Q&A of April the 20th - Room Acoustics

[Anonymous]

Referencing to the Q&A of April the 20th, specifically https://youtu.be/kHBK8jO7UEg?t=892

A century ago when engineers started to realize that acoustics are important and when the 31 bands graphic EQ's came on the market, they already figured out that this does not work.

I did the experiment myself years ago; sending pink noise through a 31 band graphic EQ to a monitor, an expensive measurement microphone on the listening spot and feeding the mic output signal into a frequency analyzer. After an hour or two tweaking the pink noise, I ended up with a damn flat sounding system. I played my favorite reference CD and it sounded horrible! So, how is that possible?

The short answer is that room acoustics is a very complex matter. What you want to achieve with room treatment is that the reverb decay of a room is the same on every frequency in the human hearing spectrum, typically somewhere around 40 - 80ms. It is also expressed in “RT60” which is defined as the time taken for a sound to fall to 60 dB below its original intensity.

An EQ does not work that way. You try to solve a problem that is time-related with an instrument that is frequency related. If you have very good, relative flat sounding monitors in a room with bad acoustics, you still have a set of good monitors. If you place an equalizer in the monitor chain and you draw a Himalaya landscape with the EQ, you end up with bad sounding monitors in a room with bad acoustics. You made it worse than it already was!

I do not give much credit to any company that claims to have such kind of a frequency-based solution in order to correct room acoustics. It does not matter how big the company is or how many Ph.D. scientists they work with. You just cannot change nature & physics. For me, they all fall under the same denominator: BS

Be warned; do not let you fool yourself with voodoo talks, smart people that use smart words and fairy dust. It just does not work that way. If you want to treat your room acoustics, then treat your room acoustics. If you are a handy person, it does not cost you more money than a good 31 band EQ anyway.

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