Dampening a the 9.8 meter long wave of a 35 Hz tone is already hard, dampening a ~19 meter long 18Hz wave mist be pretty much impossible.
The only thing more amazing than loud low bass is bone dry loud low bass that starts and stops precisely.
The only thing more amazing than loud low bass is bone dry loud low bass
My frustration with rock venues is that there's usually lots of bass, but it's super sloppy. Everything below ~80hz sounds like a giant audio sludgeball.
I feel like even a little bit of tuning and room correction (the sort one can do at home with freeware and a $89 calibrated microphone) would help tremendously, but there's no appetite for that on the part of concertgoers or sound techs.
I'm glad there are dance venues getting this right.
- get a calibrated mic
- use REW (Room EQ Wizard, free) to take several measurements in your room, in the listening area(s)
- REW will average them and generate an inverse EQ curve to compensate
- you can export the parametric EQ settings and use them anywhere that supports parameteric EQ such as EqualizerAPO (windows, free) or CoreAudio parametric EQ units (Mac, free) or in a standalone hardware device like the MiniDSP (~$100 IIRC)
you can always tweak the parametric EQ curve to suit your personal taste, like some extra bass or extra treble to compensate for aging ears (like mine)
have fun and good luck!
The absolute worst case scenario for sound is an empty rectangular (or cube) shaped room with bare walls and most corporate meeting rooms come pretty close to this.
However, you can still make some improvements.
From their own (again excellent) help guide: https://www.roomeqwizard.com/help/help_en-GB/html/iseqtheans...
After that comes room issues. Surprisingly I think most residential rooms are decent, acoustically, because they tend to be filled with padded furniture and such and aren't overly reflective in obnoxious ways. Also most people aren't running massive subwoofers and if they are, they generally know what they're getting into. With all that said, I think REW is great for cleaning up the rest.
If all people did was pay attention to speaker selection and placement, I think most people would wind up with a very good listening situation.
And if all people did was pay attention to speaker selection and placement and clean up the remaining issues with REW, I think most people would wind up with a great listening experience.
The thing that might break your acoustics might more often be time-domain issues. No EQ on earth will get rid of the reverb in an empty warehouse. The same is true on a smaller scale in your place. And because it is smaller you will have specific frequencies (room modes) ringing out longer or shorter at your listening position. These are issues you can only fix with actual physical alteration of the space by putting in more stuff and adding absorbers, diffusors and such.
So EQs can help, but you should also think about the actual surfaces of the room itself.
In short I think speaker selection and placement are about an order of magnitude or two more important than everything else. If those are the only two things you pay attention to and don't drastically screw the rest up, you'll have a nice sounding system.
Room correction (which is also speaker correction) is probably the next most important thing, although well into optional territory IMO.
There's lots more that I fuss over, but I don't want people believing that they need a lot of elaborate rituals and room alterations to achieve good sound. It's not true, it's counterproductive, and scares people away from this really fun hobby. =)
No EQ on earth will get rid of the reverb in an
empty warehouse. [...]
So EQs can help, but you should also think
about the actual surfaces of the room itself.
1. They tend to be filled with comfy padded furniture, bookshelves, etc. which do a nice job of breaking up high and mid frequency reflections.
2. The brain already performs a lot of "room correction" and it's particularly good at performing it in familiar spaces like our own homes.
3. Most people's home systems (especially those of beginners) aren't putting out the kind of massive low frequency output that's really troublesome to tame.
Of course there is always going to be a room mode or three, usually with a prominent one somewhere in the midbass range.
As you seem to have intuited, I am in beginner territory and that "gist of it" overview is all I needed.
My HTPC/Steam machine will get a calibration in the near future!
Thank you very much for helping me to help myself to improve listening experience.
Those modes will make it so that you have some areas in the room where that frequency will be uncomfortably loud, and other areas where it goes away entirely.