Can I Make It Sound BETTER?

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[JeffGeerling]

Putting some large panels of Corning 703, wrapped in some nice acoustically transparent fabric to your style/liking, is what many pros do for radio, recording, theaters, etc.

Corning 703 is pretty cheap, too, especially for a small space like that. It's great for absorption, and almost infinitely better than the cheap low density foam panels you can buy for 'YouTubers' on Amazon or elsewhere.

[fbrz]

Diffuser looks cool and the bass trap was a pretty good solution. You need more surfaces to absorb sound, though. Ideally that diffuser would be behind you, to diffuse whatever comes from the speakers. Your speakers are also creating fake bass by being too close to the wall, so some foam panels behind them should help. You probably have carpet there but a rug never hurts, and a cloud panel above your seating position helps with ceiling reflection.

[HansAndreasR]

i love how this channel morphed from a from a DIY channel with the premise of: "i need a bed, let me show you how to make a bed" to a product developing channel with the premise of: "i have the need for a bed, let me tell you how i got to the bed that i needed"... yes, it's a product that you needed (a bed in this example) but how you tell how it is made, makes me think true my own needs for a bed and how to design and make my own! Thanks Bob!

[kyelight]

Sound treatment is mostly a matter of understanding what sounds bad and then preventing it.
In a very rough priority order, here are the big ones.
Standing waves are bad. That's when the sound bounces around a room following the same path every time. It's bad because that path reinforces some frequencies and kills others, so the room sounds odd. This path can be as simple as two parallel surfaces (and if you've ever clapped your hands in a concrete carpark and heard the "flutter echo" you'll know what I mean - it sounds like a twang). This can be broken up by diffusers, like the one you made in this video. Practical tip, sound reflects off everything, so a bookshelf is actually a great diffuser. In general terms, you don't have to make every surface have texture, just make sure that one of each parallel pair does. Also remember the floor and ceiling are parallel. There will be paths around the room that reflect off more than two surfaces, like hitting each wall at 45 degrees, but if you sort the parallel surfaces it'll probably sort these too.
The next one is the amount of reverberation.
A bathroom has tonnes, a walk-in robe full of clothes has far less, standing in the middle of a field has basically none. In general, there are two concerns, the amount of reverb, and the balance of it. In general, you want to land somewhere in the middle between the two extremes, and when you're writing music you want to hear more of the speakers playing your mix and less of the reverb of your room, so having a bit less reverb than a comfortable room is good. Once again, bookshelves also absorb sound pretty well. Libraries are quiet places as much because of the books as the librarians not letting anyone talk.
The balance of the reverb is the other concern. If you were to take a concrete basement and put thin foam all over every wall then the high frequencies would get absorbed and the room would sound very 'dead' in the top end, but thin foam doesn't absorb bass much at all, so the low end would sound like the room was empty and be very boomy. Listening to music in such an environment would sound really odd, and it would be impossible to mix anything in there. It's hard to give simple advice on how you might actually test how balanced your room is, but I would think the bass trap you made is likely to be relatively ineffective, and even if effective is probably too small. One very very easy experiment to do is to just to try placing something that absorbs a lot of bass in the room and see if it helps - a foam mattress rolled up in a cylinder absorbs bass pretty well, as do sealed bags of fibreglass insulation (or any other type of fibre-based insulation). It's common for people to just put a sealed bag of insulation in the corner of a room as a bass trap. If you try this and you discover the make a positive difference, you can either add more bass traps, or you can remove other thinner absorbent things so the highs are less absorbed. Having a room with a little too much balanced reverb is better than less reverb that isn't balanced, as you will try and compensate when mixing, making your mixes sound funny.
These strategies will get you a long way there. A sanity check it to compare how decent quality headphones sound compared to how the speakers sound at your reference location (where you sit when listening to your mixes). They will sound quite different, but both should sound relatively balanced, so that might give you some direction if your room doesn't sound great and you can't work out why. You should also listen to your mixes on lots of different headphones, speakers, places, etc, to eliminate the sound of any one environment. Also, the more you listen to music in that room, the more you'll learn the room and can get your mixes in broadly the same shape as the pros have done.
Hope this helps!

[Elementaro]

"I make everything complicated, and I'm about to do it again." needs to be on some merch 🤣

[TheLabyrinthTV]

As a mixing engineer I’d honestly say you’re off to a pretty decent start for someone that not familiar with the science and technical stuff. I did hear a very slight difference in the A/B test especially with the reflections [I listened to this on my iPhone speakers] so I can imagine what it sounds like in headphones. The biggest thing I heard was mostly reflections in the upper frequency range. Here’s my recommendations. First if you’re going to be recording at your desk, make/buy a “cloud” for your ceiling. Second, for the room, you’d be surprised how much of difference having bigger pieces of furniture helps — think stuff like a couch. Third, look into sound blankets. If you’re on a budget some moving blankets can help too. Basically the aim is not to kill the sound of the room but just to minimize it because you’ll still want natural qualities of the room, without it being “in the way” if that makes sense. Either way what you did build looks really dope and I like the idea of having slats that adjust!

[scotthallgv]

DIY PERKS has a video about this sorta stuff that might come in handy if not by directly copying it, it might give you some ideas and inspiration in terms of possibilities. I tried his method out or a rough approximation of it, and made a pretty significant difference in sound reflections in my room. Cheers.

[TanukiTakey]

A spectral frequency display view of a frequency sweep recording in the room may help visualize the most resonant frequencies in the room as well as show you a before and after contrast.

[sixairsoft]

You can use REW to take measurements of the room. That'll help identify issues and you can google the solutions. It'll all depend on what are you looking for and the use of the space. Its a good idea to cover the whole corner of the wall where your speakers are and I'd recommend absorption over diffusion behind the desk. That'll reduce any resonance and mostly phase issues. A good basic thing to do is:

1) Absorption on the wall where the desk and speakers will be (bass traps, acoustic panels you can easily make out of rockwool, etc.)
2) Diffusion behind your listening position
3) Absorption or a combination with diffusion (aka the same thing you did with the bass trap) to the left and right walls of your listening position

Ensure your listening position forms an equilateral triangle with the speakers. This setup greatly enhances accuracy when working with audio.

Youtubers with great info on this:
Produce Like A Pro
In The Mix
WayneWav


Good luck! Love your videos!

[smirkingrevenge]

That diffuser is a piece of art. Damn well done 😁 never change Bob! Keep things complicated 👌👌

[aidanknight]

Your funky QRD diffusor looks really nice! As others have mentioned: Depending on your goals, adding more absorption in your room might help tighten the audio in your test recording. I'm building a studio right now so I am in deep on this stuff, but the general premise is that you want to cover somewhere around 20-30% of your hard surfaces with 2-4" thick panels (decent for voiceover but going 10"+ for music will help) filled with fluffy insulation (rockwool/owens corning/etc). You can do more, but this alone will start to improve the intelligibility of your audio. Acoustic treatment is a never ending rabbithole ;)

[PhilipValdesMusic]

Most recommendations for treating a room tell you to put absorbtion at your first reflection points and diffusion behind your listening position. Unless you have a subwoofer in there I don't think you need to worry about bass traps as much until you start pumpoing a whole lot more bass frequencies into the room. Making absorbers is pretty easy and you can look for some other youtube videos for inspiration. It's coming great!

[chriscutress]

In my home studio I have an old tapestry hanging on the wall behind my console setup. This cuts the bounce in front of the room. As I have 1/2 racks with analog reel to reel machines on both sides of the room I haven't had to do any major sound re-enforcement on those walls and behind my sitting position I have a floor to ceiling rack loaded with outboard equipment and patchbays as well as some roll around equipment racks which rest against the back wall. All in all it sounds pretty good with no major standing waves. Main speakers are wall mounted and pointed down towards the primary listening area. As well, near field monitors on mounted on wings to each side of my audio console/mixer. The total room size is about 12' x 10' so it is a small control room and I use another room for the recording studio duties. In there I have packing blankets that I suspend from multiple clothing racks to absorb negative sound and standing wave issues. As well there is a plush sofa and some fabric covered chairs to further absorb sound bounce issues.

[Craftlngo]

Someone who knows a lot about acoustics is your fellow colleague John Heisz here on YouTube. He is mostly known for his prowess in building his own woodworking machines, but he has also built a complete room for listening to Hi-Fi Music and watching Movies.

[DeeMacias]

I'm not an audio professional but in my town there's a theatre that was built by audio professionals, and it's beautifully sounding. I attend lots of concerts there and acoustics is awesome. Every single surface is a diffuser. It's all made of wood, and every square inch is an irregular piece of wood next to the other. Nice job you've done here!

[ekij]

Breaking up your big flat surfaces will help.
Even a few picture frames on the wall will help (somewhat)
The ceiling looks to have foam tiles so probably not a problem
The biggest problem might actually be the floor since it's concrete and not carpet.
This is where being messy actually helps!
Leave boxes and chairs and tools and stuff out on the floor.
Or if you're too tidy for that a few rugs will help.

[DeniedGrace]

The diffuser is gorgeous!
My one bit of input is that you might end up needing some foam at the top and bottom of the wood inserts to keep them from vibrating and making noise when you have a lot of bass in the room.

[catgynt]

Books are wonderful surface for diffusing sound. Walk into a busy library focusing on the sound in hallways compared to between the shelves. I suggest you add a wall of horizontal book shelves across the dark wall. Paperbacks or hardbound, it shouldn't matter. Use what you have available.

Great insight, thanks for sharing.

[GordonSime]

Good timing on this one as they've asked me to try to deal with sound treatment at work. Food for thought, thanks

[MichaelSorrentino]

For better understanding room acoustics I recommend the Acoustics Insider channel and some GIK Acoustics videos. My main feedback is for a Bass trap that will be effective at absorbing bass frequencies, you need lots of absorbent material that is deep to absorb lower frequencies. You’ve got a grasp of the main concepts! To see if the bass trap worked or not, you would measure the frequency response of your room with a calibrated measurement microphone and some free software like REW, before and after.