- use REW (Room EQ Wizard, free) to take several measurements in your room, in the listening area(s)
- REW will average them and generate an inverse EQ curve to compensate
- you can export the parametric EQ settings and use them anywhere that supports parameteric EQ such as EqualizerAPO (windows, free) or CoreAudio parametric EQ units (Mac, free) or in a standalone hardware device like the MiniDSP (~$100 IIRC)
you can always tweak the parametric EQ curve to suit your personal taste, like some extra bass or extra treble to compensate for aging ears (like mine)
Good starting tip, but readers should be aware that you can only help with frequency domain issues here.
The thing that might break your acoustics might more often be time-domain issues. No EQ on earth will get rid of the reverb in an empty warehouse. The same is true on a smaller scale in your place. And because it is smaller you will have specific frequencies (room modes) ringing out longer or shorter at your listening position. These are issues you can only fix with actual physical alteration of the space by putting in more stuff and adding absorbers, diffusors and such.
So EQs can help, but you should also think about the actual surfaces of the room itself.
Forgive me! It's a broad topic, and one must always choose what to cover in a short internet post.
In short I think speaker selection and placement are about an order of magnitude or two more important than everything else. If those are the only two things you pay attention to and don't drastically screw the rest up, you'll have a nice sounding system.
Room correction (which is also speaker correction) is probably the next most important thing, although well into optional territory IMO.
There's lots more that I fuss over, but I don't want people believing that they need a lot of elaborate rituals and room alterations to achieve good sound. It's not true, it's counterproductive, and scares people away from this really fun hobby. =)
No EQ on earth will get rid of the reverb in an
empty warehouse. [...]
So EQs can help, but you should also think
about the actual surfaces of the room itself.
You're completely correct, but I don't emphasize room issues too much for beginners. Why? In my experience, most residential rooms are actually pretty acoustically decent for a few reasons.
1. They tend to be filled with comfy padded furniture, bookshelves, etc. which do a nice job of breaking up high and mid frequency reflections.
2. The brain already performs a lot of "room correction" and it's particularly good at performing it in familiar spaces like our own homes.
3. Most people's home systems (especially those of beginners) aren't putting out the kind of massive low frequency output that's really troublesome to tame.
Of course there is always going to be a room mode or three, usually with a prominent one somewhere in the midbass range.
https://holoplot.com/ give a two dimensional array. The hangs of speakers that you see at most concerts are a line array, and within each of them will be an array of transducers that control the pattern of the individual cabinet (eg cardioid subs. You'll also quite see digitally steered columns in a lot of spaces these days too. None of these remove the reverb, but they do provide control over where energy is directed to minimise it occurring in the first place.
Neat! "All" you need on top of that for reverb cancellation is for the 2D array to be a surface enclosing the region of interest and for the way it itself mechanically interferes with the sound to be predictable. If you're a bit careful with where you send the sound then perhaps the top/bottom exits wouldn't matter too much.
REW is an excellent piece of software. You may be able to make some improvements for a single listing positioning, but just a heads up that you can't EQ away room level issues.
Right, REW is not a cure-all. Speaker selection and placement are orders of magnitude more important than anything else.
After that comes room issues. Surprisingly I think most residential rooms are decent, acoustically, because they tend to be filled with padded furniture and such and aren't overly reflective in obnoxious ways. Also most people aren't running massive subwoofers and if they are, they generally know what they're getting into. With all that said, I think REW is great for cleaning up the rest.
If all people did was pay attention to speaker selection and placement, I think most people would wind up with a very good listening situation.
And if all people did was pay attention to speaker selection and placement and clean up the remaining issues with REW, I think most people would wind up with a great listening experience.
Good luck! Corporate meeting rooms tend to be a bit of a worst case scenario for sound.
The absolute worst case scenario for sound is an empty rectangular (or cube) shaped room with bare walls and most corporate meeting rooms come pretty close to this.
Yeah, foam deadening has gone a long way for us to reduce echo and other issues over Zoom, along with many directional mics condensed into a mixer. I am a bit of a stickler with sound quality over conference calls, so anything to improve it is very interesting to me.
- get a calibrated mic
- use REW (Room EQ Wizard, free) to take several measurements in your room, in the listening area(s)
- REW will average them and generate an inverse EQ curve to compensate
- you can export the parametric EQ settings and use them anywhere that supports parameteric EQ such as EqualizerAPO (windows, free) or CoreAudio parametric EQ units (Mac, free) or in a standalone hardware device like the MiniDSP (~$100 IIRC)
you can always tweak the parametric EQ curve to suit your personal taste, like some extra bass or extra treble to compensate for aging ears (like mine)
have fun and good luck!