Acoustic treatment for my mixing room?

[Derernn]

My home studio is situated in my garage. The garage door has gone and been bricked up. All the walls are treated with loft insulation and Plaster board. It's the length of about 1 car and a quarter with my mixing console done one end. On the ceiling above and infront of the mix position I have acoustic foam tiles. Now I always think my mixes have far to much bass in so I turn the bass down eg Bass GTR then when I play my mixes in the car it's lacking bass. Could anyone advice on how and where to put the traps and other acoustic treatment

Cheers

[Embenny]

For small rooms, bass trapping is by far the biggest issue. Acoustic foam is generally terrible stuff, and is totally counterproductive in this kind of environment. It absorbs high frequencies and upper midrange and leaves even more bass dominance in the room than your size is forcing you to deal with. To be honest, I'd be inclined to remove it all and focus on bass traps. Many bass traps are, in fact, broadband absorbers anyway, unless they've got reflective membranes on the front of them to reject high frequencies, so you'll probably get as much mid and high absorption as you could want (possibly too much, for that size room) with the traps alone.

How wide and tall is your room? Depending on the shape, the highest-yield location in a small room is typically the wall-ceiling interface, followed by the wall-wall corners. There's a nice primer on bass traps over at arqen

You can analyze your actual room with tools like Room EQ Wizard to figure out what you're dealing with.

Beware that bass traps are big. They need to be. They have to be spaced off the wall in order to really reach down to the low frequencies, which is a challenge in an already-small room, but it's the only way. You can easily build your own out of fiberglass or rockwool , and there are commercial products available if you have more money than power tools.

[eggwheat]

Bass trapping on your back wall..loads of it...like 2ft thick..prob got a ton of 80hz or something bouncing back at you from that wall to the position your mixing from..

Use something like FuzzMeasure to analyse..or just run some test tone from your speakers at various frequencies and walk around the room to see where the nodes and nulls are.

Trapping wise I love diy tube traps..but they are a pain to find the materials for if you are in the UK.

Look on you tube, forums like gearslutz etc..there is a wealth of info on this subject...some of it nonsense unfortunately!

[AlumNeck]

No need to really do that as much anymore if you want to or are willing to run room correction. That said it always helps to acoustically treat and for best results you will want to do both. I suggest keep it simple I would catch any first reflections on walls and ceilings with something that looks cool and absorbs and or deflects evenly as others have pointed out the foam is not the best solution ( though can be done right). Best results will come from bass trapping in the corners and room correction. Remember the two most important things about a studio sound. #1 you like how it sounds #2 you know how it translates to other systems. Most residential rooms have a boom or a suck out in the mid 60-70 hrz range, usually a boom.

[øøøøøøø]

Hard to say for sure without inspecting the space, but yes, it’s most likely that you need lots of bass trapping.

In addition to the raw cubic feet alluded to above, you can make your bass trapping more efficient by creating mechanical impedance mismatches in the absorbing materials. Since you have limited space, this could be to your advantage. The goal here is to reduce energy, and one of the best ways to do that is to create a loss of efficiency.

Very often this will get you more loss of energy per cubic foot, as you’ve deliberately created an inefficient system of several layers with mismatched resistance to flow. You can then trap front corners as well, if you want, and/or hang rigid fiberglass clouds.

Before any of this, make sure you don’t have things ringing... hollow walls with thin Sheetrock acting as diaphragms, etc. Really the best thing to do would be to bring someone good in to consult.

My preference is not to lean too much on room correction, as you won’t always be in the sweet spot 100% of the time. Make your room the best it can be first.

[Larry Mal]

Good information here, everyone, and I'll be referring to it when I undergo a similar project in the hopefully near future.