My Room Measurements Thread

[Orvillain]

Today, I did a big re-arrange of my room. I gutted it. Took absolutely everything out, then rebuilt it. This thread will function as my diary for what I found.

My Monitors are Yamaha HS8's.

My room is 3.15m wide, 5.14m long, and 2.46m tall. All measurements are done with a Behringer ECM8000 measurement mic, using Room EQ Wizard.

My room is adjoined to the side of my house, and was built in the 2010's. It is well insulated and does keep the heat inside. There is a ceiling Velux window as well as a side window. There's a kitchen area, but the worktop that poked out into the room, I already removed when we first moved in. I have a small bathroom which I just use for storage. I put shelves in there and most of the time the door is closed. So all measurements are done with the door closed.

I can't remove the kitchen or bathroom without seriously impacting on my house resale value, so this was never an option for me. I have to make do with what I've got - which, to be honest, I'm very fortunate to have.

There are three "valid" positions for the speakers in this room. One was to take up the kitchen floor space, but it turned out that actually... no... speaker ends up too close to the door. So it wasn't valid after all. The other two involve setting up along the longest walls, and then the last one involved setting up along the shortest wall where the window is.

I started off setup along the right most shortest wall. I measured the width of the room, found the central position, and determined this would be the centre of my listening position on the "Y" axis. I then used this to go 60cm either side to find the position for each speaker. This then gave me freedom to move along the "X" axis to experiment with measurements.

This is the left speaker, 25cm from the wall.

This is the right speaker, 25cm from the wall.

In comparison, here is the same thing, but setup along the longest wall on the bottom.

First, left:

Then right:

All of the above measurements are with the room completely empty, aside from the monitors, stands, and the laptop and audio interface sat on top of the kitchen counter.

I (with some help from @MirrorProfiles) determined that although there was a fair amount of excitement in the low region when setup along the shortest wall, it was overall more balanced and workable than setting up along the longest wall.

I did do measurements for 30/35/40/45/50/55/60cm from the shortest wall too. I'll focus on the left speaker as to not drown you in too many graphs.

30cm:

35cm:

40cm:

45cm:

50cm:

 

[Orvillain]

55cm:

60cm:

And here's a SPL sweep of all of these together:

Hopefully you can see, in the bass region there's a pretty solid dip between 70hz and 90hz-ish, and it gets worse the further from the wall the speaker is. This is (again, thanks @MirrorProfiles) the SBIR effect - speaker boundary interference response. You can see this effect is semi-mirrored around 120hz as well.

I decided to stick with 25cm from the wall. This allowed me enough room away from the wall where I wasn't exacerbating build up, and where I wasn't losing too much floor space.

Again, at this point, nothing is in the room.

Here is 25cm from the shortest wall, versus 25cm from the longest wall:

The long wall has these peaks that I didn't like, and a pretty wide and deep dip from 30hz up to about 60hz, then another dip between 80hz and 110hz. Overall, the red line is more balanced. Which again, is why I went short wall.

Now the window is a problem. Not really because of the room, but because of my neighbour. She's an old lady with hearing aids, and will complain about noise if I don't have the window covered up with panels. So I decided to position those first. Here is the comparison:

You can see that while the general response is the same, there are a few smoother areas when the window is covered with panels. The huge dip around 170hz is much improved. Here is the spectrogram with the windows covered:

And again, without:

It might be hard to see, but there are fewer room node peaks to contend with once the windows are covered, and the overall energy is much subdued.

Then came time to bring in my desk. It is a basic pine desk from IKEA. Nothing special.

We've tightened up a few more room nodes around 300-400hz just by putting the desk in and breaking up some reflections. It is true that desks can also cause reflections, but generally they're higher frequency and more tolerable to my ear. We have introduced a bit of a dip around 90hz however. But I was happy to go with this.

Up until this point, the measurement mic was 140-145cm away from the wall. This was a bit far back in terms of a listening position, so I went in to 110cm:

Then I added my side panels to handle the first reflections:

You can see, from 200hz up we have a pretty controlled room going on.

 

[Orvillain]

By this point, quite a few hours had gone by, and I'd had enough. I put all my stuff back into the room and did one final measurement. Here is the left speaker:

And here is the right speaker:

There's definitely more I can do. I'm going to put two panels above the desk and listening position to break up some of the reflections and standing waves there. I'll also look at adding a rug to the kitchen area, and maybe mounting a panel on the door. It depends really. Not a lot I can achieve with the kitchen bit.

I definitely have too much stuff to fit into this room. Especially the electronic drumkit - it takes up a butt ton of space!!

But yes... where I started versus where I finished, in terms of just the frequency response:

 

[Orvillain]

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[Orvillain]

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[Orvillain]

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[Orvillain]

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[Orvillain]

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[MirrorProfiles]

It is well insulted

I can believe that

 

[TSJMajesty]

I can believe that

Hahaha! I didn't even catch that!

 

[nicolasrivera]

Why are you meassuring speakers with out any acoustic treatment in the walls/cealling?

 

[Orvillain]

Why are you meassuring speakers with out any acoustic treatment in the walls/cealling?

How are you going to know what to do with your acoustic treatment and how much of it you need, without getting a baseline measurement of your room and speakers?

 

[MirrorProfiles]

Why are you meassuring speakers with out any acoustic treatment in the walls/cealling?

First you need to identify the positions in the room where the modes are causing the least issues. Putting panels up doesn’t really help to do that, just means more work to move them wherever you end up positioning things.

And he’s measuring the response of the room, once you have an idea of how the room is behaving you can then approach the treatment accordingly. How can you position acoustic treatment if you don’t know where the speakers are going yet, and if you don’t know what the room is doing?

 

[nicolasrivera]

Yes, sorry...my mind was elsewhere thingking this was a construction from the ground up.

 

[FuzzyAce]

How can you position acoustic treatment if you don’t know where the speakers are going yet, and if you don’t know what the room is doing?

I measure my room a few different ways:

 

[SillyOctpuss]

I love threads like this.

 

[la szum]

Great stuff, Orv!

 

[la szum]

I struggle with my E-kit, too. I need it. But damn it is a huge PITA with
how much space it takes up---like actual drummers do in real life on
stages all the time.

 

[SillyOctpuss]

I struggle with my E-kit, too. I need it. But damn it is a huge PITA with
how much space it takes up---like actual drummers do in real life on
stages all the time.

My sister bought an E kit a few years ago to learn to play but never stuck with it. I want to borrow it but would probably have to keep putting them up and down everytime I wanted to play and don't think I can be bothered. They just take up too much room that I need for other stuff.

 

[Orvillain]

My sister

Is she fit?