What should the bass range sound like in my room? Everyone involved in music and sound – whether audio engineers, musicians, or simply music lovers – wants to know the answer to this question.
Whether you focus on spectral balance when mixing or recording audio, or whether you can’t get enough of the bottom end, it always depends on how the room handles the bass: acoustics is physics, and as we all know, physics always follows its laws!
You can’t break them, but fortunately, you can make very good use of them. And the solutions we have with professional room acoustics can help us shape our low end exactly as we need it.
Decay time
Before we can even start debating which solution is best, we need to identify the problem! Low-frequency sound waves, just like in all other frequency ranges, are reflected by the hard surfaces in the room. However, the wavelengths and energy in the bass range are significantly larger: much more needs to be done to reduce the problems caused by these reflections than in the mid and high frequency ranges. At lower frequencies – in other words, below 300 Hz – we don’t talk about reverberation, but rather about decay time, that is, the fading of resonances.
Like the reverberation time of higher-frequency sound waves, the decay time in the bass range plays a key role in the precision – or lack of it – with which we perceive sound in a room.
We can say that longer decay times result in less clear bass response in the room. That’s why we want to reduce the decay time!
Here is an example – before and after. You can see two so-called spectrograms, i.e. measurement graphs showing the decay times of all frequencies in the measured room. The duration of the decay is represented by the length of the vertical bars. For the sake of simplicity, we will ignore the colour here. In the ‘before’ image, you can see that the sound in the room is already well-controlled between 200 and 20,000 Hz. Below 200 Hz, however,……………
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