In every situation, keep in mind your loudspeaker’s coverage pattern. The size and shape of your room and the application for which it will be used determine, to a large extent, how many speakers you will need and where they should be placed. This preset is specifically designed to compensate for bass buildup while maintaining a tight mid-bass response and a clear midrange. It is important to be aware of what’s happening and be prepared to take advantage of it or compensate for it.īecause a floor monitor placed on the stage is unavoidably subject to half-space loading, PreSonus loudspeakers feature a “Monitor” preset. On the other hand, if you need some extra bass boost, this technique may be worth a try. To have the most control over your sound, it’s best to start with the flattest response, so you normally should avoid wall and corner placement. This can increase the bass frequency output as much as 6 dB if the speaker is placed near one wall (half-space loading), 12 dB if placed near two walls (quarter-space loading), and as much as 18 dB if you put the loudspeaker next to the ceiling or on the floor in a corner (eighth-space loading). If you place a loudspeaker against a wall, the rear sound propagates back into the room. Very low frequencies are not directional, so they radiate from the sides and back of the loudspeaker, as well as from the front. Installing acoustic treatment on the walls will also lessen the impact of reflections at your listening position. If you are setting up your loudspeakers in a reverberant space, position your speakers so that as much sound as possible is focused on middle of the room and steered away from reflective surfaces. If a speaker is placed near a reflective surface (such as a brick wall or window), the direct sound coming from the speaker and the reflected sound coming from the wall can arrive at the listener’s ears out of phase with each other, causing cancellation and/or reinforcement. This type of reverberation (reverb) is quite desirable for recording and acoustic listening but not for loudspeakers reproducing audio at normal stage volumes. Consider the effect of a cathedral’s reflections on a choir or a piano. Like most room anomalies, reflections can be good and bad. Another way a room interacts with sound waves is through reflectivity. So if your room’s walls and floor are made of solid brick and concrete that don’t vibrate much, the bass response is going to be much more powerful than if you’re in a room where the walls are normal sheet rock construction and the floors are hardwood. This is called “diaphragmatic action,” and it dissipates energy and strips away the low-end definition. Low-frequency waves can be powerful enough to cause the walls, ceiling, and even the floor, to flex and move. So any audio in that room will have a heavy low end because the low frequencies are being exaggerated by the room acoustics and you’re likely to have for compensate for them, either in your mix or by using a system EQ.Ĭonstruction. In a room such as this, 50 Hz reproduces very well-maybe too well. For a 50 Hz wave, 1,130/50 = 22.6 ft.) When a 50 Hz wave bounces off the wall, the reflective wave travels right back along the same path and bounces off the other wall, and the cycle repeats. (To calculate how long an audio wave is, divide the speed of sound-1,130 ft./second-by the frequency. A 50 Hz wave is also about 22.6 feet long.
Let’s say we have a long, narrow room where the distance from one side to the other is 22.6 feet. When a room’s width or length correlates directly to the length of a waveform at a specific frequency, a standing wave can occur where the initial sound and the reflected sound begin to reinforce each other. This may seem odd until you think about the physical length of audio waves at various frequencies.
The size of the room directly impacts how well certain frequencies will be reproduced. In general, the following physical features of a room can affect a sound system’s performance: It’s necessary to recognize and correct what that space does to the sound system in order to optimize the P.A.’s performance in the venue. Smaller music venues are often chosen for location or architectural aesthetics, rather than music reproduction. For large-scale tour productions, venues are often sports arenas that have been designed to maximize crowd noise. In most live environments, the room is rarely designed to maximize the listening experience. Understanding how a room interacts with audio will help you to get the most out of your system. Difficult room acoustics, combined with improper loudspeaker placement, can interfere with achieving the fidelity of which your loudspeakers are capable. The performance of any loudspeaker will be influenced by the acoustics of the space in which they operate.