Acoustic Sound Treatment For Home Recording Studio

By Author: Henry Janice
Total Articles: 134
Comment this article

Apparently the most vital aspect of a recording studio is recording your music. Nonetheless, an equally vital aspect is to record that music at a very high sonic quality. There are various tools in the arsenal of the audio engineers that help in this but the space that the recording studio is in can help or hinder this process even further.

The part of your house that you decide to put your studio is super vital. But will that space be contributing to audio recording? You have to consider what the space you are in will do the actual quality of the recording. There are two main input transducers that can be changed by the quality of the space that you are in, which are your ear drums and the microphone. Before you go purchasing much gear and soundproofing phone and machine sound enclosures, you have to consider two main things. One is where you are going to set it up and where you will be setting up your microphones?

You have to understand some basic physco- acoustic principles before you can commence searching ...
... for problem areas in your space.

Let us first consider a sin wave or a sound wave node. A node is a position in an air space where a couple or more sine waves of the same frequency occupy the same place and end up cancelling each other out. A sine wave is a negative and positive energy and when the same frequencies live in the same place at opposite polarities they negate each other, or else known as phase cancellation. This is a bad position to set up an input transducer when the aim is to create a top quality recording. Nodes exist to some extent in all areas of space where there is sound reflections.

Flutter echoes are another problem that is quite common in home recording studios due to the nature of the space used. Flutter echoes start when a sin wave is bounced between two parallel surfaces repeatedly until the energy of the sin wave is depleted. This obviously will destroy a recording as the sound source will keep on repeating itself over the diaphragm of the microphones resulting in multiple copies of the actual sound getting captured on the recording and creating many phase issues also.

After that you have to deal with 90 degree corners under the wall where your recording desk will be in. 90 degree corners create bass straps and you have to keep that bottom end from building up in your room. An accumulation of bass frequencies in your mixing area will create a false perception of bottom end in your mix. Even long acoustic blankets along the bass of the floor and wall intersection behind your recording desk can assist.