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Where to start with correcting my room

Old Shatterhand said:
The matter of fact what rugs do acoustically isn't changed, rugs do only absorb some HF and if you make use of them to much, like showed in your pic, you will have dull HF and still (too) lively MF and BF.;)
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That’s not my room. It’s a demo room in a high end hifi shop in Seattle!
 
In terms of REW, I have been trying to grapple with this software more for fun than anything. Please be aware its unfathomable, you literally need a degree in audio engineering and java to have half a chance with it. User friendly it ain't. But then even if you get somewhere then you have to decipher the output, user friendly it ain't.
 
garyi said:
In terms of REW, I have been trying to grapple with this software more for fun than anything. Please be aware its unfathomable, you literally need a degree in audio engineering and java to have half a chance with it. User friendly it ain't. But then even if you get somewhere then you have to decipher the output, user friendly it ain't.
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That's good to know! Is there any other software that is more user friendly? I'd rather pay for software that is user friendly.

And has anyone got a microphone they'd like to sell?
 
The only other one I have seen is hardware based, cannot thin of its name.

There was also a cool plugin in for foobar back in the day, might still be there, but so far as I can tell it only worked through foobar.

I'm sure someone will tell me its just me on REW, but quite honestly I dont have enough hours in my life to learn the 8 million buttons.
 
garyi said:
The only other one I have seen is hardware based, cannot thin of its name.

There was also a cool plugin in for foobar back in the day, might still be there, but so far as I can tell it only worked through foobar.

I'm sure someone will tell me its just me on REW, but quite honestly I dont have enough hours in my life to learn the 8 million buttons.
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In my simplistic mind I'd just like to run a test tone, and see if any frequencies are being sucked out or amplified (caused by open fire place, fluttery corners, ringing radiators etc). I can then try moving furniture a bit, adding rugs etc. As you say I don't want to spend hours just learning how to use it.
 
I found thinking out of the box with Giks positioning can be very beneficial. For example moving 2 corner traps into
2nd reflection point just in front of my listening area brought an instant " thats it" moment. Big Dm 2 in a narrow
difficult room.
 
garyi said:
In terms of REW, I have been trying to grapple with this software more for fun than anything. Please be aware its unfathomable, you literally need a degree in audio engineering and java to have half a chance with it. User friendly it ain't. But then even if you get somewhere then you have to decipher the output, user friendly it ain't.
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I'd like to somewhat challenge that, as a non-technical person, I found it pretty easy to use.

I have a USB UMIK-1 into a laptop (with calibration file), using a Behringer UCA-202 for the RCA out into my amplifier.

Set the test level, amount of sweeps and then away you go.

At the very least, you will get a frequency response graph first, something like below, has two plots as I had measured the left and then the right speaker:


Tannoy @ Listening (R + L) by Robert Seymour, on Flickr

Some of the other plots are a bit more difficult to interpret straight away, such as the RT60, which I found more useful for showing the effects of room treatment


XO2 - RT60 by Robert Seymour, on Flickr

I've never really found much use for the Impulse plot, or waterfall/spectogram plots.
 
Neil P said:
In my simplistic mind I'd just like to run a test tone, and see if any frequencies are being sucked out or amplified (caused by open fire place, fluttery corners, ringing radiators etc). I can then try moving furniture a bit, adding rugs etc. As you say I don't want to spend hours just learning how to use it.
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Acoustic won't work that easy. IMO there are two solutions, place the stuff in your room and listen, if you don't like it, shift the stuff, listen again, or measure the room, buy the right acoustic treatment stuff and get much better results.
 
@Hoopsontoast : I found REW more complicated than Audionet Carma. Waterfall plots are more precise and also show deeper frequencies than the 2D RT 60 graph. BTW: 10dB scale is way to coarse IMO. With the response chart you can see the influence of furniture, the refections of hard surfaces like a shelf or cupboard causes peaks
 
I followed the excellent instructions on roon for creating convolution filters. And whilst they are excellent they don't actually explain what you are doing only how to do it. The last steps where it is suggested to tweak until you are happy with the result is where I loose it, I don't know how to do that or what it is that I am tweaking. Suffice to say when applied the sound was ultra weird, plus some how I had like 150k taps so even my 32 core server was falling over trying to process.

I gave up somewhat miffed I paid out for a umik lol.
 
Carpet the floor.
Listening seat away from the rear wall.
Absorption panels from the likes of GIK definitely at the 1st & also preferably the 2nd reflection points.
Bass traps in the corners.
Listen to the system for a good while, really get a firm idea of what you like/ dislike.
Then fine tune from there. The basics of the 1st & 2nd reflection points & bass trapping the corners will nearly always be massively beneficial. You may want to treat more, with ceiling panels, or adding absorption or diffusion, maybe on the rear wall for instance, or you may decide that’s enough.
Taking it to the next level will require a bit more tech knowledge to interpret waterfall graphs, in room responses etc.
 
It's the uneven bass response associated with the room modes that is the primary target of room correction. Higher frequency response (slap echo, reflection points etc) can mostly be taken care of with normal decor.

Unless you listen in a broom cupboard, my understanding is that the most important room modes occur at a lower frequency than that covered by most broadband acoustic absorbers. The GIK 244 for example only goes down to 80Hz. So most folks may well need tuned membrane type trapping tailored to specific problem frequency(s) if they are going to use passive treatments rather than DSP.

Thus my approach is just to play a few tracks with good bass and walk around the room. I'm yet to notice booming and suckout, so have gone no further with measurements etc.

Do correct me if I'm wrong. Perhaps I'm missing out on all the fun and I just need bigger speakers, played louder... ;-)
 
If you want DSP that "does it all for you with minimum user effort required" then something like DiracLive is worth considering. All you need is the competence to position the microphone correctly for the sweeps it performs around the listening position, it then implements what it decides to be the necessary corrections automagically.

However, if you want to actually gain some insight into your room's acoustics then it's worth taking the time to at least learn the basics with REW. I've been using it since 2013 and still don't understand all of its features, but the basics can be picked up fairly quickly. An RTA will give you enough info to be able to optimise the position of your loudspeakers and listening position to obtain the smoothest low frequency response, and an RT60/Waterfall will allow you to measure the reduction in echo/reverberation as you add more absorbing furniture to the room. This is likely all the info you'll need.
 
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