Hi everyone, Dennis Foley from Acoustic Fields.
Today we’re going to talk about room size and volume as I get a lot of questions about
this and it just never ceases to amaze me how many, how much misunderstanding there
is about this.
So I kind of put together some guidelines here and maybe this will help the situation
a little bit.What is a room?
A room is really this huge box of pressure.
Well, not huge in some cases.
But it’s this box of pressure from our loudspeakers or whatever the usage is, live room, control,
voice.
It’s a box that must contain and manage all the energy that you put in it if you’re
going to achieve certain results.
In a live room, you want to record certain things, you want them to sound a certain way.
In the control room, the mixing and mastering room, you want translation.
So each room usage has a particular goal that you have to achieve.
And the room size and volume are critical with this box of pressure, Obviously the smaller
we make the box and if we keep the pressure constant, we’re going to have issues.
Obviously if we keep increasing the pressure and decreasing the volume of the box, we might
as well just shoot ourselves because that’s a relationship that will not work at all.
So, how do we calculate room volume which is length, width, height.
Good simple formula.
Take the length of your room, the width of your room and the height of your room and
multiply the three.
That will give you your cubic volume, cubic feet of volume.
If you’re overseas, cubic metric volume, you just have to get this number in your head.
So I went through our database and I came up with three divisions.
We have a 116 rooms built and measured in our database and I took all those rooms and
I broke them down into three areas and I think these three areas will help.
They’re all based on volume.
So if your room length, width and height is less than 1,500 feet, please, cubic feet,
please find another room.
Why do I say this?
It’s just too small for any energy to be managed correctly.
Let’s take the low frequency energy.
If you’re going to manage low frequency in a room less than 1,500 cubic feet, the
amount of treatment that you have to put in the room will make it so small that you wouldn’t
be able to sit in it.
So less than 1,500 cubic feet, absolutely not.
Find another room.
Less than 3,000 cubic feet.
Now these can vary, you know length, width and height, they can all be different.
But it’s the cubic feet we’re looking at because we’re talking about a box of
pressure here.
So less than 3000 cubic feet, problematic.
Yes, it can be treated.
Yes, it can be dealt with depending on usage and what you’re trying to achieve in that
room.
Less than 3,000 cubic feet works for some usages but not for other.
So it’s – when I call problematic, it’s treatable, depending on the usage.
And you have to figure out what you’re trying to do in the room versus how much treatment
you’re going to need in the room.
The next one is greater than 4,500 cubic feet.
Anything over 4,500 cubic feet is treatable and usable almost in all forms and usages.
So, that will give you some idea of three different levels to look at.
If you’re considering a room for extra usage, look at the length, width and height, get
the volume, look at this chart and I’m going to include the chart at the end so you can
visualize it.
And just look at where your dimensions fall within that chart and realize that if it’s
less than 1,500 cubic feet, find another room.
Just do that, you’ll be much better off.
Less than 3,000 cubic feet, we can treat it.
It’s problematic, we have pressure issues, we have RT 60 reverberation time issues but
it is treatable depending on usage.
Now there’s qualifications to the usage.
It won’t work for maybe a live room with drums but it might work for a voice room or
a control room.
So all depends on usage.
4,500 cubic feet and up, plenty of space, plenty of space to manage a low-frequency
pressure and the reflections or RT 60 times.So in this graphic here that I’m referring
to, you can see the breakdown and we have it colored in red, yellow and green.
Red is a no go acoustically and yellow is problematic depending on usage.
So keep that chart in mind and refer to it often if you’re looking at the usage and
pressure and volume
in rooms.