Picture the scene in your studio. You are sitting at your mixing console, DAW or control surface, right between your loudspeakers at mix position. The acoustics of your room are relatively well controlled. Although there are first, second and third order sound reflections from around the room coming at you, they are not too offensive and don’t distract you from the direct sound of the monitors. But something else is bothering you. Somehow things don’t sound quite right. What could the problem be? Well, the problem could be that you are hearing ‘echoes’ that arrive before the direct sound from the monitors. All monitors radiate sound from their cabinets. Try putting your ear up against the rear of a loudspeaker cabinet and you will see exactly what I mean. Generally it sounds pretty poor. When this sound gets into the air, it definitely does degrade the sound of the loudspeaker. Also the sound from the cabinet can get into the speakers’ supports. And from there it can distribute itself all around the walls, ceiling and floor of the room. And all of those surfaces can radiate or vibrate that sound at you. Perhaps you may think it’s just like another reflection then and may not be too much of a problem. But there is a problem. And that is that sound travels faster through solids than it does through air. So sound from the cabinet that is pretty poor, is arriving at your ears sooner than the direct sound from the speakers drive units. This is greatly confusing to you when recording or mixing and you are trying to capture the best sound possible. The answer is somewhat simple and that is to decouple the loudspeaker cabinets physically from the room. There are all kinds of decoupling devices from pro audio dealers and my experience has been anything small such as foam wedges won’t really solve the problem. Ideally what you would need would be a heavy slab of material to stand each loudspeaker on. Underneath the slab would be a layer of resilient material. The heavy slab would be difficult for the cabinet to vibrate, so not much energy would get through. And the slab is decoupled from the room by the resilient layer. I know this may not work for everyone’s studio because of such limitations such as physical space or budget, but there are quite a few solutions on the internet and from several manufactures that have a remedy to this problem. I have come up with one solution of my own just by using simple products found at your local hardware store. I’m not suggesting you spend a lot of time worrying about this, because usually there are far worse acoustic problems to deal with especially in the home studio environment. But it is a real problem that won’t go away, and if you want your studio to be perfect, you should definitely look into this issue.
On my next Tech Tips article, I will explain how to improve speaker performance in your studio by at least fifty percent by just using a few household items.
Ron Leeper