Help setting up corrections for my room

[Miraldo]

Hello everyone!

A week ago I bought a pair of M-Audio BX8 D3 monitors, an UR44 audio interface, a DSP and a behringer ECM8000 measurement microphone.

I do have some familiarity with audio science, I finished a 1-year degree with very experienced technicians as professors and as such I am taking the challenge to go further and perfecting my knowledge in the area. A long road but one that I must walk.

I've downloaded REW and started measuring my room, the first couple of days I was pretty overwhelmed by the measurements, software, curves and filters but today I think I arrived at an interesting result and need your help to make sure I have not overlooked something and am actually fooling myself. I am setting up my system in order to be able to mix/master songs with a starting amount of fiability on my work, hoping to kickstart my career in the industry.

Off to the interesting part:

I am measuring my system using the sweep method on REW, first without adding any EQ curves to my DSP and trying to find the best position of the speakers in the room (which has no acoustic correction, unfortunately). The sweep ranged from 20-20,000Hz measured with both speakers simultaneously with the microphone at LP.

Progressively, as I made measurements I added filters to my DSP and my "final" response curve is the one found below.


As i said, I am looking for as much help and I can get and I am not sure I've provided all the information I should.
My biggest question is: Is this a suitable response/phase curve for the LP in a room with no acoustic treatment, homemade by someone with no experience or is it too good to be true?

With the best regards!
Miraldo

 

[Hipper]

I'd say it looks too good because of the parameters you have chosen. You can see for example that with no smoothing you have a range of some 20db in the bass region. You can do better.

When I set up my listening room I concentrated on the bass region (say 0-300Hz - to be scientific, below the transition [Schroeder] frequency) to start with in order to get the best speaker and listening positions. This makes sense because bass is a lot tougher to manage then the higher frequencies.

Using REW (the SPL only graph. I found that phase smooths itself out as I progressed). I would use no smoothing but expand the dB scale as large as possible - in your case that looks like 75-105Hz. Use 0-500Hz on the frequency scale.

Once I got the best positions for the smoothest bass I then used room treatment - mostly bass traps - to further improve the bass response. Finally I used EQ to complete the task. If you can't use bass traps then use DSP to get the smooth bass.

After that look at the higher frequencies perhaps using 1/12 smoothing, or 1/6. These can be adjusted in part by speaker toe in, removing reflections off the desk, walls etc..

Another graph worth looking at is the waterfall plot. Again only look at the 0-500Hz region but notice the decay times. I'm not sure what is best for a mixing room but I've got decay times of around 200ms or less - probably a bit low but I like it!

Another thing you can measure with REW is ambient noise. Just measure in the normal way but mute the signal from the loudspeakers.