Dok's guide to monitor placement in your home recording studio NOW W/Pt. 2: SUBWOOFERS

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Re: Dok's guide to monitor placement in your home recording studio

Post by BTL » Fri Apr 08, 2022 3:53 pm

My monitor speakers are about 36" apart and centered about 36" off the side wall and the drivers are about 12" off the back wall. It looks like I'm going to have a pretty big dip around 100Hz (~G2), at least on the side to side axis. Am I interpreting that correctly?

Interestingly, I hear that note equally well in my current listening position as well as on headphones , but that's just a single piano note from YouTube. I'm using Polk Audio RTi4s, and guitars sound more forward in my Presonus HD7 headphones.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zrnbpbes3Cw

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Re: Dok's guide to monitor placement in your home recording studio

Post by Dok » Fri Apr 08, 2022 5:44 pm

BeeTL wrote:
Fri Apr 08, 2022 3:53 pm
My monitor speakers are about 36" apart and centered about 36" off the side wall and the drivers are about 12" off the back wall. It looks like I'm going to have a pretty big dip around 100Hz (~G2), at least on the side to side axis. Am I interpreting that correctly?

Interestingly, I hear that note equally well in my current listening position as well as on headphones , but that's just a single piano note from YouTube. I'm using Polk Audio RTi4s, and guitars sound more forward in my Presonus HD7 headphones.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zrnbpbes3Cw

Image
36" from your side wall, according to your axial mode plot puts the speakers right in that null, but not your listening position, wherever that may be. I'm having trouble though because if your room is 11'8" wide (or 140 inches), your speakers can't both be 36" from the side wall and also 36" apart. 36 + 36 is 72, which is actually around the halfway point. If you have the center of your speakers both 36" away from the side walls, that should mean that there is about 68" between the center points of the two speakers, because they'd each be 34" from the very center of your room. Right? 140-36-36=68.
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Re: Dok's guide to monitor placement in your home recording studio

Post by BTL » Fri Apr 08, 2022 7:18 pm

OK, yes…the listening position is 36” from the right side wall and 36” from the front wall, centered between the speakers. The right speaker is 18” from the right wall and the left speaker is 54” from the right wall. The center of the speaker baffle is 12” off the front wall.
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Re: Dok's guide to monitor placement in your home recording studio

Post by Dok » Fri Apr 08, 2022 7:31 pm

BeeTL wrote:
Fri Apr 08, 2022 7:18 pm
OK, yes…the listening position is 36” from the right side wall and 36” from the front wall, centered between the speakers. The right speaker is 18” from the right wall and the left speaker is 54” from the right wall. The center of the speaker baffle is 12” off the front wall.
so you're not centered in the room with respect to left and right? that's the most important component of any listening system - you have to have L and R symmetry if you're going to be able to treat your room acoustically and have proper phase relationships and equal reflections.
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Re: Dok's guide to monitor placement in your home recording studio

Post by Dok » Fri Apr 08, 2022 7:47 pm

Focusing on just L to R, here's what I think you described:

Image

When it should be more like this:

Image

Your goal is to get those speakers out of those deep valleys and in a spot that's least affected by them, you know what I'm saying? Unfortunately you can't do much about the nulls in the center listening position in this manner, but that's what the subwoofer(s) end up being for. 8)
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Re: Dok's guide to monitor placement in your home recording studio NOW W/Pt. 2!!

Post by Dok » Fri Apr 08, 2022 9:20 pm

Hi again.

Okay so you've read and re-read the first post and you've set your speakers and listening position so that in conjunction with our axial mode calculator,

1. Your speakers are arranged symmetrically in relation to the L and R walls with you sitting directly in the center of the room with respect to your room's width dimension.

2. The speakers are not placed in one of the big giant nulls predicted by the axial mode calculator, either L to R or front to back

3. Your listening position and your speakers form an equilateral triangle - if they're 60" apart then that's the base of your triangle, and the other two sides are also 60" forming an apex behind where your head is when sitting in your chair.

Great job! You've done a ton of the work and you've worked with the sort of physical limitations that are present in every rectangular room so that at least you are giving yourself a decent chance of not being totally stymied by acoustical fuckwithery. But what now?

RULE #4. YOU ARE GOING TO NEED AT LEAST ONE SUBWOOFER, TWO ARE EVEN BETTER

Yeah that's right. Unless you happen to have somehow ended up with the most perfect room geometry that defies pretty much every law of physics, you will have a very difficult time hearing your low end properly and will most likely have a difficult time getting your mixes to translate. If you have already done this, good for you! If you followed the steps previously posted and are happy with what you're hearing, congratulations! You don't need to proceed further, nor do you need to chime in on this thread and argue with me about why I'm right and you're wrong about needing subwoofers. But without a measurement microphone and lots of sweeps of your room, you won't truly know what you're actually hearing in your listening position and you could spend your whole life trying to compensate for what you can't hear without knowing how or why.

Once again we are going to first check in with Carl Tatz, who is a guy I've never met and is also responsible for this whole protocol, with apologies to another guy named Dr. Earl Geddes, who we are also going to visit in a little bit. It should be noted again that Carl Tatz makes his living implementing a much more bespoke version of this system for people who own real studios, but he is generous enough to host the basic tools and explain the principles on his website for free, and we should all be grateful to him for doing so.

This article, from the November 2015 issue of Sound on Sound, is essential reading in its entirety. Read it over and over until you understand it: https://carltatzdesign.com/downloads/el ... rticle.pdf.

I'll excerpt some important parts, but I can't emphasize enough that it is necessary that you read it thoroughly until it clicks.
The observed phenomenon is as follows (cue for the acoustic animal trainer to lead the elephant into the control room). In a personal home-studio-sized control room, nearfield or mid-field monitors are usually mounted on speaker stands behind a desk or atop the meterbridge of a large-format console at tweeter/listener ear height, which is typically 48-50 inches (122-127 cm) above the floor. The overwhelming majority of the time, this configuration leads to a low-frequency acoustic cancellation due to the interaction of the floor, front wall, ceiling, console and listening position, creating a dip in the neighbourhood of 125Hz, give or take 25Hz. (Similar interactions occur in large commercial control rooms, but the dip is usually closer to 60Hz, and is less severe.) In the extreme — but not that uncommon — case, if the boundaries of your listening position, speaker position and perhaps even the front, side and ceiling wall distances are all in this approximate 50-inch range, you will necessarily experience the cancellation dip in this frequency range even more strongly, since you will be hearing the direct sound combined with the delayed information off all of these surfaces. Often it’s not just a dip: a wide canyon is routinely measured, often from 10dB to 15dB deep. Depending on the speakers and the particular room, the low-end response will usually also feature a peak somewhere in the 30 to 60 Hz range, which will vary in amplitude.
In other words, the floor, walls, ceiling, console (desk), and listening position all combine to cancel out a very important range of frequencies, which we so far have already done our best to mitigate thanks to calculating our speaker and seat placement using our room's dimensions and the axial mode calculator, and those cancelled frequencies start around 125 Hz, which is right where a ton of low-end information lives. One more time for those in the back, emphasis mine:
What this means is that you are making your mix decisions in a low-frequency ‘Grand Canyon’ which runs from approximately 125Hz or higher down to maybe 60Hz. With the setup described above, which is very typical, there have been no exceptions to this phenomenon. So if you’re thinking ‘not my speakers’, you will be sadly mistaken. As part of my lectures at various audio events and educational functions, I am able to present over 20 randomly chosen frequency graphs from the great many monitors in various rooms we have tuned. Some graphs show the same monitor in different rooms, and every one demonstrates this phenomenon. To reiterate, there are no exceptions to this. You might even think that you have pretty good bass, and you might — at a specific low-frequency peak. But there’s a huge amount of missing bass information between that peak and 125 or 150 Hz.
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Re: Dok's guide to monitor placement in your home recording studio

Post by Dok » Fri Apr 08, 2022 9:51 pm

"Okay Dok, you long-winded, handsome nerd," you might be saying to yourself. "How the hell is a subwoofer going to fix this?" And for that we need to understand just what exactly a subwoofer is doing. "Isn't it just there to make everything lower than the crossover frequency louder? So how about I just tune it to that big Grand Canyon frequency and make it 15 dB louder than my monitors and shouldn't that do the trick?"

NO

And the reason for that is because the axial modes in your room will always be working against those frequencies in your listening position, and a subwoofer placed randomly in a room is going to be subject to those modes. So we must place our subwoofers in the right position and at the right amplitude to defeat them. And we do that by bass-loading. We are going to take our subwoofer(s) and find a position that is so perfect it will actually excite those fucking stupid-ass room modes and make the whole room resonate in just such a way to fill in that Grand Canyon of low-end information at your listening position. In essence, we are going to turn the room itself into the speaker that reproduces those frequencies. Here's Carl Tatz from the same article:
Yes, subwoofers. Properly positioned — and two are always better than one for phase-correcting axial modes — they will begin to fill in your Grand Canyon of missing bass information. This is the only way the canyon can be filled, and no room is too small for this to work. Positioning is key to attain the best results, but it is a subject too expansive to thoroughly cover here. Without powerful analysis software and digital processing [don't worry pals, Dok is gonna address this too], perfection will be elusive. However, great improvement can be yours if you are diligent in your approach.

...By the way, you can ignore those who profess not to corner-load the subs because it excites all the room modes. It does. And who cares? All you should be concerned about is the listening position; to hell with the rest of the room. This is as true in a bedroom as it is in a well-designed commercial studio control room. You don’t tune a room: you tune the monitors. There is only one position that can be accurate and that’s your position in front of the monitors. The laws of physics dictate this, not me.
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Re: Dok's guide to monitor placement in your home recording studio

Post by Dok » Fri Apr 08, 2022 10:34 pm

So now we come to the understanding of how this works and why we need more than one sub. And I'll try to be as brief as I can here while providing more in-depth resources for you to read should your admirable thirst for knowledge take you.

As far as I can gather, the multi-subwoofer approach was devised by an acoustic scientist named Earl Geddes. There's a lot to read from him in this area, but here is one useful site that provides a good overview, with an important quote. We aren't going to dwell too much on this because the truth is most of you reading this will probably not even bother with one subwoofer, much less two, even though I am promising you it's absolutely worth it. So: https://mehlau.net/audio/multisub_geddes/ gives us this section:
for each additional sample that we add to the result, the variance will drop by approximately 1/n where n is the total number of samples. Hence, if samples are sources, then we should expect that the variance of the sound field will also go as 1/n where n is the number of sources (subwoofers to us). This is in fact what happens (within some limits). The more subs that we have in a small room at low frequencies the smoother the response will become in both frequency and space. We can't really increase the number of modes, but we can easily increase the number of sources.
Another way of putting it, from Earl Geddes himself: http://www.gedlee.com/Papers/multiple%20subs.pdf

Basically if I have one source has a variance, V, of the frequency response (the variation of the response from the average or smooth response) of say 6 dBs, that by adding a second source we will reduce this variance by half to 3 dB. Adding a third source reduces this to 2 dB, etc. Basically the variance goes as V/N where N is the number of “independent” sources. A key requirement here is “independent”. If the added sources are close to the first source then they are not independent. And two sources in opposite corners or symmetrical locations are not as independent as two sources placed non‐symmetrical locations
ARE YOU EXHAUSTED YET? BECAUSE YOU STILL HAVE A LOT OF WORK TO DO. THROW YOUR COMPUTER AGAINST THE WALL RIGHT NOW AS HARD AS YOU CAN

Alright, so we've hopefully established that a subwoofer is necessary, why it's necessary, and why two (or three) are better than one. Now that you've rushed out and bought your two subwoofers, let's get to work trying to figure out where the hell to put them. And for that we are going to need three things:

1). The free measurement and room simulator software called Room EQ Wizard. https://www.roomeqwizard.com/
2). A measurement microphone. I use the Dayton EMM-6: https://www.amazon.com/Dayton-Audio-EMM ... B002KI8X40 which also doubles as a great omnidirectional drum room microphone. There are others out there, and there is also a USB version, which quite frankly is probably easier to configure and use with Room EQ Wizard, which can be tricky to set up properly.
3). A willingness to throw REQ Wizard's predictions out the window and utilize some trial and error until you've achieved a satisfactory result.

Something we can actually do right away without buying that measurement microphone is open up REQW's Room Sim and plug our room's dimensions into it. I'll continue to use our example from the beginning of this thread, which is 15'9"x18'6"x9', and I'll place both my speakers and listening position where I've placed them according to the results from our axial mode calculator:

Image

That surface absorption section assumes a little bit of acoustic treatment on all surfaces - this is really difficult to predict and measure beforehand, suffice to say that if you put nothing there you get very strange results, and we are just using this to get a guide of where to put our sub(s) so I'd suggest using something minimal like that and just moving on - don't get too lost in those details. So what does our room simulator predict?

Image

Sweet Yeti of the Serengheti, look at that goddamn null at 108 Hz! Just as our axial mode calculator predicted for our width dimension, because we are sitting right in the center of the room and that is the one bigass mode we couldn't avoid! And that makes sense because both of these are still just models and they should spit out the same results given the same data.
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Re: Dok's guide to monitor placement in your home recording studio

Post by Dok » Fri Apr 08, 2022 11:11 pm

Alright then, let's use our room simulator to do some simulatin' on a subwoofer. I just go with the default values, but you can assume a couple of things, like your speakers and subs are going to be ported (unless they're super expensive they're likely to be ported), and it's best to have overlapping frequences (i.e. your crossover frequency should be higher than the lowest frequencies your mains can reproduce), according to Geddes. Let's add one against the front wall right in the center, that should work yeah?

Image

INTERESTING. We've shrunk that null at 108Hz and moved it down below 100, and also have brought up our 30Hz considerably, but it's not perfect. What if we try inverting the sub's polarity?

Image

Well, that didn't work. Wait, didn't both Tatz and Geddes say something about corner-loading?
Front-corner subwoofer positioning will offer the largest piece of clay to work with as you experiment with the high- and low-pass crossovers, frequency settings and subwoofer volume.
and here's Geddes:
1) If there are corners, then one sub should probably go in a corner. Corners have the unique characteristic of see all of the modes. But using two corners is not an effective use of two subs because the symmetrical situation makes these two sources less statistically independent. A less symmetrical location for the second sub would be better.
2) One of the subs should be relatively close to the mains, but not too close. Ideal here might be to locate the first sub close to the mains, but back in a corner, if in fact the mains are pulled out slightly from the wall behind them, as they should be.
3) The rest of the subs locations become far less important if the first two points above are adhered to.
Alright, so let's flip that polarity back and stick it in a corner, what do we get?

Image

Ooh, baby. YES. Look at that marvelous low end. Yes, there is still some weirdness at about 90Hz and 120Hz, but this is overall much better. Say, what happens if we leave it there and flip the sub polarity once again?

Image

YOU HAVE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME, HOT DAMN. All we did was flip the polarity!? Why does that work? Remember, because now we are making that room resonate in our favor instead of against us. Now, it's important to note that your experience here is not likely to go as smoothly and you will not KNOW if this has worked without measuring.. But if you don't want to go as far as measuring with a microphone and repeating, etc, this is going to be your M.O. - place, listen, flip sub polarity, compare. But take it from me and Carl and Earl - start in a front corner and also remember that since most subs are side-firing rather than down-firing, you will have four different positions to try, each with two polarity positions - generally, firing at one of the walls will give you best results. Find some music that you know intimately and see if you can hear everything you know is in there. You can also try some slow sine wave sweeps and see if you notice any particular frequencies dropping out, or jumping out as the frequency rises.

Just for shits and giggles, though, let's at least finish out this particular detour and see what is predicted with a second subwoofer. Flipping the polarity back to its original position but still in the corner with the first sub, let's add another one (asymmetrically, mind you), and move it around until we find a position that seems to work pretty well:

Image

Okay, not terrible. We've fixed some of that weirdness at 90 and 120, but still feels like it could be better. What if we invert the polarity on sub #2 only?

Image

MUCH better, again. Now, is it as good as the first time we put one sub in the corner and flipped the polarity on it? Not really, but remember that everything we've done with the subs here is a simulation, and every room is going to behave differently, which means that you are going to have to move your subs around and try different combinations of positioning and polarity until it falls into place. You will have better real world results with two subwoofers, truly. And if you've made it this far you should really get that measurement microphone because it will make this process much easier. But, the REQ Wizard room simulator feature is super useful for giving you some very decent starting points. So just remember:

Image

I'll probably do another section on best practices when running sweeps and measuring with REQ Wizard at some point, but if you've made it this far you've probably got the acumen to figure that out. Lots of tutorials on that part elsewhere on the web. Good luck!

FURTHER READING

Setting up Multiple Subs, by Earl Geddes. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxgUOG ... hMtesY_V9Q

Why Multple Subwoofers in Sound Reproduction? https://mehlau.net/audio/multisub_geddes/

Two Great Articles on Multple Subwoofers. http://seriousaudioblog.blogspot.com/20 ... tiple.html
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Re: Dok's guide to monitor placement in your home recording studio

Post by BTL » Sat Apr 09, 2022 5:28 am

Dok wrote:
Fri Apr 08, 2022 7:31 pm
so you're not centered in the room with respect to left and right? that's the most important component of any listening system - you have to have L and R symmetry if you're going to be able to treat your room acoustically and have proper phase relationships and equal reflections.
Understood, but that's not going to happen. It's a multi-use space and at this point I've never mixed anything at all. That said, I can spread the speakers out to 12" from the right and 60" from the right and that will move them out of those dips. On treatment, I'll do what I can over time to make things better, but it sounds like I'll need good headphones for the most critical tasks.
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Re: Dok's guide to monitor placement in your home recording studio NOW W/Pt. 2: SUBWOOFERS

Post by marqueemoon » Sat Apr 09, 2022 8:48 am

Wow, the subs info is pretty eye-opening.

I’ll have to think about the implications for space and budget.

That frequency range is critical and for me usually takes some trial and error for me to get right.

I think my bandmate’s space has both the 125 Hz valley and room mode-related issues with placement.

I think this also explains the too-loud kick drum phenomenon I’ve heard in recent things I’ve played on that were mixed by others (corrected in later mix versions).

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Re: Dok's guide to monitor placement in your home recording studio NOW W/Pt. 2: SUBWOOFERS

Post by Dok » Sat Apr 09, 2022 9:01 am

marqueemoon wrote:
Sat Apr 09, 2022 8:48 am
Wow, the subs info is pretty eye-opening.
Yeah! And it's pretty cool that there are simple(ish) methods of dealing with it if you're willing to take the time. And it should also be said that almost all rooms still should have corner bass trapping and acoustic panel absorption at the early reflection points, at minimum. But those are worthless if you aren't addressing your low end with a sub(s).

Oh, and I also wanted to recommend the Presonus T10 subwoofer here. It's the cheapest good subwoofer I've been able to find that has a super important feature, which is a subwoofer out, meaning that there's a dedicated channel that feeds subwoofer #2 when you're ready to purchase it. I think they go for between $400-500 new.

Luckily, if you decide to stop at 2 subwoofers (because you're a reasonable person, after all), subwoofer 2 doesn't even need to be as nice as the T10 and you can use pretty much any old thing as long as it's operating in spec and not distorting with blown components or anything like that. Remember, you're just trying to stick it in a spot that will excite your room modes, so all you really need is the ability to adjust the volume and the polarity - if your sub doesn't have a polarity switch you can get one of those in-line xlr polarity flippers like this: https://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail ... lr-adapter
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Re: Dok's guide to monitor placement in your home recording studio NOW W/Pt. 2: SUBWOOFERS

Post by BTL » Sat Apr 09, 2022 9:47 am

Dok wrote:
Sat Apr 09, 2022 9:01 am
Oh, and I also wanted to recommend the Presonus T10 subwoofer here. It's the cheapest good subwoofer I've been able to find that has a super important feature, which is a subwoofer out, meaning that there's a dedicated channel that feeds subwoofer #2 when you're ready to purchase it. I think they go for between $400-500 new.

Luckily, if you decide to stop at 2 subwoofers (because you're a reasonable person, after all), subwoofer 2 doesn't even need to be as nice as the T10 and you can use pretty much any old thing as long as it's operating in spec and not distorting with blown components or anything like that. [...]
This is great information and very much appreciated. I'm now aware that anything I do will be somewhat of a compromise (that's life), but I have the tools and information to make the best of what I am working with. Thanks, Dok!
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Re: Dok's guide to monitor placement in your home recording studio NOW W/Pt. 2: SUBWOOFERS

Post by DeathJag » Sat Apr 09, 2022 10:05 am

Aaiiiiieeeeee! This is INCREDIBLE! Dude! I do not know how I missed this in January. You are just a super being, putting so much time into sharing. Many people woulda just moved on, but your saintly nature produced this amazing thread. Wow! Here’s my story:

I have been home / basement recording since 1990 (Tascam 464!) Fast forward to today, and I’ve got much better microphones and a much nicer space, and decided to get as serious as I could without actually dedicating a room to mixing a few years ago. Without this information you have just shared, I had no idea what was going on during mixing. I reckoned it was the speakers. So out of ignorance + creativity I have been attempting to solve my mix problems entirely in my brain. By reprograming my ears when I mix. I guess it’s kind of stupid because it ignores physics. I have an almost decent hifi with very nice speakers, for the home. Music sounds great through them, yet mixes were super muddy. I reasoned my speakers were very nice and “smooth” on the bass, whereas other systems got farty. In my mixes, things that sounded full and big were muddy as hell on all other systems! Also the high end was a little “smoothed out” on the hifi, things never really sound crispy.

So I began reprogramming. I figured that for whatever reason, specific freqs were just misrepresenting themselves, so I “got used to” doing mixes with a different bass level and tone. I was in a band that practiced weekly so I had weekly recordings to work with. There after followed a long period of wildly different mixes coming out of each practice. I would think I had learned my lesson from the previous week, but then it would come out bad in a different way. It became funny how different the mixes were, and I’d laugh in the car when I switched to a super shitty mix.

Then my good friend told me to listen to favorite track through the board, to a song that has a similar mix to what I’m going for that I know sounds good. He said that since I am familiar with that track, I will have listened to it on all sorts of systems and have an intuition on how it actually sounds. MAN that helped a ton! I kept fighting with it, until I finally accepted that if I just mix the bass a certain hollow-ish and faint way, it comes out better. It doesn’t sound so great while I’m mixing though! Headphones seemed to handle the bass similarly, where the mix sounded fine but then bad in the car.

My big take away from this is not so much the actual numbers, but that those peaks and nulls exist. Sometime in the future I will have a dedicated room for mixing. I will get proper monitors and THEN I will fully appreciate this information.

I wonder if anyone could develop the skills to just walk in and hear the nulls? Carry a speaker, emit specific sounds, and point. That’d be so cool.

Sorry for the long post haha, got carried away. Thank you so much Mista Dok!

Dan

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Re: Dok's guide to monitor placement in your home recording studio NOW W/Pt. 2: SUBWOOFERS

Post by Dok » Sat Apr 09, 2022 10:38 am

DeathJag wrote:
Sat Apr 09, 2022 10:05 am
Aaiiiiieeeeee! This is INCREDIBLE! Dude! I do not know how I missed this in January. You are just a super being, putting so much time into sharing. Many people woulda just moved on, but your saintly nature produced this amazing thread. Wow!
Happy to help! Honestly it came out of a) going fucking crazy for YEARS trying to get my mixes to translate (honestly, I wouldn't wish that on anyone, please learn from my pain) and b) the near constant amount of threads I see on audio and music forums containing various amounts of misinformation and conventional wisdom about speaker placement and subwoofers - and people spending WAY too much money on more and more expensive monitors that would never perform optimally if not positioned correctly. This way I can just point back to this thread instead of having to try to condense it into one post. Just last week I was arguing on the TapeOp forum with a mastering engineer who, after I shared a bunch of this information, still said something to the effect of "I just don't believe that a subwoofer can do this without overloading the room with low-end frequencies, and the only possible solution can be to just keep putting in more bass traps." But as I said on that forum, It absolutely feels counterintuitive but you don't have to "get it" for it to be true. Anybody can test it, anybody can measure the results and see for themselves. It works and is reproducible in every single room I've ever tried it in. And it sure beats fumbling around in the dark and trying to guess where to put more expensive absorption than may be necessary while pulling your hair out wondering why your low end never seems to translate.
I wonder if anyone could develop the skills to just walk in and hear the nulls? Carry a speaker, emit specific sounds, and point. That’d be so cool.
A lot of tracking engineers do just that when figuring out the best place to put the drum kit, for example. They'll walk around the room and clap (or even just talk) until they like what they hear. And you can do this too - loop a specific bass frequency out of your monitors via sine wav, say 100 Hz, and walk around to various parts of your room. You'll notice that there are some areas where it seems to build up and get way loud (often the corners) and in others where it seems to disappear entirely. Those are your axial modes in action!
Local milk person

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