You probably could… IF you were in a huge flat area with no reflective walls and were very far from noise sources and potential complaining neighbors.
Someone in my family had a share in a vacation house out in the Mojave Desert that was about 80% of that ideal, except when the wind blew or jets passed over. We never mixed there, but speakers outside sounded phenomenal, and the quiet was so profound that the occasional distant coyote yowling was a welcome change.

(somewhat) similar experiences when using a pa system outdoors compared to indoors - the big difference between these two scenarios is the number of subwoofers required for a balanced frequency response of the speaker system...

...and tall grass is surprisingly well suited to simulating the absorption of a crowd of people - or flock of sheep ;-)

I prefer Owens-Corning Sheep. Instead of wool, they grow fiberglass.

We went exclusively KNAUF [sheep]

i don't even dare to praise the virtues of organic products anymore if they come from 'methane farters'...

I recognize "sax" as one of the participants in the sample rate thread. I assume "warren" or ("fluffy warren"?) is someone he was arguing (battling) with. I'd go and visit that blasted out no-man's-land of a thread to look it up, but that would require me to get out my gas mask, put on my lead-lined underwear and take some preemptive Potassium Iodide pills.

The solution is don't try to mix bass in a small room. Find a bigger room or expect disappointment. You can put some treatment in there to try and dampen the low end, but it still won't sound the same due to low volume.

Have you seen what rooms people are choosing for their at home setups? Most people don't mix in a bedroom if they have a choice. They go for their living room, barn, garage, sometimes basement that is larger than a bedroom.

Earbuds work because the ear canal is sealed if the buds fit properrly. The wave does fully develop and no air is moved out. It goes directly to the drum. The low frequency wave hits the drum cleanly.

Sound moves air molecules.

In this small room, the driver could be too large (or too small, but unlikely) for the room. Treatment would help. Better to choose the correct size driver, place the speakers well and then suss out any null or the opposite.

Part of the reason earbuds work well, is that there aren’t any null areas in the ear canal. In fact, the opposite is the case. Also, if any of you have seen an audiologist, you would know that bone vibration delivers a log of sound - especially bass. Part of a basic hearing test is a headset that uses skull bone to determine if any canal blockage is occurring.

If you use search, like Qwant or duckduck, you can find papers from universities explaining how sound waves move air molecules, how earbuds work, how speaker drivers work (even big ones like 32”) and how room modes occur.

GS is a good place for product release info.

Thanks again for your persistent fake expertise…
Size is not the only (or even the main) problem with most bedrooms. Most bedrooms tend to have almost square lateral dimensions, and often have a vertical dimension too close to those lateral dimensions. Those factors tend to greatly exaggerate both the destructive nulls and additive peaks at many audio frequencies.
But it is incorrect to say that bass, or any audio, can’t be loud in a small room. If you turn things up, small rooms get louder quicker and with less power than larger rooms. Small untreated rooms won’t give you accurate or useful frequency response, but they will be loud.
And usually there WILL be some bass in those rooms. Even as the nulls make certain frequencies disappear, additive bass peaks can be very pronounced. Because both those things happen at the same time, the over all low frequencies you hear in that small squarish bedroom will not be at all similar to the lows that others in better acoustic environments will hear when they listen to what comes out of such rooms.

You’re not wrong; but it’s nothing to do with “your can’t hear bass in a small room cos the wavelengths are too long to develop”.

You try to avoid small rooms for mixing because you generally run out of space to get big enough traps in, before you have enough trapping.

It’s perfectly possible to have a great sounding small room. The solution is you start with a much bigger one and build the trapping into the walls.

This isn’t the point anyone is debating, and it’s not the position you put forward before.

In a perfectly built small room that wouldn’t matter - size of driver doesn’t really matter, size of bass extension does.

No one is arguing that small rooms are unlikely to sound good.

The point was why.

There’s lots of great knowledge on GS of course, but also a fair bit of noise

Like earbuds, speakers are designed for applications. If a speaker is designed for a 100 foot room it will not work well in a 5 foot room. If it is designed for an ear canal, it will not work well in a 10 foot room.

What are the speakers designed for? Most companies tell you. A speaker designed to sit 3 feet in front of you won’t work well 20 feet in front of you. Etc

The other issue is the room itself. They may not work in the room. Whereas another speaker might. Just luck.

We do line arrays at work. We use software that predicts where the sound will go. There will be spots in the room that don’t get a lot of coverage. So we use fills. Etc

Most 18” drivers in cabinets are not designed for a closet. Most earbuds are not designed for a room.

When I was shopping for monitors a few years ago, the companies tell you what size room and listening position the speaker is designed for.

I’m pretty sure it still matters. I was looking at some mini Genelecs and these were designed to sit a few feet from the listener with a specific distance off the wall.

The 8” woofer in the cabinets may be too big for the room. Maybe the 5” are better suited. Maybe the manufacturer specifies this somewhere.

woofers are not designed for specific room sizes but for a specific frequency area to reproduce.

the only downside of using monitors with large woofers in a small room is that they become more directional - possibly too much if you're sitting close - and that tweeters and woofers are a bit far apart unless you're using a coax design.

...and for amount of sound pressure they can produce at the listening position for example Genelec will sell you something entirely different depending on if you are sitting 1m from the monitors or say 3m to be able to achieve the same reference SPL.

As you say then you get in to considerations of directionality and the size of the 'sweet spot'.

yep, spl is also amongst design criteria - but does not necessarily relate to diameter:

i have a 12" subs which go lower than their 15" equivalent (from the same manufacturer and series) and go equally loud.

All of these speaker companies believe that speakers size and room size are related.

I trust these companies.

https://www.palmer-germany.com/en/blog/studio-monitor/

https://www.jbl.com/blogs/choosing-studio-monitors.html

https://www.genelec.com/correct-monitors

https://www.genelec.com/monitor-placement

https://www.genelec.com/-/genelec-g*...ew-ones-models

https://www.genelec.com/previous-models/ht315b

there's a fine line between trusting a company and being blinded by marketing blabla (or lacking the capability to correctly interpret them)...

you simply can't hear what's going on in the lowest two octaves with tiny speakers; you then have to add a sub which mostly uses a larger woofer (or two) so there you go in terms of memrane surface...

even in a small room, a woofer needs to be very large to be become 'too large', unless you're sitting damn close!

good resources. thanks. book marked.

All of those companies believe speaker size, which is correlated with SPL capability, and distance of the mix position from the speaker are related.

Did you read these carefully? The first example clearly and primarily relates woofer size to music genre.
Room size relates to speaker size and power because larger speakers with more powerful amplifiers are often required to reach a clean target SPL in larger rooms.

Yes I did read also the SPL at frequency is not just related to diameter it also relates to xmax of the transducer and what principle the enclosure is built on amongst other things.

Relating just size to music genre is a dramatic simplification made to avoid a technical discussion of the physics of enclosure and transducer design.

The size of the cone of the woofer determines how much air volume can get pushed out. Tiny cone = weak bass

It's like splashing around in a bathtub and calling it a wavepool. A wavepool has a generator and what's interesting about this is that the actual wave is never the strongest where the wave comes out. It actually is strongest at the midpoint of the pool.

Can you "hear" the wave right at the source yes, but it's not terribly useful. Nearfielding is generally terrible for a number of reasons. It's like trying to work on a painting by putting your nose literally right on top of it.

Aaaaaa… no.

---

Ok right - you’re now talking about something else. And again, you’re not totally wrong (it’s basically impedance matching) but crucially - it wasn’t the point everyone is arguing with you about! Even with a large woofer in a small room, you’ll still hear bass, even if the waveform is longer than the room.

Can we at least agree you didn’t express what you meant very well initially? Then we can move on…

Nearfields work fine in many situations, there’s nothing inherently wrong with them like you’re suggesting. But yes you can have speakers too big for a room. Again, no one said you couldn’t.

Here's the science explaining why bass doesn't work in a small room. Hahaha. 99% of the time, it's the room and positioning. If you want to mix in a small room with padding then be my guest. Nobody here can produce a high quality mix in their bedroom.

I'm not debating any of that.

My argument was that even if a freq's wavelength is "too big" for the room, you can still hear that frequency in the room.

It's all largely irrelevant to the OP. They should still be hearing bass from their speaker in their room. If they're not, there's a serious room/mode issue going on that smaller speakers won't fix - don't you think? I've got Genelec 1030s and a genelec sub in a relatively small room; I can hear the bass from both speakers AND sub!

Don't mean to sound snobby, but Serban's room is effectively a (large-ish) treated bedroom. They've been on record as stating it's not a "pro" studio in the sense most would understand.

And whilst I'm not in the same league by any means, I've been working out of a small-ish treated bedroom for years as far as mixing etc goes. If memory serves me right, I've mixed at least 2 top 10 albums from here....nothing world-bothering, but good sounding.

So I call BS on your internet BS

And just one more time - the info you keep parroting from people who understand it is NOT what I took objection to. Every post you say something different; none of it is your original point.

Wow! Can’t wait for you to provide “the science explaining” why the earth is actually flat and the universe rotates around it. Hahaha and a couple of tra la las.

“Shifting strawmen” is the argument technique du jour around here lately, this poster is likely a multiple account - you’re a mod, you can certainly find out