WonderSound Audio Consultation

“Find Your WonderSound”

We make rooms sound excellent.

As engineers and musicians, we love listening to music. Even more so, our entire livelihood is built on accuracy, balance, and fun in the listening position. After completing a complete refresh, buildout, and tune at our own studio as well as our personal listening rooms over the years, we want to bring the same level of expertise to your listening room, home theater, or control room. We may be young and and we do not have a long list of legendary clients, but come listen to the control room at Wonderhaus if you require proof of our expertise.

Our approach to room treatment uses a combination of acoustic treatment (absorption & diffusion), placement, and corrective EQ for speaker tuning. We believe that just as in record-making, developing an excellent acoustic space is both a scientific AND creative endeavor. As such, we use a calibrated measurement microphone and REW software to “capture” and graph the response of the room during each step of our process, but always check these results against what our ears tell us. The scientific approach helps us quantify more easily what our ears tell us, but our ears and our judgement are by far our most valuable tools.

We offer a variety of services in pursuit of audio perfection:

1) General Consultation and Recommendation

2) Equipment Specification and Purchasing

3) Component Installation and Setup

4) Room Treatment

5) Room Measurement and Correction

Next, we walk you through an example of how this process works at the pro audio level.

Although it was already built out as a recording studio, both rooms at Wonderhaus required quite a lot of modification to their acoustic treatment. This provided a unique challenge, as our budget made it necessary minimize downtime and construction, as well as utilize as much of the already built treatment as possible (treating the live room was a more typical scenario where the room was initally open and reverberant, and we controlled the response by building a combination of absorptive panels on the walls and diffusers on the ceiling).

STEP 1: LISTEN & MEASURE

Spending time in the room listening critically to music, as well as our own speaking voices, was the first step in understanding the changes that were needed.

Next, we measured the response of our speakers in the room & analysed the results in Room EQ Wizard (REW). The results both confirmed what we felt we were hearing and gave us a quantifiable reference to base our treatment on.

The control room had several significant problems that resulted in a very unnatural sounding room:

• The entire front wall, rear wall, and ceiling were covered in fabric. This absorbed any natural reverb in the room and resulted in it feeling extremely “dry”—like being in a walk-in closet filled with clothes.

• The installed treatment was not full-range: it was too thin to absorb bass and midrange frequencies.

  • There were significant unabsorbed “room modes” ringing, which made the bass response of the room feel very muddy, with many frequencies being masked.

  • It also absorbed too much in the treble frequencies, and the room sounded very dark.

Measuring speaker response in the room

STEP 2: ACOUSTIC TREATMENT

Now that we knew what we were working with, we outlined our treatment plan. Our goal is to get the room sounding as good as possible with physical treatment first before using any EQ. We don’t just want to end up with a good-sounding system in poor acoustic environment— we want the room itself to feel and sound natural.

We decided to start by taking the rear wall panels down and adding an additional 4” of Rockwool insulation. We also added Rockwool in the drop ceiling, which was previously empty space. We could now absorb through the midrange frequencies and made a small dent in the bass fequencies. To absorb the lowest frequencies with this method, we would need up to 4 feet on insulation behind the walls, which was not feasable in this room. We used other methods to control the low end, which we will come back to.

Next, we added diffusers to restore some natural reverb. We tested, cut, and finished wood slats arranged in groups of nine across the entire rear wall. We also hung two wood diffusers on the ceiling near the mix position.

A recording studio room is often filled with gear & large furniture, and ours is no exception. Fortunately, there is an acoustic benefit to this— not only do they make the room more diffuse, but large speaker cabinets and outboard racks have so much mass that they can act as imprecise bass traps. We used our large cabinets here strategically to help absorb low-end energy.

We measured the room again after each step of the process, compared that to our observations, and found that we were able to smooth out the frequency response of the room significantly down to ~250hz.

STEP 3: Corrective EQ

We prefer to use a 1/3 octave analog EQ for the final step in room correction. Modern DSP & software EQs are always an option, but, like our friends at Ocean Way Audio, we have found that we are able to acheive better results with analog EQ units.

In our control room, audio signal flows from our D/A interfaces —> Analog EQ —> monitor controller.

As we got our physical treatment in place, we started making system-wide EQ changes based on our latest measurements. From there, we adjusted and fine-tuned by ear until we felt like we were getting everything we wanted out of the speakers.

STEP 4: LISTEN & ENJOY

By the end of our process, we found ourselves with a control room that feels comfortable, sounds excellent, and translates mixes very well. All treament is tailored specifically for this room, as any treatment plan should be unique to the space its designed for.