Help with room analysis

[cscs]

I'm looking to smooth out the low end in my room and am trying to determine how much difference an upgraded ceiling cloud will make. It would be very appreciative of any and all feedback on my analysis.

Analysis:
- REW graph shows massive nulls at 55hz, 65hz, 140hz, 180hz and peaks between them
- I tried moving the speakers closer/further from the wall but the 55 and 65hz nulls don't move. Further from the wall did reduce the low end by about 5dB overall though. So this is the 'smoothest' I could get
- Looking at the Amroc model, almost all of the pressure zones for the modes would interact with the ceiling cloud

Room:
The room is industrial style loft that is 39 feet wide, 22.5 feet deep, and 12 feet tall. Floor and ceiling are polished concrete. The walls are drywall but its concrete maybe 1-2" behind without insulation. Speakers are centred along the long wall and sitting about 2 feet out into the room. Listening position is about 9 feet from the wall. My set up is Wiim Ultra --> Emotiva BasX A2 --> Polk Audio R700.

Cloud Upgrade Idea:
As it currently stands, the only 'wife approved' acoustic treatment is a ceiling cloud directly over the listening position. I would love to install corner bass traps but so far I haven't figured out a way to hide them and/or not displace the furniture. I currently have 5 panels mounted above the listening position (2" thick 24"x48") that I'm considering upgrading to 6" thick panels made out of Rockwool Comfortboard 80. Specs here. The current panels have helped reverb quite a bit but are doing almost nothing below 250hz.

Thanks in advance!

Amroc model of my room HERE

REW:

 

[levimax]

I'm looking to smooth out the low end in my room and am trying to determine how much difference an upgraded ceiling cloud will make. It would be very appreciative of any and all feedback on my analysis.

Analysis:
- REW graph shows massive nulls at 55hz, 65hz, 140hz, 180hz and peaks between them
- I tried moving the speakers closer/further from the wall but the 55 and 65hz nulls don't move. Further from the wall did reduce the low end by about 5dB overall though. So this is the 'smoothest' I could get
- Looking at the Amroc model, almost all of the pressure zones for the modes would interact with the ceiling cloud

Room:
The room is industrial style loft that is 39 feet wide, 22.5 feet deep, and 12 feet tall. Floor and ceiling are polished concrete. The walls are drywall but its concrete maybe 1-2" behind without insulation. Speakers are centred along the long wall and sitting about 2 feet out into the room. Listening position is about 9 feet from the wall. My set up is Wiim Ultra --> Emotiva BasX A2 --> Polk Audio R700.

Cloud Upgrade Idea:
As it currently stands, the only 'wife approved' acoustic treatment is a ceiling cloud directly over the listening position. I would love to install corner bass traps but so far I haven't figured out a way to hide them and/or not displace the furniture. I currently have 5 panels mounted above the listening position (2" thick 24"x48") that I'm considering upgrading to 6" thick panels made out of Rockwool Comfortboard 80. Specs here. The current panels have helped reverb quite a bit but are doing almost nothing below 250hz.

Thanks in advance!

Amroc model of my room HERE

REW:

View attachment 457971

How was this measurement taken? Is it just one measurement at the LP or multiple measurements near the LP averaged together or MMM?

 

[DVDdoug]

and am trying to determine how much difference an upgraded ceiling cloud will make

Bass traps normally have to be thick, or there are membrane bass traps. Regular acoustic treatment doesn't do much for bass.

You can fix peaks pretty-well with EQ but you can't do much for the dips because it takes "infinite power" and "infinitely large" woofers to overcome cancelation. The good news is that the dips tend to be less annoying than the peaks.

...I think very few of us have "perfect" rooms. I've never measured my untreated living room.

 

[cscs]

How was this measurement taken? Is it just one measurement at the LP or multiple measurements near the LP averaged together or MMM?

It was one measurement taken at the LP.

 

[cscs]

Bass traps normally have to be thick, or there are membrane bass traps. Regular acoustic treatment doesn't do much for bass.

You can fix peaks pretty-well with EQ but you can't do much for the dips because it takes "infinite power" and "infinitely large" woofers to overcome cancelation. The good news is that the dips tend to be less annoying than the peaks.

...I think very few of us have "perfect" rooms. I've never measured my untreated living room.

For sure! I use Sonarworks but am not running it on this set up yet. My plan was to improve the acoustics of the room and then use Sonarworks to help with the remaining peaks.

 

[Mort]

What's going on below 50hz?
EQ room compensation would probably help more than a room treatment.

 

[levimax]

It was one measurement taken at the LP.

For a single measurement that does not look bad but to better see what is going on either a "vector average" of 6 or more positions around the LP or MMM around the LP will be helpful. Either method should yield similar results (MMM only has FR information but is fast and easy and probably all you need) and will look much smoother as well as be more correlated to what you actually hear at the LP.

 

[Bjorn]

6" panels will not effect much below 100 Hz. But it's always an advantage to do the treatment you can do since it will always have a good effect in the important time domain, where EQ doesn't help.

 

[alex-z]

Upgrading the ceiling cloud from 2" to 6" will definitely help the 100-400Hz region. You should see the decay times become more balanced and seat to seat variance decrease, making EQ application more effective.

The lack of response below 50Hz is the biggest issue. If you add 1-2 good subwoofers you will get more attack from kick drums, and be able to hear the bottom octave of piano, pipe organ, electronic music, and movie special effects.

You mentioned the room having an air gap between the drywall and concrete. That means your entire room has an undamped cavity resonance, I would recommend adding 2" pink fibreglass behind the drywall to fix that problem. This will also reduce noise leakage and improve the heating/cooling efficiency of your room.

The treble response seems uneven. What model of speakers do you have?

 

[mglobe]

Upgrading the ceiling cloud from 2" to 6" will definitely help the 100-400Hz region. You should see the decay times become more balanced and seat to seat variance decrease, making EQ application more effective.

The lack of response below 50Hz is the biggest issue. If you add 1-2 good subwoofers you will get more attack from kick drums, and be able to hear the bottom octave of piano, pipe organ, electronic music, and movie special effects.

You mentioned the room having an air gap between the drywall and concrete. That means your entire room has an undamped cavity resonance, I would recommend adding 2" pink fibreglass behind the drywall to fix that problem. This will also reduce noise leakage and improve the heating/cooling efficiency of your room.

The treble response seems uneven. What model of speakers do you have?

OP said they were Polk R700. I’d probably be more concerned about the treble that you point out than the bass. Maybe play with toeing them out a bit to see if that smooths out?

https://www.spinorama.org/speakers/...nsAudioCorner/eac/SPL Horizontal Contour.html

 

[kemmler3D]

If you add BAD facing to the 6" panels you might be able to do a little bit below 100hz, with the cost of slightly lower absorption overall, but with better scattering at higher frequency. Something to consider. I'm vaguely thinking about doing a BAD cloud in my office.

 

[alex-z]

OP said they were Polk R700.

Thank you, I missed that.

They have fairly good directivity so @cscs should be able to EQ the 1700Hz peak without issue. As for the peaking above 7000Hz that could be a microphone calibration or orientation issue. Do a measurement on-axis at 1 metre with the 0 degree mic calibration loaded to make sure the speakers are performing correctly.

 

[mglobe]

Thank you, I missed that.

They have fairly good directivity so @cscs should be able to EQ the 1700Hz peak without issue. As for the peaking above 7000Hz that could be a microphone calibration or orientation issue. Do a measurement on-axis at 1 metre with the 0 degree mic calibration loaded to make sure the speakers are performing correctly.

The get really narrow starting at ~7kHz. That’s why I was thinking about toeing them out.

 

[cscs]

Upgrading the ceiling cloud from 2" to 6" will definitely help the 100-400Hz region. You should see the decay times become more balanced and seat to seat variance decrease, making EQ application more effective.

The lack of response below 50Hz is the biggest issue. If you add 1-2 good subwoofers you will get more attack from kick drums, and be able to hear the bottom octave of piano, pipe organ, electronic music, and movie special effects.

You mentioned the room having an air gap between the drywall and concrete. That means your entire room has an undamped cavity resonance, I would recommend adding 2" pink fibreglass behind the drywall to fix that problem. This will also reduce noise leakage and improve the heating/cooling efficiency of your room.

The treble response seems uneven. What model of speakers do you have?

Thanks for this! I'm hoping the 6" cloud will do what you're saying. Regarding the under 50hz region, I agree its a big issue but I can't add subs into my set up unfortunately. So its something I'll have to live with.

 

[cscs]

The get really narrow starting at ~7kHz. That’s why I was thinking about toeing them out.
View attachment 458230

Thanks I'm going to try toeing them out and re-measure. I think you may be right. I experimented with a few different speaker positions and not all measurements had the issue at 1700 and the 7000 region.

 

[mglobe]

Thanks I'm going to try toeing them out and re-measure. I think you may be right. I experimented with a few different speaker positions and not all measurements had the issue at 1700 and the 7000 region.

Did you have any success with any of the suggestions people offered?

 

[cscs]

Did you have any success with any of the suggestions people offered?

Apologies, I should have reported back!

I tried several different outward angles which boosted the 4-6k region on the graph but caused big 5-10dB dips around 2k and 13k. So didn't really improve anything.

Taking the multiple speaker positions into account was an interesting experiment. I ended up measuring 2 feet left, right, front, back of the LP and averaging them with the LP measurement. Front and back really either boosted or decreased the low end. Left and right measurements were a lot more uniform without extreme swings above 200hz compared to the measurement taken at LP. This is definitely a lot more reassuring because its more of a 'real world' scenario when watching TV/movies side by side on the couch with my partner.

I think the next step is to remeasure after running the built-in room correction on the Wiim Ultra. If that doesn't improve anything I'm going to run Sonarworks and manually enter the calibration curves on the Wiim's PEQ.

 

[mglobe]

Apologies, I should have reported back!

I tried several different outward angles which boosted the 4-6k region on the graph but caused big 5-10dB dips around 2k and 13k. So didn't really improve anything.

Taking the multiple speaker positions into account was an interesting experiment. I ended up measuring 2 feet left, right, front, back of the LP and averaging them with the LP measurement. Front and back really either boosted or decreased the low end. Left and right measurements were a lot more uniform without extreme swings above 200hz compared to the measurement taken at LP. This is definitely a lot more reassuring because its more of a 'real world' scenario when watching TV/movies side by side on the couch with my partner.

I think the next step is to remeasure after running the built-in room correction on the Wiim Ultra. If that doesn't improve anything I'm going to run Sonarworks and manually enter the calibration curves on the Wiim's PEQ.

Thank you and no need to apologize. It’s helpful though to all of us to learn through your experience. I suspect the WiiM room correction will help, and if not, will be very interesting to see how the Sonarworks approach compares. If you’re so motivated, I suspect many here would be interested in REW graphs to compare original, WiiM, and WiiM with sonarworks.

 

[cscs]

Took me way too long to run a room calibration with Sonarworks on this but I finally did it. I have it for my desktop setup and it made a massive difference but until this week there wasn't a practical way to run it with this set up, so I didn't bother to try (its for set ups where the audio runs out of your computer into an audio interface ie. a recording studio).

Anyway, this week I saw that Sonarworks launched an integration with Audient for the ORIA Mini. I contacted support to see how it would integrate into the signal path of my specific set up. They said:

"In this setup, the ORIA Mini would sit between the pre-amp/DAC and the power amplifier. On the ORIA Mini, you would simply set the volume control to 100% which would then just pass the signal from input to output at unity gain and with no attenuation. The Pre-amp and DAC would then handle the volume control still."

Exactly what I was looking for!

Before ordering the ORIA Mini I decided to make sure Sonarworks would make a large enough difference, so I ran the calibration this morning using my computer + audio interface into the Wiim Ultra's line in. I haven't spent a lot of time comparing before/after but I could immediately hear that the low end is sounding a LOT tighter. The low end 'before' sounded a bit boxy and slightly hollow compared to the 'after'. I'm VERY happy with the results so far and will be ordering the ORIA Mini this week.

For anyone interested, this is what Sonarworks is doing. It measures 38 different spots around the listening position to create it's calibration curves. This chart shows the calibration being applied to the L and R channel in order to achieve a flat response.