Priorities In The Post Production Room
Regardless of whether you’re an audio professional or a sound engineer working at home or in the most expensive studio, all your equipment will be useless if you don’t pay special attention to your priorities. Audio professionals and sound engineers require a perfectly balanced work environment so they can listen to their work in an objective way, which of course is no less than vital for their decision-making process.
How Can Audio Professionals Build An Acoustic Room?
This the first thing sound engineers and audio professionals need to consider when venturing into building their studio — this is far more important than even the post-production room itself, as some issues cannot be simply solved by resorting to room treatment alone. So what do you need to consider?
Room Dimensions
Many things have been said about the ideal room dimensions for an acoustic room; however, there seems to be a certain degree of consensus regarding one specific subject: do not use a square room for professional audio work.
Squares often are perhaps the worst choice for an acoustic room, as it increases the chances of room mode resonance happening — a phenomenon where some audio frequencies are louder than others. When choosing the right dimensions, build a room according to Bolt’s ratio for room modes, or better, get a rectangular room.
Wall Material
First things first: are the left and right walls made of different materials? This can be your first hurdle. If that’s the case, it would mean that the sound reflected on these walls will be entirely different, as not all materials absorb the same frequencies. This will highly affect the way how you use equalization and panning. Unless you are giving thought to covering all the walls with the same material, make sure your acoustic room uses the same materials for sidewalls.
Sound Isolation
Of course, this is pretty much self-explanatory: you can’t work in a room if there’s a huge amount of noise outside or machines that produce humming noise. Do your best to eliminate all sources of unwanted noise and further work on your isolation if necessary.
What About Speaker Placement?
For all sound engineers and audio professionals, listening is their top priority, which is why, of course, speaker placement is no less than pivotal. Bad placement can definitely undermine the quality of your work. So, where should speakers go?
First, make sure that the speakers are at one end of the length of your room if your room has a rectangular shape — it’s key to ensure as much distance as possible from the speaker to the back wall to avoid and prevent unwanted reflections from affecting where you will be sitting.
Also, make sure you don’t place your speakers against the wall, as this will result in reflection and phase cancellation issues once the sound reaches you. It is advisable to leave some distance between the speakers and the front wall; however, pay special attention to it and make sure they are not of the multiple, as it will help you reduce the chances of resonance issues from happening. Pro tip: when it comes to finding out the best place to be seated, as a sound engineer you should sit at about 38% of the total length of the room from the front wall.
As for the distance between speakers, as well as the distance between each speaker and your head, the resulting form should be an equilateral triangle — all distances and lengths should be the same.
Reflections
Speakers are supposed to provide a true and accurate representation of your work as a sound engineer or audio professional. You certainly have done your best to ensure that all your equipment is the best place possible; however, and as mentioned before, without proper acoustic treatment, the resulting sound might end up being affected in several ways by early reflections.
Early reflections are most commonly known for being those first few bounces of sound waves after the sound goes through the speakers and makes it to your ears. Since those copies of the original soundtrack are not in phase, they result in the what audio professionals call the comb-filtering effect — an effect where parts of the sound get canceled out before you can hear them, which means that there are some frequencies that cannot be heard accurately.
To provide a solution to this, as an audio professional you need to put absorbers on the wall to prevent the reflections from happening, which would help you make sure that you only hear the sound coming from the speakers and not your walls.
The aforementioned pieces of advice are mostly related to the physical space and equipment placement, which of course have a direct impact on the quality of your work. In order for your work to be labeled as professional, you need a proper space, and of course, understand the fundamentals of sound. Otherwise, your resulting work will be faulty.
