2010 October 17

With growing confidence that I will be remaining in my current residence for the next year or so, it has become more important to acoustically treat the living space for production needs and for well-being too. The current troublesome sources are:
1. Down-stairs refrigeration motor, which is on for intervals of 10 minutes on – 5 minutes off continuously. At the neighbours wall, this noise generator produces approximately 20 dBC above ambient, and so is clearly a terrible nuisance.
2. Window facing the main street: Low frequency disturbances from traffic (buses, inconsiderately noise amplified personal motor vehicles, etc) are transmitted primarily through the single pane window, but also through the floor and the ceiling (not much acoustic insulation in these cavities.

As a positive, the residence is double brick so this provides some protection.

Window cavities are poorly sealed (rotten wooden window sliders); gas vent (6 in main living area) along with two small windows provide more openings for nasty sounds.

The front door is also a fairly poor acoustic seal, and lets through much of the disturbance from the down-stairs refrigeration noise generator.

Oh, and not to mention proximity to an international airport and situation in the flight path.

The above culminating in a quite poor place for working on audio, wouldn’t you say?

Besides sound isolation concerns, of which the above show that there are many, the quality of the internal acoustics (room reflections, modes) have been a cause of concern too. The plots

show the room’s (and to a much less/insignificant extent the monitor’s and measurement microphone’s response) frequency response. The sound source was band-limited to above about 50 Hz. The following refers to the right channel measurement: there is an alarming local minimum of -18 dB at 83 Hz, which makes mixing bass and drums extremely difficult over the loudspeakers. We also see a -8dB dip at 143 Hz, and overall a very uneven response all the way up the audible range, including a big dip at 2.5 kHz, and high eq shelf attenuation and troughs above 5 kHz. Overall, a very uneven mixing environment, and one in which you would expect to have a difficult time creating translatable mixes.

So the quest now is to build broadband bass traps to tame this difficult internal environment. Purchasing these from retailers is prohibitively expensive, so the challenge is to source materials and construct said traps on a budget and with effectiveness. A difficult challenge, but one which I want to get done very quickly, and to get on to the music producing.

Oh and did I mention vocal booth? Eeep another pet peeve. At present, due to all of the acoustic disturbances, recording any acoustic source is troubled with high background noise levels. A makeshift vocal booth has been setup, but this provides merely reflection control rather than any real acoustic isolation.

More updates to come as materials come to hand.

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~ by thegrandcuckoo on October 19, 2010.