Hi everyone, Dennis Foley from Acoustic Fields.
Today we're going to talk about room amplitude and frequency response.
I get a lot of people that call in and send their measurements of their room and I have
to remind them that there are certain qualifications to those measurements and we need to understand
what really a flat response in a room is all about.
So we know from past videos that room size and volume dictates the response curve.
And we know that in small rooms we always have that big bump below 100 cycles.
So that's always a problem in small rooms.
So we know that these bumps and peaks are directly related to the size of the room and
the volume and also the usage, okay?
Because what we do and how much energy we put in the room determines how the room reacts
to that energy.
So we know that we have peaks and troughs and we know from past videos that our peaks
can exaggerate certain frequencies and certain sounds.
And we know that the troughs can attenuate or completely eliminate.
I always tell people, I mean you can EQ a trough in a frequency response curve and blow
up your equalizer because the room is simply not going to let you work with it in that
way.
And I know that's hard to understand but that's really how it is.
So what do we get?
We get a relationship where we get a new curve.
Good or better or worse so to speak with every half dB increase in our gain.
So when we reach for that gain knob, if the top one was our original curve that we measured
before and we reach for that gain knob and we push that gain knob up a half a dB, that
curve is going to change.
That's how sensitive room response is.
So every time you increase or decrease the gain, you're changing the response curve of
the room.
So what is a flat room?
Well, it's that response at that pressure level.
So it's whatever the pressure level in the room is that you've created with that gain.
That's going to be your response.
So we like to try to work with our response curves in our room between 82-85 dB SPL and
that gives us plenty of headroom and energy to go from there.
So I hope that helps.
Just realize that the frequency response of your room is directly dependent on gain.
Thank you.