Your room dimensions are just about as bad as they can get. Do you make music at home? Is it possible to swap rooms, so something else gets the horrible equal dimensions. x*x*½x. is trully a no go. You will have exessive boosts and cuts through out the frequency range. The standing waves you get will be on the same frequencies in all the basic diretions: left/right, front/back and floor/cealing. Personally, if I had your budget, and I had no choice but to use that room, I would spend some good effort on the room - especially research. You've really got to know, what you are doing in there. Buying 1000£ of acoustic "miracle" stuff is no guaranty things will turn out good. I am not an expert in acoustics, but on the other hand you will get a lot of advice from people knowing far less than me, when you start your research. Please spend the time to become able to distinguish carismatic writers who may be wannabee experts from the true capacities. My personal bet would actually be something like physically changing the dimensions of the room. You could make one wall shorter by adding a huge pile of mineral wool and putting a fancy curtain in front of it for better looks. Leaving 2 feet of air behind piles of 1.3 feet wide mineral wool will shrink you room to 5*4 meters. Then you at least only have to directions helping each other (the 5 meter and the 2.5 meter). A nice thing about adding such a pile of mineral wool is, that you can make it not go all the way, and then you can make an opening wide enough to pass sideways. Behind the pile, you can put up your PC - this will diminish the noise from it (sorry - I forgot you allready spend a good deal of dough on a quiet PC, but for others in the same situation, the trick is still valid). The treated room could look something like this:
Code: Select all
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|________________________ __|
| S S |
| |
| |
| Y |
| |
| |
| |
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| = wall
- = wall
_ = mineral wool "wall"
S = Speaker
Y = You
(the suggested place for your PC was behind the mineral wool behind the right speaker)
The basic thing is to make the room NOT square (like 5*5) or "multiples" (like 5*2½)
In my proposed set-up you are still kind of in the middle of the room. I don't know, if this is a problem.
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About speaker types
You have heard about near fields. Basically people talk about three types of monitors: Near field, Mid field and Far field. The difference is in what distance you should idealy be in from the speakers. Near field are most always 2-way constructions. They need to have the drivers very close to eachother, so you don't experience too much faze shift when moving your head. As you get farther away from speakers, it matters less how close the drivers are - because the angle between them, from your ears, will be smaller due to the increased distance to you. Near filed speakers often have less extended bass than the other speakers. Far field speakers will often have the most extended bass. They will also need the biggest room. If you put speakers with huge bassextension in a small room, you will get too much bass, because the room will "amplify" the low frequencies below a certain point.
You want good bass. The problem is, that you room is very "dishonnest" - especially in the bass range (but you problems will extend pretty high up in the frequency range). There is NO speaker which will sound honnest in your room as it is now. I am sorry to say, but that is the (99% sure) fact. However, if you don't want to modify (pun: dis-muddyfy) your room, or if you don't want to do it very drastically, you may still have one option. I don't know too much about this, but it may be the right thing for you. There is something called "critical distance" (the word may be different in English - I just translated it from a Danish book). When you are within critical distance, the room will have less effect on your perception of the sound. The less vibrant your room is, the bigger will the "border" of the critical distance be. It may be, that you will be able to get along if you stay within dritical distance. This does indeed mean, that you will need to use near field monitoring in you not-too-big room (I'd love to actually have 25m2 just for music though).
Find a free test tool to run frequency sweeps thru your speakers. If you find that sertain frequncies are heavily emphasized, it may be your speaker - but could definnitely also be your room. If the critical frequencies arive at multiples of each other (like 100Hz, 200Hz, 300Hz, 400Hz, ...) then you have a room problem. You may not be able to notice the fundamental bad frequency, so it may look like 200, 300, 400. Just as there are frequencies being bosoted, there will be frequencies being canceled too - these will even themselves out in your room, so they sound weaker, than they actually are. I believe Celmo made such a tool once. Othervice programs like WinISD have sweep tool. WinISD is a free program for calculating speaker's bass responses in various speaker cabinets.
Immanuel (I know, that I am mostly found in the off-topics section. I read most of the board though, and when I do write it often does get pretty longwinded (one reason I do not write too many serious posts
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