Hi everyone, Dennis Foley from Acoustic Fields. Today we're gonna talk about the kick, the
bass, and the war that they both have with the room. So kick drum frequency response, 50 to
80 hertz, right in that frequency range. Bass guitar, 40 to 400. So you see a lot of overlap
here. Whenever you see overlap, you've got twice the problem. Okay, and if your room is not
set up to handle one problem, now you got two. So wavelengths don't fit in the room. So...
You're going to have, like I said, the shared frequency here. So you're going to have two
sound sources with the same frequency. 40 Hertz is 28 foot long. No room's that long that we
see. 50 Hertz, 22 foot sometimes, but very seldom. And that's only in one dimension. But remember
we have three sound fields, width, height, and length. So we have to make sure we have the
appropriate treatment for that. We have room modes in all three sound fields. Are you hearing
both clearly? We have a lot of songs that we use for testing and there's a lot of songs
that have good bass and good kick at the same time, but getting your room to allow them to
separate, that's the key. The recording's good. You know, you can hear both of them in the
recording, you put on headphones. But when you play them back in your room, can you hear them
with the same definition, separation, attack and decay rates that they need to have? Are
you hearing both clearly or? Excuse me, the term we like to use is mud and soup. Because
that's what it sounds like when you get wavelengths, you know, that don't fit and the same frequency.
It's hard to separate the two. That's really important. So what do modes do? They exaggerate
or attenuate. You hear too much, which is bloom or, you know, bass boom, people call it. or
attenuate, you don't hear anything at all. Not so much the case with low frequency energy.
Okay. The treatment is absorption, not diffusion. 50% surface area coverage. We go back to our
acronym TAP, type, amount, position. We have to have about 50% coverage in all three sound
fields. If you're going to control it. The floor to ceiling dimension is that standard 60, 70,
80 Hertz problem. That's all low frequency. That has to be treated. People forget about
the floor to ceiling dimension all the time. They get width and length, but they need to
look up and see what's going on floor to ceiling, because that's a big factor. We're going to
use absorption, we're going to use low frequency, and we're going to need about 50%. Our ACDA
series and our carbon panel series are five foot in height for a reason. Because in North
America where we work mostly, ceilings are eight feet. At five feet you're making that 50% minimum
requirement. And that's what you got to have, we found over the last 17 years, to have a
real big impact. on the low end. To make you feel like, you know, the money you spent to
get that has been worth it. You know, a panel here, a panel there is not going to do it.
We found the ratios are about 50% surface area coverage in all three sound fields, floor,
ceiling, width. You got to keep those sound fields in mind because bass is a pressure wave
which just fills the room like water. Tear off the roof, pour water in your room, that's bass.
poor maple syrup, we used to use that example. What's it do? It goes in the middle, fills
to the boundary surfaces and then rises. That's where low frequency energy is. It's a good
way to visualize it. So make sure your kick base aren't fighting your room and the way
you interject between that war is the proper treatment. Hope this helps. Thank you.
So please do that because we offer special price discounts to only those on our newsletter.
And then don't forget about our forum. We have started a forum on our own website where people
ask questions and I usually get a chance every couple days to look at it. There's an interchange
between people on the forum and we'll give you real answers on a regular basis so that'll
help you. Thank you.