Do you think Genelecs are a good solution for someone looking for an all around decent solution in an untreated room?

There is really no good solution in an untreated room.

The new Genelec series are very good for what they are, and the higher end units have a "room correction" system which can compensate somewhat for room-related low end problems at one point in the room. This is a nice thing when you're stuck having to mix in an improvised control room in a dressing room or a bathroom, but it still doesn't give you bass that you can trust in an untreated room. Because the room correction system can compensate for peaks but not so much for nulls.

Room treatment buys you more per dollar than anything else you can do anywhere in the chain.
--scott

The HS8s he mentioned go down to 38 Hz and the sub goes down to 22 Hz. I think that ought to be 'bass' enough in terms of low-frequency extension anyhow. Something else must be going on to rob the OP of his bass.

Yeah but this is Gearspace, where room treatment is so often "impossible". Gearspace, where there's a thread every week asking for speakers and microphone suggestions "for an untreated room".

Yes, precisely, although I don't necessarily trust "goes down to" as a reference. But yes, I agree that it's something else but I think trying it outdoors in isolation is a step toward understanding and figuring out what it is.
--scott

For me, i have no intention of ever opening a commercial studio or mixing room. I just need something a little better to work on my own songs. Right now, its a lot of testing out the final mix in different environments and then tweaking. Hoping to find a stop gap solution where the mix translates decently well across different listening environments. It doesnt have to be perfect. Just a little better. I also dont make modern bass heavy music genres, so am assuming i dont need to worry as much about the low end

People produce/mix/master without room treatment all the time.

While I certainly think checking your mix in many different places is a useful strategy, it is not a substitute for treatment. It's not about having a "commercial studio" with clients and it's not only about "bass". As just one example: first reflection points - you are hearing the sound from the speakers and also hearing it bouncing off the walls a little bit later. You are getting a double-image of the sound.

In the old days, if you had a double image on your broadcast TV set, you would fiddle with the antenna until you got rid of it. You wouldn't tolerate a visual double-image.

Do any parts of your songs involve recording instruments with microphones? Room acoustics matters there, too. We all know speakers are sexy and room treatment is not sexy, but still the amount of money people are willing to throw at speakers and the utter refusal to put in any treatments never fails to amaze me.

(sigh) I can't believe it's 2024 and I am writing a post arguing for the value of acoustical treatment. Oh that's right, it's April 1st, 2024.

and a happy April 1st to you too.

People? You mean professional people? Name some.

"People" also eat junk food 'all the time' and skip their oil change 'all the time'. The frequency with which something occurs does not make it Best Practices, or even a good idea.

In any case, what he said was that acoustic treatment was the best bang-for-the-buck in audio and that is indisputably correct.

No worries. You make really good sense and valid points. I will certainly look into it. I think based on my research as well as my own personal situation -- it's a toss between going all headphones and soundid reference or going with something smaller that is better quality -- like mtm iloud 5's or genelencs. no room for big speakers and subs in my studio.

Especially since the film industry had this all figured out by the late 1930s - after sound had been in use for roughly 10 years - the major studios constructed entire sets out of acoustic traps and diffusers to look like walls and furniture, and recorded orchestras in the same buildings (sometimes the same sets) fashioning gobos that could be set up and broken down quickly - making it possible to have makeshift audio recording studios.

It’s all known science and what to do to control it, but around here, it’s some kind of novelty which, when repeated, gets mocked, as you’ve just seen a few posts above with the classic, inane contribution of “people have been [fill in the blank] for years”

I have genelecs (though not with "room correction") in a somewhat treated room and I STILL check on headphones, Slate VSX, Boombox and in car.

It's usually checking rather than making drastic changes fortunately! I usually find I mix vocals and snares a touch loud, which probably means my speakers could be wider..but hey, I know where I am.

But yeah - no treatment = always guessing (up to a point). You can't fix time domain problems (room modes) with EQ. Once you've fixed those physical problems, you can ice the cake with room correction software.

You mean like people with PhD's? Yeah.

If you set up the speakers correctly and have the right room it goes down to 20 Hz with zero treatment.

Most treatment is just a bandaid for a small room problem. Bass traps definately help, but they don't fully fix the problem.

Room treatment is a bargain. There's no better cost/benefit ratio in the whole music/audio production universe. For heaven's sake, just spend a few hundred bucks on some wall panels and gobos. Make incremental improvements. Every time you take a step forward you'll notice more and learn more.

I'm the proud owner of a new pair of Genelec nearfields, love them to death already! But in no way do they reduce the importance of my room treatment, and in fact they're making me realize how much more I could use.

Not sure what you're talking about here!

If by "the right room" you mean a properly built room, then I suppose you have a point. Most would consider that "having treatment" though.

Also - I've never seen any sort of control or mastering room without *some* treatment. They may not have bass trapping as such ('cos it's built into the walls), but you'll have diffusion and resonator panels.

You're also not wrong about a 'small room problem". Most good sounding small rooms started off as much bigger rooms! At the same time it's possible to improve a small room significantly, which is what you're really aiming for in these circumstances.

Indeed, but this is not exactly a good thing.
--scott

Bass waveforms can't fully form in a small room.

Hmm.

I stopped to think about that for a moment.

And then i did some googling.

Found this:

https://www.talkbass.com/threads/abo...e-myth.797797/

Which makes a good point - how do you hear bass in headphones then? I mean - subbass MODES might not be able to form in a small room, that makes sense. but not that the sound just can't be heard until a room is a certain size.

Thoughts?

The other thing that occurred to me is that most rooms do not have infinite baffles as walls. You'll always have some sound leakage/absorption into the space beyond the walls; in which case, there's always going to be longer wavelengths/modes possible.

I think it's all about the physics. The tiny amount of bass coming out of a headphone is nothing compared to a massive sound system. Our ears and body filter and alter the sound as well.

You have to think about how much space it takes for the speaker dynamics to come together. If you're too close then it doesn't sound correct. Although people will sit in front of the bass stack like it's jesus.

Apologies but this doesn’t make any technical sense to me.

A speaker can either reproduce a low freq or it can’t.

If a small speaker can make you hear 50Hz close to your ear, then there’s no reason why a big speaker in a room can’t.

If you think about it, if you needed the space of a waveform between speaker and ear to “hear” the freq, headphones wouldn’t work at all.

Being “too close” to a speaker could sound weird if the tweeter and woofer are physically separated. But I don’t know what you mean by “speaker dynamics” in this context.

This is where i am confused. I watched that Beato and Clearmountain interview and I realized what i make aligns with some of Clearmountains views. There is way too much bass and low end in modern music genres and i dont make modern music genres. So now i am wondering if most speakers for studios are made for EDM and HH geners in mind and the stuff i have and do will never need or utilize that low end capability so i just need to really worry and deal with the mid and trebles and make sure they are as correct as possible across most listening environments?

So my question is, if you are making things like Son or mariachi music type stuff, do you even need to care about the low end? There is no 808 or sub bass in that.

That’s not how you hear bass - if it were true, you’d never hear the bass on headphones.

The waveform comes out of the speaker fully formed, it’s when it hits walls and ceilings and corners and bounces back around the room as multiple reflections - you have a problem: nulls, modes and peaks.

That’s what bass trapping is for, to quell as much of that activity as possible.

Well, I suppose you need to know what is there that shouldn’t be but you can do that in headphones I suppose. But it’s not just bass end that matters in rooms. And when we say “bass end”, it’s often pretty high up - 500Hz isn’t exactly rumbling subs but a bad room has lots of modes around there! But you might not need a sub to mix your low end right

As for “speakers for types of music” - not really. Some speakers are maybe more delicate when it comes to spl in low freqs (we used to have ATCs in a writing room, replaced them with presonus speakers when the clients kept blowing drivers!) but that’s more inappropriate use than music-specific.

I’d just listen to similar styles of music whilst mixing, and learn your speakers (assuming the room is good enough to learn them!)

Again, we do not hear the LENGTH of a waveform. We hear positive and negative variations in sound pressure at our ear as the specific parts of the wave arrive at our ear. That is why we can hear bass on earbuds and headphones.
When we are listening to speakers, THE ROOM has to deal with the length of the waveform, in the sense that as the room size decreases, reflections will increasingly cause the first part of long waveforms to bounce back into the room and interfere with the remainder of that specific waveform at our ear. That interference at specific low frequencies happens in combination with interference from all the other reflections at all frequencies, from all surfaces, for as long as those reflections are audible in a particular room. Room dimensions, construction materials, and room treatment all combine to render a room more or less suitable for critical listening or mixing.

No, I mean audio professionals. People who get paid for the music/mixes/masters they make. Not someone with a PhD in English literature, for example.

I personally have never heard of this, but I am sure many Gearspacers would be very interested to learn more.

What are the dimensions of this room? What percentage of the treatment-wary bedroom warriors on Gearspace do you think already have one of these "right rooms"? Once you are done naming those professional audio engineers who record, mix and master with zero room treatment, maybe you could also describe how to determine if a room is "the right room" that requires zero treatment.

For example, a blueprint of this room would be helpful to those who cannot afford room treatments (because they spent all their money on speaker correction software.) Also, since the post that prompted your original statement was about the cost-effectiveness of treatments, a description of how to build a room to the 'right' dimensions for less money than the cost of treating an existing room would be enlightening for the entire forum.


But you just finished proposing that "plenty" of people get away with zero treatments. Do they all have these magic rooms? What are the dimensions? If bass traps "help" but don't "fully fix" the problem how can omitting them entirely be superior to having them?

Speakers trigger air molecules and there has to be enough space for waves to form and converge into a single point that represents all of the frequencies correctly.

This is not really how it works. May I suggest checking out F. Alton Everest's book on small studio design?

If you take your speakers outside, you can hear plenty of low end when you are close to them.

I think what you are referring to is the issue of time alignment which isn't a room issue at all.
--scott

It's just physics.

The more air you move the more room you need.

The old adage of having a speaker too big for the room is actually true.

Nobody listens to ATC 300s at point black range. It's stupid when you think about it in terms of common sense.

That is a nonsensical statement.
Sound is not wind… it does not move air through the room. Sound pressurizes and depressurizes the air in place. Those pulse waves move through air in the room, they do NOT move air through the room.

Ignoring for a moment the woeful use of english to explain acoustics that doesn't mean a speaker can't represent bass in a small room. It means you need to be far enough away from the speaker to consider it a "point source".

(which we never are for nearfields anyway, why having speakers vertically aligned rather than sideways is better when they're closer to you, and why concentric drivers can have better phase response).

Exactly Everest's "principles of acoustics" was our primary acoustic text at uni!

But that's also not the same thing!

Part of that is needing to run the speakers loud enough for them to be efficient.

Part of it is physical size as I've said - if your tweeter is physically a foot away from the main drivers, it's not going to sound good too close because you'll literally hear the drivers individually - but you'll still "hear" the bass.

Your common sense is fine, but it's not relevant. That wasn't the point being made!

Exactly. It doesn't mean the speaker isn't producing bass freqs; it means they're cancelling out due to the room.

It is, which is why I suggest the F. Alton Everest book. Admittedly it does a lot of handwaving but it is pretty good on the basic practical stuff.

You also seem to be confusing distance from the speakers with room size, which are two different issues. Although the room size may limit how far you can get from the speakers, the opposite is not true.
--scott