My new room is now empty. Some new paint (maybe carpet) and a few touch ups and I'll be ready to start moving in my gear! I had Lowes do a quote on Ruxul Rockboard 60 the other day and it was $87 a bag! It's $52 at Amazon. Anyway I'm making slow progress and I'm getting pretty pumped about it. I'll check with Home Depot next and have them look for Owens and Corning 703 as well next time. I'm still trying to decide if I want frames or not. I think the panels will look ok with just fabric.

Clint read my post #48 and the paragraph about what you can do in an empty room. Something very few do because they don't have an empty room and most people are installing monitors where they can rather than where they could.
 
Here it is again:
 
If you are about to install a speaker system and you have an empty room you must try this. Feed a mono mix of a quality CD into a single speaker. Attach it to a long cable. Get a friend to move around the room holding the speaker (roughly at the right height) while you listen in front of it. Check the areas you were thinking about first. Try other areas. I can guarantee it will sound better somewhere else. There will be a place where the mix will sound robust and the bottom end just nice and tight and perfect. This point should be the centre point for your monitor system location. No one does this.
 
I realise that the best speaker sound may not necessarily be practical but at least you will know where they sound best.
 
 

Good idea Jeff! I will be able to try this. I'm going to read a lot before I do the treatment and make sure I'm happy with the location of everything. I don't want to have take all the panels down and redo everything 5 times. Measure twice cut once....as they say.

Great Clint. It might be a little harder if the room is untreated but I think you will still get the concept that in some parts of the room the speaker will just sound better.
 
The same principle can be used to determine where the best place to setup a drumkit might be in a studio or any room for that matter. People just plonk drums down where they think they should be. A much better option is before setting up the drums, get the floor tom out and tune it for a decent fat lowish note. Hold the floor tom close to your body by hand and walk around and hit it. In some parts of the room it will explode with bottom end, in other parts it will be thin and whimpy. Obviously you set the drums where the floor tom sounds best.
 
If the floor tom sounds great everywhere it means you in a great even sounding room and then you could put the drums almost anywhere. I have still found in some studios though there is still one place where the floor tom really booms.

 Bill, Danny, Jeff, Mike all good comments from differing perspectives. I know many of you guys have done this for years and know what works. I think clintmartin is going to need to sort through some of this if he wants to simply add acoustic treatment lol! I think Bat was attempting to clarify things a little bit.
 
  Bill -I guess if the reality of ARC is that it only gives a perception that it did something instead of actually doing it, it sure makes a darned good perception. Good enough for some folks to make mixes that translate well across many systems. I'm not in this discussion to win or lose, simply to put another option out there. I am not convinced that it uses any kind of trickery to get the job done other than make corrections where possible and where necessary, so maybe we'll have to part ways on that. I appreciate your comments. I don't think you are the kind of guy that would simply form opinions with very little info to go on. I'm sure you have had your own experiences that have lead to your take on the subject, as I have had mine. There is certainly nothing harmful in being cautious about anything no matter what it is. Your conclusions wouldn't lead to a bad mix. Like you say people have been getting rooms close for at least 40 years with rockwool, foam and fiberglass done correctly. My only nit with it as a singular approach is that there can still be gaps in the outcome, and a fully treated studio isn't always an option for everyone.
 
 I have actually used presets on occasion after I tweaked and found out that my tweaks weren't any better than the presets lol. Not always but on occasion. Nothing wrong with a preset that just works.
 
 I think monitor correction works especially well in situations where the room surroundings might change or for the portable moving musician.Renters might not want to damage the walls.
 In my case I plan to eventually have a different space and so I don't want to ruin the space I'm using now for something else later. The idea of scraping glue,taking foam off the wall(along with the drywall paper) and filling holes is something I'd like to avoid on a major scale. There was a time in my life when I  worked with fiberglass and I hate the stuff with a passion. I will do it if necessary but I'd almost rather go see my proctologist or have a french bikini wax on my back.
 
 One other consideration that might affect others  is the design of a particular room. Most bedrooms have a door close to the corner of one wall. In my case I have a door up snug against one corner...no way in heck to get a bass absorber in there. I have a closet on another wall once again taking up part of a corner and once again impossible to add a bass absorber.So I'm kinda stuck for another solution and I don't think I'm alone in that. I don't look at it like the lesser of two evils, or even an evil at all. Just a solution that works and allows for a good translation. That and a good set of  monitor headphones and I'm good to go. Surprisingly my space is fairly acoustically interesting and the higher freq.s aren't really much of a problem. I don't have rear firing monitors and that helps.ARC does a decent job on the early reflections and EQ adjustment.
 
 I like your idea Jeff of taking the speaker to a place it sounds the best and putting the speakers there. Sometimes we might not have the luxury of putting the speakers in a given place. Hopefully he will have that luxury.
 
 Mike I see where pink noise might help to compare a given space. Not sure it could give you the full picture. It would let you see the spectrum in 1/3 octave increments. Or is yours a higher resolution? 
 
 
 
 

 
Hi Starise,
 The RTA I use has 1/24th octave increments.
 
 Jeff's idea about moving speakers around is something hi-fi enthusiasts seemed to speak about when I was a kid. I think it is a great and timeless idea. It also works very well for stage monitors like wedges and side fills.
 
best regards,
mike

I'll have to be practical. It's only 12X14. Basically a nice control room I'll have to record in. It's usually just me with an occasional drummer so it should be fine as long as the desk isn't in the middle of the room.
@Starise The topic has drifted a bit, but that's fine. A few of these guys know I've been interested in ARC2 from other threads...It's always interesting when Bitflipper, Danny and the other knowledgeable guys talk about technical things. I try to keep my mouth shut and just take it all in.
After the room is done and the panels are in I'll probably still get ARC2 since my room will still have problems...I'm sure.

 Sorry to make the topic drift a bit Cliff. I hope you get your room all set. Can't go wrong with some decent acoustic treatments if you can do that. When it comes to secondary choices as you can see, opinions differ.
 
 Mike I'm more familiar with pink noise generators in setting up large PA systems. I have attended concerts where they used it and the sound was terrible. Maybe they didn't measure correctly, and I beleive it's highly directional, meaning it wouldn't be the best solution for a PA system. Doesn't seem to deal with reflections, only EQ. I might be mistaken.
 
One contractor I recently talked with won't use it and prefers to use his ears. I think it would be interesting to see the results you get. I guess all you need to do is find a system with correction and give it a try. I also liked Dannys idea of looking at the computer file saved. I hadn't thought of doing that. I'm sure it could tell you a lot.

RTA analysis does not correct anything.
 
You use the analysis to decide what to correct, and then, if you are any good at it, you correct some stuff.
 
It doesn't tell you anything quantitative about timing issues but the fluttering you observe are the results of the timing issues.
 
The various times of arrival, at the mic position, cause comb filtering and the fluttering is the response caused by the circumstance where the stuff arrives at different times, syncs up in a mish mash, and sums to be either flat, a peak, or a null. 
 
If you run a RTA on an *electronic* example of Pink Noise and look at an averaged response you will get a straight line.
 
If you run the same test on an *acoustic* example you will almost always get a wavy line with some peaks and nulls. The smaller the peaks and nulls the better off you are.
 
If someone tells you they, or their system, did a great job of correction it is ridiculously easy to set up a RTA and find out if anything actually got corrected.
 
What this means is that a RTA may not be able to tell you much about the actual timing of the system but it will be able to tell you if any of the attempts at correction, regardless of the technology used, are providing improved results. If you do a before and after and the peaks and nulls are still fluttering with any substantial level then you'll know something worth knowing.
 
If for example, someone told you that the correction made things worse it would be fairly easy to observe on a RTA analysis and determine if things actually got worse, stayed pretty much the same, or perhaps got better.
 
If you look at a file of the results of a correction to an electronic signal you can expect to see a *straight* line. We don't listen to the electronic file... we listen to the acoustic energy in the room. An RTA and a good microphone will tell you a whole bunch about what happens to the electronic file once it becomes acoustic energy. We discussed it above, ARC doesn't test itself. You are shown the results of it's correction to the electronic file (the nearly flat line) and you have to use an independent test to check its result in the acoustic domain. 
 
I know a few guys who have done it on their ARC'd systems. I thought the results were interesting.
 
Your contractor friend is telling you what many of us have been explaining... an attentive set of ears can take you a long way.
 
 best regards,
mike
 
 
 
 
 

 Thanks Mike. Yes I knew that PN was basically only a generated set of frequencies covering the spectrum and received into a singular microphone, usually an omni correct? Some of those more elaborate units have some kind of self calibration that can be engaged to adjust the eq based on the PN.
 
  You have worked with the frequencies and watched the "beating" or the fluttering. Do you watch the graphic representation of the signal and then make adjustments accordingly based on the "flutters" you get. If flutters are timing issues then this gives you a lot more of an idea where to attack the problem than simply using ones ears.
 
 I think our ears can lie to us occasionally.Especially if we are fatigued.
 
 To simply play PN through a corrected system and see what the results are  seems pretty straight forward. So you say the results you have seen were interesting. I'm curious now.Do you mind sharing the results?