Room Acoustics for Recording Studios

Back in the day, room acoustics for recording studios used to be handled by a “live end, dead end” design. In truth, there are a lot of reasons why this still works and why a lot of experienced room designers still adopt this method. Live end, dead end is where the front of the room is pretty much “dead”. Sound absorption materials are implemented to ensure that your ears are only receiving (from the speakers, anyway) the initial point source of the sound. The rear of the room, however, utilizes a design which includes diffusion to create a live space while breaking up any standing waves or major modal issues.

The only problem with live end, dead end room design is that it’s a tad unpredictable. The models for these rooms are almost impossible to calculate without extremely sophisticated systems and they don’t lend themselves to good predictability when rooms widths and depths need to be changed from studio to studio.

[top-seller category_id=’66’ product_count=’4′ title=’Popular Room Acoustics Products’]

Rooms Acoustics for Recording Studios vs. Home Theater

Room acoustics for recording studios differs from theater or home theater acoustics in several ways. The biggest way in which acoustics for recording studios differ is the goal. A recording studio really only needs one good seat—that of the engineer. It’s also largely a near-field scenario, with a high concern of even frequency response and achieving a wide soundstage. But when you’re dealing with a sing;e listening position—and not an entire movie theater or even a home theater space—you save a lot of headaches. You can better deal with some unpredictability and general rules make it a lot further than they do in a space where you’re attempting to bring a wider space into audio nirvana.

Another way in which rooms acoustics for recording studios differ from the home theater is that you are often dealing with a much different mix. Recording studios are often using near full-range speakers and rarely incorporate subwoofers into the room. There’s good reason for this as recording studios (we’re talking about music studios here in case you’re wondering) are mixing and mastering for the two-channel consumer. They just are. The simple fact is that most people who listen to music are doing so on a stereo system as opposed to a 2.1 setup. That natters since the recording studio is where you are mixing the very music that needs to sound good on those systems. Calibrating and keeping a stereo system properly configured is infinitely easier than introducing a subwoofer, whose incorrect level settings could potentially destroyed a piece of music.

Modern Room Acoustics for Recording Studios

As room acoustics began to be studied to a much larger extent in the past decade or so, patterns began to emerge. Organizations like THX have been aware for quite some time as to the issues with low frequency modes and concerns for predicting low frequency response across a variety of listening positions. In the recording studio, it began to become very clear that modes and acoustics could be very accurately predicted in a rectangular space. This led to advanced acoustics sciences which could treat rooms with a modicum of predictability in the results.

And if you can truly accurately predict the results of your room acoustic treatments before placing them in a room—and then measure and confirm—you’re going to look like Scotty from the Enterprise (a miracle worker and a genius).

Room acoustics for recording studios are taking modern science and applying it to a more traditional design which can yield huge benefits. Some studios, for example, have false walls that allow bass waves to bass through and get collected by well-placed traps. The “frame” of the room (its true acoustical outer boundaries) are rectangular in nature—but you’d never know this from within the studio.

Recording Studios in the Home

Not only has the trend towards new calculated methods for room acoustics infiltrated the professional space, as more and more studios are moving into the home, these techniques are following there as well. It’s helping provide a new level of achievement and sound quality from these home recording studios that was never before possible. We’re not sure if it’s these techniques that precipitated the migration to home studios, or vice versa, but in either case the trend doesn’t seem to be letting up.

Conclusion

These are just some of the ways in which advancements in room acoustics for recording studios are changing the way things are done. And they are changing things for the better.

Of course the modern trend towards overly-compressed, near-distorted music doesn’t help, but that’s not the fault of the room or its designers.