TL;DR - Got new speakers, figured out the room added a very high spike of energy at ~136 Hz to the tune (pun intended) of around 19 dB. Does that sound right or am I barking up the wrong tree?
So I decided I wanted new speakers (had tiny ones, wanted a fuller range). Spent a month researching here (thank you so much
), got the right amp, speakers finally came in. Plugged them in, everything great. And then I listened to a song with a bass guitar, HUGE boom + mud. Oh no, don't tell me I screwed up interpreting the spin data... Well, the speakers are mounted to my desk, which is a sit/stand desk, so I just raised it to stand height. No boom, no mud. Oh no, my problems just became very large, as I can't just swap out the speakers, and I am WAY out of my element when it comes to this. I tried quite a few tweaks to placement, orientation, toe in, angle up/down, etc but nothing yielded results.
Time to get hands-on. I used audacity to generate a 20-second linear chirp (aka sine sweep) from 40-400 Hz and just listened. Found the problem around 8 seconds into the sweep, so I generated another sweep, 10 seconds long, 100 - 150 Hz. I have a DAW (reason) and an EQ plugin (izotope elements) so I just imported the second sweep into the DAW and started listening and tweaking. Ran a few experiments and found the center by playing the sweep and stopping at the loudest part. Averaged a few runs, told me about 136 Hz. Did the same experiment but for when I perceive the increase in volume starting (to help me narrow down the Q factor). All told, I needed a Q of 3.0 and a gain of -19 dB to get the sweep to sound fairly flat (without spending a ton more time tweaking or using more accurate room measurement tools). I didn't want to buy a room testing mic, I know ears are unreliable, and I'm sure there are reasons why a sine sweep isn't the best metric for this, but I just wanted a cheap (in time) and fairly accurate way to get a guess on the problem. I added those parameters to another band in Peace and listened to the same song and it seems the problem has been worked around.
But damn, 19 dB? That's almost twice the perceived loudness increase, and if I understand dB correctly, over three times the amplitude. Is that normal? I wasn't expecting the room to add anything near that amount. There's a few other bumps/pits in perceived loudness during the 40-400 Hz sweep, but nothing that comes close to this one. Is this somewhat normal, or does my room + desk + etc just really come together in such a way to perfectly align like four reflections?
So I decided I wanted new speakers (had tiny ones, wanted a fuller range). Spent a month researching here (thank you so much
), got the right amp, speakers finally came in. Plugged them in, everything great. And then I listened to a song with a bass guitar, HUGE boom + mud. Oh no, don't tell me I screwed up interpreting the spin data... Well, the speakers are mounted to my desk, which is a sit/stand desk, so I just raised it to stand height. No boom, no mud. Oh no, my problems just became very large, as I can't just swap out the speakers, and I am WAY out of my element when it comes to this. I tried quite a few tweaks to placement, orientation, toe in, angle up/down, etc but nothing yielded results.Time to get hands-on. I used audacity to generate a 20-second linear chirp (aka sine sweep) from 40-400 Hz and just listened. Found the problem around 8 seconds into the sweep, so I generated another sweep, 10 seconds long, 100 - 150 Hz. I have a DAW (reason) and an EQ plugin (izotope elements) so I just imported the second sweep into the DAW and started listening and tweaking. Ran a few experiments and found the center by playing the sweep and stopping at the loudest part. Averaged a few runs, told me about 136 Hz. Did the same experiment but for when I perceive the increase in volume starting (to help me narrow down the Q factor). All told, I needed a Q of 3.0 and a gain of -19 dB to get the sweep to sound fairly flat (without spending a ton more time tweaking or using more accurate room measurement tools). I didn't want to buy a room testing mic, I know ears are unreliable, and I'm sure there are reasons why a sine sweep isn't the best metric for this, but I just wanted a cheap (in time) and fairly accurate way to get a guess on the problem. I added those parameters to another band in Peace and listened to the same song and it seems the problem has been worked around.
But damn, 19 dB? That's almost twice the perceived loudness increase, and if I understand dB correctly, over three times the amplitude. Is that normal? I wasn't expecting the room to add anything near that amount. There's a few other bumps/pits in perceived loudness during the 40-400 Hz sweep, but nothing that comes close to this one. Is this somewhat normal, or does my room + desk + etc just really come together in such a way to perfectly align like four reflections?
