Neumann KH150 - Homestudio acoustic treatment measurements (after/before)

[FranB]

Hello everybody!

I was finishing conditioning my homestudio with the acoustic treatment, and I would like to share the difference of the measurements before and after the treatment.
The speakers are Neumann KH150 with MA1 calibration system (very happy with them ) .

I'm aware that the results could surely be further improved by adding more bass traps/diffusers/etc, but for now I think that I have reached the maximum that I am willing to invest.

This is before the acoustic treatment (without MA1 calibration):

I

This is after the acoustic treatment (without MA1 calibration):

The 6db peaks at 55hz, 75hz and 150hz approx, which do not seem to change much, I guess that it's due the dimensions of the room, and the room modes coming together in those areas (the MA1 seems to solve pretty well this)

I've been trying changing the positioning of the monitors and after making many measurements I came the best result at a listening position of 174cm.
At 200cm for example, as it's closer to the middle of the room where the modes are stronger, those 6db peaks increase up to 9db. On the other hand, I also didn't want to reduce the distance between the monitors so much to not lose stereo image.

This is after the acoustic treatment with the MA1 alignment software applied:

I also did measurements in REW to see a little more detail for each speaker, and this is how it looks:

With 1/12 of smoothing (+-6,5db approx between the maximum and minimum peak)

With 1/3 of smoothing (+-2,5db approx between the maximum and minimum peak)

ETC:

Spectrogram (right speaker)

Unfortunately I don't have the same measurements in REW for the room without acoustic treatment to make the comparison in terms of RT60, decay, ETC, etc, but surely they would be much worse. The difference it's quite noticeable. Specially in terms of boominess and reflections all over the place.

And this is how I placed the acoustic treatment (GIK):

- 2 tri-traps in each front corner
- 4 244 bass traps in the front wall
- 2 242 panels each side for early reflections, and 2 in the ceiling
- 2 monster traps behind the listening position


What do you think ? It's acceptable? I'd appreciate any feedback as I'm relatively new in the room acoustics and measurement world.

Thank you!

 

[DJBonoBobo]

Thanks for sharing. A few thoughts:
- The MA1-software uses something similar to psychoacoustic smoothing. It looks good, i think, very flat bass, no problems (dips) there.
- Your REW FR response looks very different from other graphs due to the scale. Could you please repost it with a 50dB scale (i.e. 60-110dB) and maybe try var smoothing and additionally 1/24 smoothing?
- ETC looks good to me
- spectrogram also looks fine, i think. very dry though, which should be ok in a studio.
- is there some drop in the higher frequencies that does not show in the MA1 graph? hard to tell - did you use a cal file for your mic? if you use the MA1, you can get a cal file from Neumann.
- why did you change the target with little tweaks and did you try to let it alone?
- How does it sound?

 

[Rednaxela]

- Your REW FR response looks very different from other graphs due to the scale. Could you please repost it with a 50dB scale (i.e. 60-110dB) and maybe try var smoothing and additionally 1/24 smoothing?

+1

REW has a graph export option for this which is incredibly useful.

The middle one (25 dB/dec) seems closest to your MA1 plots.

 

[FranB]

Thank you for your suggestions. Here are the average responses of the same pictures with a 50db scale (from 50 to 100db)

1/3 smoothing:

1/12 smoothing:

1/24 smoothing:

1/48 smoothing:

- is there some drop in the higher frequencies that does not show in the MA1 graph? hard to tell - did you use a cal file for your mic? if you use the MA1, you can get a cal file from Neumann.
- why did you change the target with little tweaks and did you try to let it alone?
- How does it sound?

Regarding the calibration file, I couldn't get it, as it's not available to download on Neumann's website yet. When I get it I'll make the same measurements to see if there is any considerable diference.

And with respect of the default target curve from MA1 (without tweaking the eq, this is how it looks like:

 

[DJBonoBobo]

Thank you for your suggestions. Here are the average responses of the same pictures with a 50db scale (from 50 to 100db)

1/3 smoothing:

View attachment 283896

1/12 smoothing:

View attachment 283897

1/24 smoothing:

View attachment 283898


1/48 smoothing:


View attachment 283904




Regarding the calibration file, I couldn't get it, as it's not available to download on Neumann's website yet. When I get it I'll make the same measurements to see if there is any considerable diference.

And with respect of the default target curve from MA1 (without tweaking the eq, this is how it looks like:

View attachment 283903

I think the FR is pretty much as good as it gets in a real room. The wiggles are normal. You made the bass a bit more flat - that´s up to your taste.
The little downward slope above 10k that also shows in the spectrogram is probably due to the missing cal file. The MA1-measurement is more precise in that regard.
I would expect it to sound neutral, clean and precise. So i think you should be good?

Regarding the cal-file:

Obtaining the MA-1 calibration file without connecting Neumann Monitors

yeah, I tried all that. Tried in Chrome and Safari. The Linearization section just does not show up for me. Can you try to login into their webpage? I don’t remember how I did it, but it was strange for me too as I could swear that initially the section did not show either and after clicking...

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