Apollo Studio Acoustics (Part 11)

The last weeks I have been studying the reports that Toine from Sound Scapes sent me. All in all very interesting stuff. In the picture on the left you can see a derived graphic that he made from the measurements taken in my studio. He entered this in his specialized acoustic room simulation software. The blue line represents the actual measurements and the green lines are the boundaries where the room response should be in between. You can clearly see the problem that is there in the lower frequencies. After this start scenario different acoustic materials with know results are placed in the room and the computer calculates the effect this has on the room respons. Toine made 3 scenario's for me to chose from. One with the use of only commercially available materials, one with only DIY material and one with the combination of the two.

Here you see a picture of a self build bass trap using lat absorbers that he proposed. The lats are supposed to be horizontal by the way in the final design. Toine send even building plans and everything for this thing. Very cool. The disadvantage is though that this thing takes up a lot of room that I rather not sacrifice and also that building it myself doesn't really attract me. For two reasons. I don't have much time and to be honest I'm not very good with wood. And when I let someone else build it, it will be more expensive than going for the commercially available products. So I decided to go for the easy way and buy the stuff he proposed. In this way I can get this up and running hopefully before I make the final mixes of my new album and hopefully have a good room response in the low frequencies by then.

Toine proposed to use Modex plates from a company called RPG. In the picture on the left you can see how this looks. These plates are mounted against the wall and are 1 meters wide and 1,5 meters high and only 11 centimeters thick. So they don't use that much space. For comparison the self build bass trap also was 1 meters wide but, 80 cm's thick and 2,40 meters high. The modex plates come in two types. Type 1 absorbs frequencies between 50-500 Hz and Type 2 absorbs frequencies between 35-100 Hz. Toine has calculated that I would need one type 1 and two type 2 plates for optimal results. It is really amazing how this stuff works. Very innovative. If you are interested you can read more about this stuff on this URL: http://www.rpginc.com/products/modexplate/index.htm


And the after placing the virtual models of these plates in the simulation software the computer calculated the result you can see in the graphic on the right. You can clearly see the change in the low end response. So basically this should to the trick in theory :) Well we will see the result in the end I guess. I really have good hope that this will make my studio a lot better acoustically and after this we will do another measurement to see what the actual result was and if more needs to be done. Of course I will keep you posted on the results and let you see what it looks like. The last question I asked now is if they can paint the panels black for me in stead of white :)

Apollo Studio Acoustics (Part 10)

As posted before I'm still testing different monitors in my studio. I liked the sound ot the 8050's a lot, but I saw that they also have an all digital system with build in room correction (in the speakers itself). So I decided to give them a go as well. I'm currently testing the Genelec 8250's that look exactly the same, but are from the DSP powered series from Genelec, also the sub was exchanged for a 7270A and that is also the digital (DSP) version of the 7070A that I had before. It comes with a piece of software that you have to install on your PC, a special audio interface that connects with USB to your PC that also works as a network interface for the speakers and a specially calibrated test microphone that also connects to this box.

The first thing you have to do is install the software on your PC and then connect the audio interface so that the drivers are automaticly installed. This all went very smoothly. Then you connect the speakers with UTP CAT5 cable (same you use for network) to each other. You just make a big loop going from the audio box to the sub woofer and from there to the left speaker and then to the right. They all have a network in and through for that. Then when you fire up the speakers they instantly are recognized. You will also have to hook up audio after that. The sub again acts as a central hub and only accepts AES/SBU for input signals. So I put a converter on the SPDIF output I used for my monitoring. Then again you just loop to the other speakers. And in the software you appoint which speaker is left and right. A very weird way to connect speakers if you think about it, but it works just fine :)

After that you set up the microphone onto your primary listening position and start a wizard in the software that takes you through the room correction process. Speaker by speaker it does a number of tests to determine the distance, and after that a frequency sweep to measure the room response. What is very remarkable by the way is that you have to enter the serial number of the microphone. All microphones are calibrated by Genelec in a special room and a compensation is done in the software for each individual microphone. On the left you can see what was measured and compensated in the EQ of the particular speaker. I'm still experimenting around, so this wont be the final settings. But you can see how much parameters are available and also you can adjust them later manually to your own taste. As you can see it did some corrections in the low end that are in line with the measurements Toine did from Sound Scapes.

After the main speakers also a series of tests is done for the sub woofer. The most important one is a phase test. Usually the biggest problem using a sub woofer is to get it in perfect phase alignment with your other speakers. Well this is just a dream come true then. As you can see in the picture also the sub woofer has a build in equalizer and it is really bad to see how much had to be compensated here. Again proving that we need to do more on the acoustics of the room itself. But the end result is stunning. It really sounds terrific. So balanced it is almost unbelievable so I can say that the system actually works :) And it really does make the overall sound way better than the already good sounding 8050's I had. I wouldn't want to go back at this point. Actually I'm so satisfied with the result and the flexibility of this system that I think I'm going to go for it. I love the concept and sound of it. I wouldn't know what could possibly impress me more than this. Besides that it allows me to start working on my mixes already before the final room treatment is done. I like that idea as well :)

Apollo Studio Acoustics (Part 9)

Last week Toine from Sound Scapes send me the first results of his measurements of the studio. He measured on several positions in the room. Here you see a combined graph of my primary listening position (shown in red) and 1 meter behind that (shown in green). Then you see three green lines. 90 dB is the volume that was send out and the graph shows the room respons. Then the result should be between the 90 and 100 dB lines. As you can see it isn't even that bad. Only in the low end on my primary listening position the are some dips. So far this is consistent with the measurements we took. We only looked at the low end until 200 Hz, so this graph looks different because it shows the whole spectrum.

Here is another graph from a measurement that was taken just before the wall in the back of my studio (at the modular desk). Here you can see also some big peeks and dips. These are the problem frequencies I hear in the room. We also walked around in the room to determine where the standing waves occur. And especially in the very low end we could determine that there was a build up in the corner near by door. We did some sine waves at 25 Hz and the door started resonating very badly and it was immensly loud. The funny this is when I opened the door it was gone. So we determined right away that this would be a good corner to do something extra to dampen these standing waves.

Toine also did some RT60 (dampening) tests like I did with Hanz as well. The first thing Toine noticed is that the test results were quite consistent. He had seen that differently. Apparently due to background noise, but my studio is very quiet so there is no interferance what so ever. Which is a good thing of course. Again in the graph you see the red lines indicating the upper and lower boundaries that the measurements should be between. You see a peak in the high end that should be ignored. Toine told me that is the measurement microphones fault. But you can also see that at 80 Hz there is clearly still a peak. This means it takes too long for these frequencies to die out in the room. The rest lookes actually quite OK. Again confirming our previous findings that we should concentrate on the low end. Toine is now calculating and simulating what has to be done to make things better. I'll update you soon on this.

Apollo Studio Acoustics (Part 8)

I have posted a lot about the acoustic treatment and measurements I'm doing in the studio. But another very important project is to select a decent pair of monitoring speakers. In my old studio I had a pair of Behringer Truths, but they are really not that good. So I went to both my regular suppliers and asked them if they could arrange that I could test some monitors in my own studio. The first pair I tested where the KRK VXT8's. For the price they are actually quite good, at that moment I was actually quite satisfied with them.

But I made a list with speakers I wanted to check out so I went on. Next on the list where these Genelec 8040's. The first thing I noticed was a much better stereo image and much more detailing a bit like they missed some low end compared to the KRK's. So I thought it would be good to maybe go for one size bigger even though I'm going to use them as near fields.

So then we went for the Genelec 8050's. And they do have much more low end. Of course because of the bigger size. But I decided that I like this better. In comparison to the 8040's they sound much more at ease. Like they don't have to work so much. I'm always amazed about all these monitor manufacturers drawing these straight lines when you look at the speaker characteristics graphics they provide, and they all sound differently ;) In the music i heard  layers I could only hear on my headphones before. So I liked these ones better than the KRK's instantly. The only thing I found was that they sounded  Ah well. I guess it is a matter of taste and also depending on your room and style of music what sounds right to you.

Together with the 8050's I also got a 7070A sub woofer on loan. I first listened to the 8050's without the sub woofer, but finally hooked it up any way. And man what a difference does that make :) I love that low rumble. I use that a lot in my music as well and since I hope to do stuff for movies in the future it could be a good thing to add a sub woofer. The nice thing is that it acts as a crossover as well. So you connect you audio outputs to the sub and then your monitors to the sub woofer. There is also a remote bypass switch on it, so you can listen with and without it. I really like this idea.

I like the Genelec setup I have now a lot, but I will test some more speakers soon. I'll update you on that of course. Last week by the way Toine from Soundscapes already did some acoustics measurements in my studio. He is a pro in this field and has a very scientific aproach to the whole matter. He instantly had some very good and creative recommendations. He is now going to put all the data he collected (measurements, room size) into a computer simulation program and I hope to get a rapport from him soon. Of course I will share his findings on my blog (with Toine's kind permission). But judging from his first impressions there is much more work to be done on the acoustiscs side. So keep following this thread on my blog if that interests you.

Apollo Studio Acoustics (Part 7)

Recently I also did some new measurements together with my friend Hans in the studio. This time we tested with the bass traps in place. Compared to the last measurements it looks a bit better and much smoother, but there are still some nasty dips there that we hoped to get rid off. So I'm afraid the bass traps alone wont be sufficient and we will have to do more to get a good room response in the low end. Something else that is strange is that the frequencies of the peeks and dips shifted a bit compared to the older measurements. I don't really understand how that can be. In the higher frequencies everything is quite OK now by the way. And for me it is good enough now to be able to start getting used to working on monitors in stead of headphones. But is as to be better to be able to make good mixes.

The waterfall graphic looks quite different from last time. As you can see RT60 decay times of the low frequencies have drastically decreased. That is the work of the bass traps dampening these low frequencies. But we did decide that it was time now to call in the professionals because we can only start guessing what to do next. So we went to ask around and found two professional acoustic engineers. I invited them both to come over and look at the room. They both had a very different approach in looking at the problem. The first one was more practical and the second one more scientific. I decided to start with the scientific one. On Monday this specialist will come and do some measurements with his own equipment and he will take exact measures of the room. This data will then be entered in a special computer program that will start simulate the sound behavior in the room. From these simulations it is possible to predict what needs to be done to solve the problems. With this data I will go to the first specialist and together we can then determine what needs to be build or bought in acoustic treatment. I'm quite curious what they will come up with. This whole acoustics theory really is starting to fascinate me. I learned a lot of new things in a short time. I'll keep you posted on the progress :)

Apollo Studio Acoustics (Part 6)

Last week I finally started mounting the acoustics material that I had lying around for a long time. Here you can see a picture of one of the bass traps. As I told before I ordered this special material from a German company called AIX foam. The blocks came in lengths of two meters each and since the total height of my studio is 2,40 meters I had to think of some kind of way to mount it. I didn't want to glue everything to the wall either since maybe this won't even be sufficient and maybe I need to remove them again. We need to do some measurements first. The solution was to mount a plank at about 2 meters from the ceiling. Put two blocks on top of each other. And then I had to cut another block into smaller pieces and put that under the plank. This way I can also easily remove the lower part and still be able the reach the cable guiding system that is running below it. It worked very well in both corners behind me. So now that this is done I can continu to put stuff in front of this corners and start cabling there.

Another thing I did was mounting three acoustic panels on the walls left and right of me. Just on my listening position. This is to improve the stereo image on my main monitors. It helps to keep reflections on that place. You don't want to hear sounds from your left monitor bouncing of your right wall. I didn't want to glue these panels to the wall either, so I started by drilling some holes in the wall, putting screws in there, hanging a wooden plate on the screws (just like a painting) and the glue the acoustic panels on the plates. This worked out very well. I used special glue by the way from Auralex. It is made to fasten quickly and not damage the foam. A lot of clue will probably eat up the material due to chemical reactions. I can really recommend this glue since the panels were already hanging firmly after about 30 seconds.

On the wall in front of me I had another challenge. In both corners is a cable guiding system that is 4 by 4 cm's wide. So I had to cut out a strip of 4 by 4 cm's of the corner traps. Otherwise they wouldn't fit tightly in the corners. I was a bit afraid to cut in the material at first since it is quite expensive to screw up. But well it doesn't happen on it's own. I ended up using a very sharp hobby knive (the type with multiple blades you can break off). You can normally push the blade out so that you have one long blade. Making a sawing motion I could cut through the foam quite easily and even quite precise. So this was not as hard as I had imagined. Only cutting a 2 meter block into 3 pieces is a bit harder since the blocks are quite big and you can only cut so deep. But I also managed this in the end with the same simple knife. Here you see some rest material.

I still have lots of panels left, so I can go around and fix some more problems with those. But first I will ask my friend Hanz to come over and do some measurements again to see what the effect was of this job. I hear improvement already, which is nice of course, but we need to see it in the graphs to know how much effect it had.
I will keep you informed about this process of course. Another effect these panels had in the room is because of the brighter color I have a bit more light now. There is just more light reflecting now. I will have to buy I dimmer now I guess :)

Apollo Studio Acoustics (Part 5)

Last week I did another set of measurements with my friend Hanz. There are a couple of things different in this measurement though. For starters in the first measurement we used only one speaker and now we used two. Also the carpet wasn't there yet in the first measurement we did. We still had to guess the listening and speakers positions a bit that will influence the measurements of course. Roughly we have been seeing the same peaks in the lower area's but we did see an even more nasty dip now between 60 and 70 Hertz. It looks like to dips very close to each other. We will have to figure out how to fix this. Of course the bass traps are still not in place. I hope that will help to solve this.

Here you also see another waterfall view of the measurements. Of course the same peaks and dips are there, but we have seen that in the higher areas the RT60 time is getting quite acceptable. That means that the real echoing in the room is quite gone. Even with a room that is still quite empty. The carpet on the floor in combination with the acoustic ceiling helped a lot in this. When everything is in place there will be much more dispersion of sound so I guess it will only get better.

Then later on in the week the bass traps arrived. 5 very big boxes with two of them in each box. The traps are 2 meters high and 60 by 60 centimeters wide. I moved them downstairs right away but I'm still figuring our how to fasten them. They won't stay in place by them selves. I saw that special glue/kit is sold by Auralex that should do the trick, but another thing is that they are standing on top of my cabling guiding system and I need to be able to open that so I'm figuring our how to solve that.

I managed to put two on top of each other in the corner like they should go. That leaves 40 centimeters since the ceiling is 2,4 meters high. So I'll have to find a way as well to cut the stuff to fit. It is quite soft material and I guess a sharp knife will do the trick, but since it is so big it will be difficult to keep it straight. I'm sure we will figure out a way to do this. Another thing we didn't account for is that there are some wall power sockets behind the traps now and also in the ceiling there are two for my active surround set that are just over the traps. Ah well another puzzle to solve :) I hope we can do another set of measurements soon with the traps in place to see how that worked out and see what else is necessary. I'll keep you posted as usual!

Apollo Studio Acoustics (Part 4)

Last week we had another very busy week. To start with we though last weekend we were finished painting, but when we looked closer not everything was covered entirely. So we actually had to paint everything again which was kind off a set back. But now it looks all nice and tidy. As you can see all the walls are black. And in the picture you can also see that the carpet has been laid. This worked out nicely in terms of color and acoustics. I looks and sounds really nice already in the studio now. Actually all echo is gone already. So that is a good basis to work with later on. My wife picked the carpet by the way and at first I was quite skeptical about it, but now I'm glad she did this after all.

In this picture you see the studio from a different angle. I can't really capture the feel in a picture. You should really see it in real live. It looks much better then. I also started to move some more stuff downstairs already that was standing in the way on other places in the house. I can't bring to much down yet though since my furniture builder will need room too to assemble the studio furniture on the spot as well. I'll be so glad when I finally can put stuff on their final position. But I'm afraid it will be January the earliest.

I also started moving the first computers into the server room. The first thing I put on the bottom in the rack was a UPS. These machines will hold critical data for me and I don't want to loose data over a power problem. And we had our share of those during construction for all kinds of reasons, but I have learned from that. Not all computers will go in here by the way. My main recording machine will be in the studio itself, because otherwise it would result in a cabling nightmare. This computer is super silent so probably I won't even notice it too much. But the machines that go in here make plenty of noise and I'm glad that there are here. So eventually I will have to place a UPS too in the studio to hook up the recording PC.

Since the server room is actually quite big (4 by 1,5 meters) I placed a storage rack in this room as well. I can hold a lot of things that I have laying around in the studio now, like cables, PC spare parts, electronic components for my DIY projects, software boxes and CD's and books etc. This way I can keep the studio nice and tidy. As you can see on top of the shelves I already unpacked the acoustic panels that we will place later on in this acoustics project. I'm glad we chose to use massive wooden doors downstairs. When you are in the server room now it is already quite noisy (and not even everything is there yet), but when the door closes you hear absolutely nothing on the outside! And there is another door like that in the studio itself, so I guess this was a good idea :)

Apollo Studio Acoustics (Part 3)

Yesterday my friend Hanz came by and we went down in the new studio. He hadn't seen it at all. I noticed right away now that the acousticly treated ceiling was dry and we put a layer of Fiberglas coating and the first layer paint on the wall that a lot of the echoing was already gone. Probaly the ceiling had the most effect on this already. We decided to start doing an acoustics measurement in the studio for a first impression. I brought an active monitor downstairs, my notebook and the measurement microphone and we fired up the Room EQ software that we used before in my current studio.

In the diagram on the right you can see the results of that first measurement. We only measured from 20-500 Hz since that is where you can do the most compensation with acoustic treatment. As you can see there is a nasty peak at around 25 Hz, one at 50 Hz and two very close to each other between 80 and 90 Hz. These last two amplify each other and will be the most difficult to compensate. Probably some are harmonics of each other so when one is canceled out another will disappear as well. But that is difficult to predict.

Here you see another diagram showing also the dy-out time of the different frequencies. As you can see on the low frequencies they don't even fit in the graph which mean the dy-out time is over 1000 mS. On the higher frequencies it is more like 500 mS. For optimum result it would all have to go down to 200 mS or so. Not more because it will sound echo-like but not less because otherwise the room becomes to dead. But we are first going to focus on the problems in the low frequencies. We are going to put Bass traps in all 4 corners of the studio to see what happens after that. We decided to not try and fix everything at the same time but do it step by step. I just ordered the corner traps from AIX foam and took the largest one because of the peak in the very low frequencies. When they are in place we will do the next measurement.

We are also very busy painting at the moment. My wife did the most part in that actually, but as you can see in the picture our youngest daughter also 'helped' (ahum) a bit. The ceiling still isn't painted. The painter did arrive but left again, because we both agreed it would be better to spray paint the ceiling because of the very rough structure. Hopefully that will be done now on Friday. After that we can add the second layer on the walls ourselves and then on Monday finally the carpet can be laid (we hope). That will really be a relief since when the carpet is laid we can put more stuff downstairs that belongs there and it can stay there. Now I feel like we picked up everything already six times to much just to move it to another spot. But it feels good to get some things going again after a long period of waiting for the moisture to get out. Today we even removed the de-moisterizer.

Apollo Studio Acoustics (Part 2)

Today the second layer of acoustic material was sprayed on the ceiling. It is drying now overnight and we just hired a painter that will paint it black tomorrow. I got some questions what material I used on the ceiling. Here you can see it in the picture. It is called Relius Hoeka Akoestikpleister. Don't expect miracles from this because this stuff on its own doesn't do much. And I don't want the room to be dead right away. But it will help better than the concrete ceiling I had before. And the structure makes it look nice as well. But that structure makes it also difficult to paint it over and that is why we decided to hire a painter to do this job. He thought he would need two layers of paint as well to get it covered.

In the picture on the right you see the material being sprayed on. It is a nasty job I can tell you. The smell is not so nice and down in the basement there is not much ventilation yet. The second layer still was not as thick as we thought it would be. It seems that the 1.5 centimeters we anticipated actually was based on a different kind of material than was initially planned. Ah well we will see how things turn out. We can't change it anymore now that it is already applied. The sprayer had a little set back this morning. It turned out that the plastic he put on the wall to prevent the material to get on the wall had fallen down. So he needed to put new plastic on in the studio before he could get to work. This took him about an hour extra I think. Ah well I'm glad this is done now. I think this is the last time you will see a white color on the walls and ceiling :)

I already bought some acoustic panels as well that we can use to filter out reflections in the studio. I bought these panels from a German company named AIXFOAM. You can find their website here if you are interested:
http://www.aixfoam.de/. You can get this stuff in a lot of different sizes, colors and structure. I chose grey because I think it will look good on the black walls and ceiling. But I don't know yet if I will have enough. We will have to measure and put them in several places on trial and error basis to get the optimal result I guess. Luckily my friend Hanz know a lot about acoustics and this will be his little project. But I'm very curious on the end result later on in the process. The acoustics in my current studio are very bad, that is why I work a lot on headphones and I hope I can use them less in the future.

Another thing you might have seen in the movie I recently uploaded is the separate server room located next to the studio. It is about 1.5 by 4 meters and holds the power distribution, but also a 19" cabinet that will hold the noisy equipment later on. Most PC's and switches have fans that make a lot of noise and I want to try and keep them out of the studio as much as possible. So in this way the server room is a bit related to this acoustics thread as well by keeping the noise level lower in the studio. But it wont return anymore in this thread of posts since I will be opening a new one soon about the cabling project of the new studio. That will be a completely different story all togheter. OK enough for today. We are going to prepare for some days of painting.

Apollo Studio Acoustics (Part 1)

Finally things are moving on a bit again. The studio is dry enough now to start working on finishing the wall and ceilings etc. We started today to work on the ceilings of both the studio and the cinema. As I told you before the whole concrete structure of these rooms make them echo a lot. We really need to put some damping materials on there to reduce this. The cinema will need a bit more then the studio in that sense. In the studio I want to keep some natural acoustic, because when that becomes to dead it will be very tiring to work in it. The human ears seem to need that. So what are we going to do? Well to start with we found a special plaster for the ceilings. You can see the buckets with the stuff standing in this picture. All quite heavy. Hard to imagine that this has to stick to the ceiling.

The stuff has to be sprayed to the ceiling. It is not something you can do yourself, we hired a specialized company that has the equipment and experience to do this. As you can see they carefully covered everything in the room to avoid the plaster to stick on places it doesn't belong. They used a lot of plastic and cardboard. They covered all the walls and also my cabling guiding system in the studio. To get the optimum result they need to spray on quite a layer. In total there will be about 1.5 centimeters of this plaster on the ceiling. They can't do that in one time. So on Friday they put on the first layer and let that dry over the weekend. On Monday they will come back and do the second layer.

Here you can see the result of the first layer. It is quite a rough structure as you can see. At first we wanted to buy the stuff in black, since that is the color I want for the walls and ceiling, but our order was to small for the supplier to mix this especially for us. They assured us though that we could just paint over it and that this would not affect the acoustic effect. But now that I see this rough texture I think we need to spray the black paint on there as well. We asked the guy who did the ceiling if he could help us with that as well. He told us that he doesn't do that himself but that he worked together with a painter who does. So he is going to put us in contact with that guy.

In the picture on the right you can also see the first inhabitant of the new studio. We moved the Eminent 310 downstairs already and I can tell you that this was not a funny job to do. It is quite heavy actually. I think only for this reason it will never leave the studio again, I can't imagine getting it back up in one piece again. As you can see it is nicely covered. I hope it won't suffer from this spray job. One other thing I can tell you that this acoustic plaster does smell very bad then it is still wet. The fumes coming from it really irritated my throat the first night after it was sprayed on. But now (a day later) the stuff is dry and that is luckily gone. We can anticipate on that now for coming Monday when they spray on the second layer.

First Apollo Studio Video Tour

Last week we went down in the basement for the first time. My friend Chris was with me and filmed it. As you can see it was still quite dark and moist. But it is nice to get a feel for the space for the first time. As you can hear from the audio there is quite some natural reverb down there. Now I'm sure we will have to work on the acoustics in the new studio.

First go at Room EQ

Last week we had a first go at trying to improve the acoustics in my studio. As I stated before my friend Hanz heard some nasty peaks in the low end of the sound. I bought a Behringer FBQ2496 to solve these problems. The FBQ2496 is basically a very precise equalizer. You can set filters to lower the level of the problem frequencies.

We hooked up a Behringer measurement microphone to the fireface 800 on my mastering PC. This was the easiest way since this microphone needs phantom power. After that we downloaded the Room EQ Wizard software from: http://www.hometheatershack.com/roomeq. Surprisingly this software is free to use. And it is widely used by audiophiles and professionals around the world.

After setting up the software and adjusting the right position and input levels for the microphone, we did a couple of measurements. In the picture on the left you see the result. The blue line is the ideal situation, and the red line is the actual situation. As you can see we only focussed on the low end up to 200 Hertz.
As you can see there is a big dip around 100 Hertz and quite a big peek after that. This has to do with room resonances. Also between 40-50 and 80-90 there are some peeks. After measuring the software calculates the filters it has to set to compensate for the peaks. Unfortunately this is the only thing you can fix a bit. The dip is not fixable Hanz explained to me because it is caused by reflections that cancel each other out in the room. If you make them louder they still will cancel each other out and it will have the same result.

In the picture in the right you see some new lines. Again the same blue ideal line but now another light blue line is added. These are the actual filter calculations that the software did. One nice feature of room EQ is that you can transmit these values over midi to the FBQ2496. Unfortunately though this didn't seem to work. So we entered the values manually in the equalizer. Next time we will spend some more time figuring out why the midi transmit didn't work. The red dotted line you see in the picture now is the curve that Room EQ wizard now predicts to be actual in the room. We did not have time to measure again. So we will have another go somewhere in the future. We did do some listening tests with the FBQ2496 running and put it in bypass mode a couple of times and we could hear the difference. It was subtle but the low end definitely got more definition (less muddy). So the technical side works. Now we have to try to improve it a bit more. Off course the best way to solve these problems would be to treat the room with acoustic materials, but that is not going to happen anymore in this studio. I will be starting a very exiting new project that I will tell you about soon :)