issues without spending a hefty amount of money need to be considered.

Moreover, floating ceilings will assist you to choose a room that is already a good option or requires little adjustment for recording. You just have to know what to listen for in a room.

There are mainly three acoustic properties that dominate the room quality. They are:

1. Room modes
2. Echo and absorption levels
3. Reflection, blending and diffusion qualities

There are definitely other acoustic properties but you won’t earn a PhD in acoustics here. Let us just try to keep it easy so we can do what we truly want to do and get a quality recording for some excellent music.

1. Resonance and Room modes

Ever play a specific note on your instrument and something in the room vibrated due to it? Well, that note hit the resonance of that object. What does resonance mean? If you take a piece of string and tie one end to something and then shake the string until you get the string vibrate on a single arc, you are at the point where the least amount of energy is necessary to shake the string.

2. Good Echoes

Let me just repeat that the drier the room, the better it is for recording and this is mainly due to the developments in digital emulation and computer technology that makes it simpler to create very realistic sounding artificial echo. This assumes the user of the echo application knows what they are doing. Furthermore, you might still want to see how dry the room is before you commence setting up your gear and bringing everybody in for the recording. So this section shows you a little trick for getting a rough estimate in the echo level of the room and HVAC noise control solutions.

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