Respect to the room owner for not making himself believe that the room sounded good when it didn't.

I nearly spat up my beer when you said that the cabinets were empty.

Thank You for breaking down what went wrong in such a room, Dennis. I think we learn more from mistakes (ours or someone else's) than successes. Hope you are doing OK now...

That room looks like a rich guy's version of a DIY home studio with all the walls and ceiling completely covered in black acoustic foam! Looking forward to see what you do to fix the room.

This is fascenating. I've built a few home recording studios in various garages etc, so I've studied this stuff a little bit, but you guys are on a whole other level. Subscribed and thank you😁

Thanks for sharing your knowledge with us. You've saved me a (small) fortune by helping me avoid costly errors. Nothing at this level, but just in general.

Would love to see owners reaction after Denis and his crew does all the fixing )

Looking forward to seeing how you fix this room !

Great discussion on absorption version diffusion. Also the discussion on not absorbing away vocal energy bands when the room is to be used for voice. Good observations on the ceiling Shroeder diffusers. You talk about prime number theory and acoustics. Have you discussed this previously ? Particularly the basis for why/how it works. Best George

Awesome. Cant wait for next follow up vid.

I can't wait for the follow up

Fantastic Video!

All I want is a set of modified GR Research NX-Oticas, dual H frame OB subs, and Parasound Preamp/maybe some tubes. Awesome to see a follow up.

I have a small media room so I don't have much flexibility with the placement of my treatments but I do quite enjoy the sound with diffusers placed at ear level on the side walls. I place absorption right above my diffusion (subwoofers block the wall below the diffusion) and around the room.

Really interested in before and after measurements

nice video, thanks for uploading

So happy I've found this channel. Rare knowledge! Thanks

My wish is one day to afford the equipment that I want and then get you guys to do my room

For the ‘normal’ person that just listens to, or maybe records, loud music (I’m one), I tried some very basic DIY sound treatment, I did take some time to research placement etc. and even my low cost meagre attempt made a huge difference! I didn’t spend much and I really believe it was far more effective than any money I’ve spent on improving my equipment. I’d love to hear one of these properly treated rooms with top notch gear.

So interesting and informative!

Dennis, you are such a credit to the industry, I have learned a tremendous amount from you and also for the past year and a half been benefiting from you selfless sharing of knowledge with me on the phone. I hope someday I can swing actually hiring you! Anyway, Huge thanks to you. Best, Scott

This is great advice. LEDE design works. The area around the speakers should be live with some absorption in case where it is too lively. Diffusion should only be used on surfaces that are NOT in the direct and first reflected path of sound between the listener and the speakers. Diffusion by its nature is intended to mess up directionality of sound (this removes information like stereo image). So diffusion is great where you want to remove parasitic reflections that clutter imaging (like a wall close behind the listener’s head, low ceiling directly above the listeners head etc). Tuned Resonators or bass traps belong only close to corners which is where they are most effectively reducing the build up of low frequency energies near these triple boundaries. Acoustics is simple physics. Also a totally dead room sounds awful. George Sabine studied this and appropriate R60 decays are critical to good sound. Rock music needs more damping. Classical music can be enjoyed in a more reflective environment. Larger rooms can have a higher R60 than smaller rooms. An R60 of 0.4 is pretty good for a 3000 - 5000 cu ft space.

Absolutely wonderful and informative video!! 👍☘👍

Solid advice - thanks

Thanks a lot! Brilliant!

I've been making records now for over 20 years and I cannot stress enough the importance of treating a room it's imperative absolutely imperative cannot be overstated

ur lecture makes sense a lot for me thank you, sir

Damn it, I don’t want to wait!

WOW.Thanks Dennis.

I was going to make very similar comments when I saw the pictures of the room. But you beat me to it.

I'm really hoping to see the follow up video on this.

looking forward for the follow up video!

Would love to see the follow up video

A stereo can still sound really nice in an untreated room. I feel your pain.

I don't pay anything for my acoustics treatment but I just make sure I organise the soft furnishings and cupboards and shelves etc to kill the reverberation between parallel walls and then the room sounds really good.

Any update? I would love to see what you ended up doing and if the owner of the room can make comments on what difference they heard..

Glad I’m not an audiophile. It seems like a mild form of insanity. He’s got a $200k room he doesn’t even use anymore because it sounds THAT bad? Really?

I'm feeling a little sad for myself right now! LOL! Would very much like to see the end results!

Room sound isn't always the enemy. Recordings and playback, totally absent of any sort of reflection or room sound, sound cold and clinical. Imagine listening to your favorite songs in an anechoic chamber versus your bedroom: As it turns out, our brains are accustomed to hearing musical reflections from the environment around us, and when those are nearly or totally absent, it removes a certain character from the listening experience. Some amount of imperfection is usually actually beneficial in my view--especially once we consider that audio engineers spend a good chunk of their mixing sessions ADDING imperfections to perfectly clean audio through saturation, distortion, EQ, analog equipment, tape machines, reverb, etc. The science of acoustic treatment is to control these reflections and the diffusion in such a way that the room sound doesn't create unpleasant tonal changes, while still leaving enough room sound behind to create a natural recording or listening experience. People who don't understand this often have the impression that room noise is the enemy, and that eliminating it will always improve audio replication. In truth, if the audio experience doesn't coordinate with our body's natural experiential expectations, something will always feel discordant. I'm personally very satisfied with $120 of 2" thick absorption panels, placed only in the reflection hot spots of my room. They made a notable difference and deadened the worst reflections, while still keeping the sound natural. I mix and master audio in my spare time, so accuracy and audio translation is important to me, and the panels, as well as some monitor pads, were just enough to bring my monitors within the same sound profile as my headphones, as well as other audio systems, and that's frankly all I needed. I can listen to audio on them all day and it sounds perfectly fine to me; all of this was accomplished with only a few foam pads. Audio overkill is indeed a thing.

I have a relative who built a room for stereo listening. After he insisted that i listen, i told him one speaker sounded off. In fact, he reversed the cables on the inputs . How can you be an audiophile but not hear that?

honestly sometimes some exotic speakers are just too ridiculously big. I mean, take any 4 floor standers and slather blue tack on top of a pair then place the other set up side down on top boom $xx, xxx speaker. I have a set of 10 thousand dollar floor standers but I found myself preferring the sound of the ls50s and when it came time to get surrounds I decided on the 3001SE EGGs due to their ability to play down too around 50 hz while the newer model could only play down to around 75hz. I figured the quality of the sound wouldn't matter as much since it was meant to be listened to aimed at the back of my head but to my shock they actually sounded BETTER than the ls50s. sure the ls50s had much more aggressive bass but the range they played in common, the 3001SEs sounded obviously more open transparent uncolored and most importantly holographic while the ls50s by comparison sounded receded and flat. so I ended up selling the ls50s and replacing them with the 3001SEs of course I'd go with smaller and better. it did get me curious if I were to mod the ls50s to have a more rounded internal cabinet and then coated it with graphene like the ACE tech unique to the the 3001SEs would that give the ls50s the more holographic bigger sound? but I suspect its the synergy how every element of that speaker was designed from scratch for that one research project which evbetjslly trickled up to the blade.

What’s good materials to use to soundproof your home / party wall ?????

Maybe I missed it but what were the bad qualities of the sound? Absorption diffusion prime numbers. What did it sound like?

love this, i think its important to know that money is not the solution, knowledge in acoustics is the answer and experience, the customer can save a lot of money if he use pro to help him do the job, + diffusion is a complex concept mainly i think! because its involve objective and subjective elements(psycho acoustics and hrtf), phase, time domain, amplitude, angle of accident are all more complex then we think

i guess it depends on what the user wants ... a room like Carnegie Hall , where a whisper can be heard from a hundred feet or a 'Dead Room' with zero resonance , where you couldn't hear someone on fire from outside the room (lol) ..... then hope the user 'knows' what he/she wants or somewhere in between ... lol

He reminds me of Kubayashi from The Usual Suspects.

Totally agree with Dennis here.

Some home audio integrator laughed himself all the way to the bank..

If we have to start building a room from zero, is there any good proportion to start with? Height, width length? I know then is the right absorption and difusión, but I mean, the best proportion for bass resonance for example, so to speak, Fibonacci's phi golden ratio works?

Absolutely.

I used all skyline diffuser in my sounds room 12X28 feet only 2 on each side wall the instruments just very present and so realistic try to removed them and listening again there was no feel can’t listen without them 7 onto the front wall 18”X18” each

What do you think of Amon Tobin's studio? It looks like wavy quadratic diffusers, I'm not sure what the philosophy is since it seems pretty unique.

The real problem is that there are too many diffusers and bass traps of the same type. Having those diffusers in the whole ceiling, front and back walls gives low reverb time on highs in comparison with mids. Also with bass traps there is nothing wrong in a low amount of absorbing material inside. They are rezonators, not wide absorbers. A bad thing is their number in this room, because there are too many of them.

A good topic for a video would be: "choosing the best room in your 3 room house/flat and arranging all your stuff in a way it makes more sense to actually hear a little bit better, with tips on inexpensive additions to hear a whole lot better". I'd totally relate to that.

Cool insights, I’m curious what the custom qrd design was going for, maybe a certain musical scale, harmonic set, or sacred tuning. Questions I’ve been curious about myself in the engineering theory behind qrd diffusor tuning.

REspect to this uploader, the owner of the room, and to at least most of the other commenters (I haven't read all of them, but I'll throw some out to all of you anyway)... In audio production, you always have to be thinking about your production value. A room that's designed for the initial production and mixdown won't always work for mastering, and a room designed for one kind of music might be all wrong for another. I wouldn't reccord an orchestra in a small room with mics on all the instruments, nor would I put a very crystal clear and bright singer in a large hall and record a fusion of hip hop and r&b; ok bad example, I might do it, but I'd also dub a session in a small contained room and mix the two together where they fit. The point is, when you design anything you do, you first need to have some clarity of your goal, so that you have a few of the final details laid out, and the pathway to get to those details. Doing this will let you know if anything you wish to achieve is in conflict with anything else you wish to achieve, so you can replan around that and either make room for both or give one up in favor of another. This video is a great example. Everything was done overkill, and the room didn't work. The problem is simple enough: He built the treatment before he built the room. That's it. He reversed the logic. Oops. Well at least he got a good closet out of it, right? If I build a room, listen in it for a while, hate something about it, then treat for that, especially when I can TREAT the problem in an economical and mobile fashion (one in which I can increase, decrease, add or remove the treatment easily), I have, dollar for dollar, exponentially greater value in that treatment than in a room that needs to be completely reconstructed every time I mix a different genre or move my desk so I can put in a new APU tower or screen. Granted, mastering engineers usually want something very close to perfection for a main room, as it allows them to really hear the differences when they adjust. But, the average listener will rarely have access to that, so most have rooms for listening in that emulate common listening environments, or speakers that are "tuned" (eq'd) for such environments. Some have multiple rooms for different genres and styles, as they can afford it. If you have one room to work with, sometimes the "cheap-sheets" method is the best way to go (using towels as heavy drapes, acoustic panels; pillows also, bookcases for diffusion). That doesn't mean that you don't cut into a few walls here and there... ...If you can, design the walls a bit, but don't treat the room before you actually build and listen to it. Building a room around the treatment rarely, if ever at all, gets any kind of a useable result.

Does that happen to be a bass trap positioned behind your couch? If so, considering it's situated behind the couch and therefore sitting on the floor. Would one be correct in assuming if it is indeed a bass trap, is it likely to still be helping out the low end?

Thank you. Has the follow-up video been issued ?

I have a small, nearly square room. I currently have two 2’x2’x2” absorption panels behind my 7 inch rear ported monitors and one 4’x2’x4” absorption panel at the center back of my wall. I also have a bookshelf, bed, and padded chair that soak up some sound too. Would diffusion be a good idea for my side reflection points or should I go for more absorption? I have considered putting diffusers behind my speakers and putting the absorption panels on the side walls too. Any thoughts are welcome.

What absorbtion material do you use? In your other video you said you dont use 703 or rocksol due to health concerns, thats what I was going to use, but now I'm not sure and I'm unfamilar with others.

The owner of that room obviously took a look a photo of Blackbird Studio C and thought he could replicate Massenburg genius by making something that looked similar. There is a shit ton of math in that room and it sounds stunning. Massenburg says it sounds like an indoor forest. It’s not dead, but diffuse enough that there no distinct echoes. They recently adapted it for immersive mixing in Dolby Atmos. I haven’t heard it since the retrofit but I can only imagine it’s the best Atmos mix room imaginable. Someone here calling himself an audio engineer said something to the effect of “all you need is an adequately deadened room for mixing and mastering”. I’d love to see his album credits. Once upon a time it took more than a laptop, a cheap pair of powered speakers and an SM57 to be considered an engineer. A good mix room is a good listening room. And a great one is great for both. That “engineer” is to a good mix engineer what the owner of that room is to a studio designer. Buying a lookalike Blackbird studio C is like downloading a ripped copy of Pro Tools and calling your basement a studio. It doesn’t make it so.

Is there a link to the review of the room after it was set up correctly? I have been combing through all these videos (very much enjoying them) and I really want to see the outcome. Thanks!

I bet the toe-in really changes things for the worse. I found annoying constructive interference in the highs on my system. Set them parallel and everything sounded so much more natural.

great video! what are the 5 rigid criteria you mentioned?

Hello, can i ask you some question to tell me how to improve my home theater? Thanks

i just subscribed....has the follow-up been released?

It's still a cool looking room, very pretty

Okay the room looks cool, ill give you that. It looks like it was designed for the 70's future.

I love music, and have made my fair share of it, but even if I were rich this would be so unnecessary for me, the average producer, or even a basic audiophile. The client might get something out of it that I don't. I just don't understand what more there is to extract out of raw audio with some mid-tier monitors and some basic room treatment. It's impressive to say the least, but massive overkill for me.

Is there a follow-up to this video out yet? I'm dying to see what steps were taken to solve the issues with the room.

OK serious question now. On a budget perspective in an apartment I only rent... Isn't it better for me to get a decent pair of headphones than it is to get 5000€ speakers I probably can't use properly anyways because I can't shift around the room for them?

I would be interested in knowing the age of the client, being in my 70’s and totally deaf on one side most of my life my listening capabilities have changed over the years

@Dennis - Have you made a follow-up video for this project?

Was there a follow up video for this fix? If so could you please send the link as I can’t seem to find it? 👍

I have a burning question.. what if you put absorbsion behind the wall. For a reccording or acoustic set op. Please can only a learned person reply 😁

As you know room proportion is also important. I once had a client call me because his room did not sound right. Turned out the room dimensions were 16' X 16' X 8', half a cube. Also agree with, keep it simple. That room is a mess. The huge number of variations also makes it much harder to predict the outcome. Helmholtz resonators don't "absorb" (they resonate energy...of course) so that was a terrible idea on the ceiling. Good idea on the diffusion either side of the listening position.works well. How did the room turn out? Would love to see a follow up video.

Shows you that money cant beat science and experience

The product in the room, that dont work, is it svanå SMT? ( its a swedish company)

"...use rates and levels (of absorption) that are conducive for music and voice, not noise. A lot of this stuff out there's for noise- 'lets absorb as much as we can per square foot'. That's not what you do for music and voice. Once you do that for music and voice parts of the music and voice are lost" This is probably pretty basic advice, but for a beginner such as myself this is awesome. As someone looking to treat my home studio for the first time I think there's a trap you can fall into when you learn that sound reflections can create a bad mixing environment where you then try to make a room that's too dead thinking that it's making the room more accurate when in fact you're actually removing important information for critical listening.

What is the best way to acoustically isolate a door?

Sound diffusion, sound absorption , sound redistribution, quadratic diffusion, resonators vs sound proofing or reduction: What is that? Do you have a separate video that discusses these things for noobs like me. Or video's keeping sound out or in

A before and after video would have been helpful to understand what was so wrong with the previous treatment.

Was there a follow up video, I could not find it?

Looks like an a echo of chamber. Audio is recorded to allow some room reverb.

Ouch!

I studied physik and i am a classical musician, strings and baroque. I very much liked to read your comments. It is a different world. What I look for is interpretation. This is a matter of brain and craftmanship. You can find it in the instruments and in the concert halls. My equipment is partly selfmade and not expensive. Only for organ music I like to hear sound from behind me. This has not to be the original sound, just any reasonable sound made out of a stereo record. I like to feel the bowings in my right hand when listening, it works if speakers are not so bad. It doesn't depend on the room. We have a completely different style of listening to music!

Exteam overkill nearly almost never works as intended, the golden rule for ultra high performance has always been and will always be keep it simple... Nothing is perfect, so it’s about making decisions on what compromises you’re making down the list from most important attributes to least, in that way you maximize your intended goals. Insane sums of money and brute force don’t result in performance either, simple and elegant, are, of course, the most difficult mental exercises, as any fool can throw money and horsepower at a problem...

I'm a studio engineer over 25 years. Diffusion is really just broken up reflection. By allowing large reflective areas it's attempting to help make your room sound a little more wet and natural than what you'd get with extremely high absorption. The many surfaces break up the single surface into many to try and make that reflection sound good. Truthfully it's just a little reverb. That's fine in a RECORDING space if that's what you intend. If that's the case the listener WILL get that from his speakers. As a studio engineer I hate reflection even from diffusors in a control room. You are influencing what you're hearing. In the case of a recording studio that's not what you want. You want absorption in your control room to hear the speakers and nothing but the speakers. In a audiophile listening room at least what I would want is the most true to the speakers experience as I could get. That's what the creators of the music intended. If they wanted you to hear more reverb they'd have added it. Can a little extra liveness from short reverb help some music, sure. You are just making a sonic decision though beyond what the producers intended and know that it may sound bad alot of the time. In the room pictured with it's rediculous amount of reflections it may sound really cool for recording a solo instrument in, but here's the problem: A recording of a solo instrument is probably going to have plenty of reverb in it if the producers thought that sounded good. If you try and play that back in this crazy room it will just have even more, far beyond what sounds good.

You can get what there is to get pretty much by sitting close to your speakers and eqing the bass correctly. Trying to get :"soundstage" at distance is not going to reproduce anything that is actually on the recording--and few of them have any kind of 'soundstage' that means anything anyway, And high resolution electronics---if you believe in that, well.....

I SAVE a lot of money now. Stopped listening to music 12 years ago!

You're a very knowledgeable cat ! So here's my 2 cents, if listening to vinyl even with the perfect room cfg you will still experience audio reproduction variances. For example, depending on what decade or what studio mastered the album the character will be enormous. A remastered Pink Floyd album pressed in 1995 will have an entirely different characteristic compared to the original year pressing. If you wanna cover all the bases, you'll need 3 tone arms with an MM, MC, (conical, elliptical, line). And also different speakers, (directional, large high sensitivity, etc). Achieving music reproduction perfection is a tormenting challenge that feeds into a bottomless pit of audiophile expenditure. The more spent, the more finicky we become ! Albums were not engineered to meet the standards of what audiophiles expect today, heck the RIAA (originally designed for AM radio) is still the defacto standard...just imagine if it got finally updated how much nicer music would sound ! Or you could go to the world of 24/196 recorded, mastered, and pressed digital and you'll be as close to perfect as heavenly possible !

Is there a follow up video?

That's sad. For both the client and the original constructor.

Oh me hart so sad.

I bet my beats pill would sound great in that room.

Are there follow ups to this video? If so, Title, please.

Why would someone want a room that only makes music sound good in certain genre? Shouldn’t good sound be good?

When I read the title of this video and saw the room my first thought was that the room treatment was way overdone! I believe absorption and diffraction can be used together but in moderation, don't over do it! As for high $ equipment, it's been my observation that once the price of a set of speakers goes over about $30K or $40K the sound quality actually starts going down with price. I get the impression that these companies that make the six figure speakers don't really know what they are doing... or more likely they do know, they are making money on inexperienced listeners that have way too much money!

Listening to this guys talk about walls feels like i'm listening to a doctor telling me that i only have 3 months to live. So serious.

Where can I find the follow up video?