Studio 16 East Gets a Tune-Up

No one cares about audio until they can’t hear it. A wise television audio guru once told me this. In a similar vein, if what you’re hearing is poor quality, it’s going to drive you nuts. Whether it’s your home theatre room or Geeks & Beats Studio 16 East, boxy rooms suffer from flutter echo. The sound bounces off one wall to the next, distorting the sound you hear when the waves return to your ears. Anything that breaks up that wave when it hits the wall helps, but nothing helps quite like sound absorption panels. It’s called “tuning the room.”

Danny Scott at WaveAcoustic to the rescue!

Listen to this “before and after” to hear the difference. It’s particularly noticeable with the claps that generate those high-frequency, quick moving waves:

I installed four 2’x4′ panels 2″ thick in the two primary corners of Studio 16 East. The core of the panels is a thick fiberglass called Roxol that doesn’t reflect the sound, it absorbs it.

Two additional 2′ x 4′ panels 4″ thick are directly behind me. The thicker the panel, the deeper the bass it can absorb.

I opted to not cover the “Circuitree” on the wall. “Spousal Approval Factor” is a huge factor in any work-live environment, and the SAF on covering an expensive decal Wifey and I painstakingly installed together was pretty low. Even without the back wall covered, the flutter echo is eliminated and the room now has a “dead sound.” Dead isn’t necessarily great for music, but for spoken word it’s essential — you want the cleanest version of the audio possible so you can “tune” the voice with equalizers.

Danny at WaveAcoustic provided Geeks & Beats with two “bass traps” for the corners, too!

One of the neat things about sound absorption panels is they don’t have to look like you’ve hung blank canvases on your walls. I happen to like the white-on-white look, myself. WaveAcoustic also does panels printed with any image you’d like: