Posts Tagged ‘home studio’
Recording Magazine’s Room Acoustics Series – Part 5
Wednesday, September 28th, 2011Recording Magazine sends out a newsletter to its subscribers every few weeks. The newsletter is (coincidentally) titled “Sound Advice” and this month it features the fifth in a series about room acoustics. Room acoustics is one of the biggest concerns for Recording Magazine readers. I know that this is also a big issue for those of you in the voiceover world. I asked permission to reprint this newsletter (and will ask to reprint the others in the series as well) so that those of you with home studios can also benefit from the information. I want to personally thank Brent Heintz, VP/Associate Publisher for granting permission, allowing me to share this great information with you.
Please visit Recording Magazine‘s website:
http://www.recordingmag.com
and their Facebook Page
http://www.facebook.com/pages/RecordingMag/174861759224348
Here is the fifth newsletter in the series on Room Acoustics:
Welcome to Sound Advice on Acoustics! For the past several months we’ve been dealing with the basics of controlling bass buildup in rooms, using ratios of room dimensions and active bass trapping and other room treatments. Bass is by far the hardest problem to deal with in tuning a room, and with it under control, we can now turn our attention to the mids and highs. Read on…!So far we’ve considered the effects of low-frequency waves in the room. There are other issues, related to the propagation of mid and high frequencies. When a mid- or high-frequency sound wave moves through a room, it eventually hits one of the various boundary surfaces (walls, ceiling, floor). When this occurs, the sound wave is either absorbed, transmitted, or reflected.
Absorption means that some or most of the wave’s energy is converted into heat. Transmission means that the wave has some of its energy passed—through the wall, for example. Reflection means that most of the wave’s energy is directed back into the room.
This will happen repeatedly as the sound wave hits various surfaces until all its energy is eventually dissipated.
A room where all the surfaces are completely absorptive sounds dead and unnatural, and is unsuitable for music-making or listening. Such a room, called an anechoic chamber, would be used for testing purposes, as in the manufacture of loudspeakers for example, to isolate the sound quality of the speaker under test from the room effects. An overly reflective room is also not ideal—too many reflections tumbling around the room obscure the clarity of music or speech (see below).
An ideal room strikes the right balance between the original sound from the source (i.e. instrument or loudspeaker) and the amount of reflected sound present. Furthermore, it is desirable for the reflected sound to be distributed as evenly as possible throughout the room, providing a comfortable and pleasant sense of ambience (liveness). This even distribution of reflected sound energy is called , and is generally desirable, as we’ll see. But along the road to this ideal room, there are many pitfalls that we’ll now examine.
Reflection of sound waves is the behavior we’ll be most concerned with in the next few paragraphs. Just as happens with lower frequencies, when mid- and high-frequency waves reflect back into a room, the positive and negative peaks of the direct (original) sound waves and those of the reflections will cancel and reinforce. This happens because the reflections are delayed in time relative to the direct sound, causing their positive and negative peaks to be offset from those of the direct sound, which results in the interference (see Figure 5 for an illustration of this).
While this resulting frequency response may look very ragged, in actuality our hearing systems tend to average out and largely gloss over these subtle, myriad cancellations and reinforcements, and instead may perceive this as a not unpleasant coloration of the sound in a casual listening environment.
However, a recording studio is not a casual listening environment. For example, we depend on what we hear in the control room to make important decisions about the way the sounds in a recording blend and balance. We need to hear exactly what’s in the recording, not a “pleasantly colored” reproduction. Consequently, we need to exert some degree of control over any such effects that impact the neutrality of the monitoring environment.
With all this knowledge under our hats, it is time to look at another fundamental (excuse the pun) aspect of acoustics: how we hear. Next time: a crash course in how our ears and brains interpret sound. See you then!
Voiceover Gear, Quality and Rates… a Correlation?
Saturday, August 13th, 2011
By Dan Friedman
Two of the biggest ongoing issues in the voiceover world are gear and rates. It seems that voice talent (or voice talent wannabes) are always looking for the latest, greatest, smallest and cheapest piece of gear that is good enough to record audio. They also seem to want the ability to do this from just about anywhere. The issue of rates is always a big concern. Job offers for payments that fall considerably short of generally accepted rates frequent the internet. These offers are often discussed as being reprehensible or even laughed at on social media. So, is there a correlation between cheap gear and low rates?
Portability and the ability to respond quickly to client requests are key factors that drive the need for much of this gear. The desire to provide for clients is essential to your VO business and let’s face it, the gear is often pretty cool and some of it sounds quite good. But the environment plays a much bigger role in your overall sound and just because you can record from your car or a hotel room, doesn’t mean you should. Other than your voice and performance, nothing has a greater effect on your sound than the environment you’re in.
Consistency and quality are critical for great sounding productions. These can only be guaranteed when the environment is a professional one, usually a professionally equipped recording studio or home studio. Consistency is especially critical when it comes to revisions. Even musicians, who are the largest consumers of recording gear, know that most of this low-end gear is for laying down ideas and for doing pre-production. When they are ready to make an album, serious musicians will usually go to a professional recording studio.
One of the biggest complaints about the voiceover industry, from those who are in it, is that so many people think that voiceover is easy and anyone can do it. Well, it should come as no surprise that when people brag about recording from their car, on their smart phones and through the multitude of cheap pieces of plastic that are now available at the megastore down the street, outsiders may believe that this is not all that difficult. Newbies don’t always understand performance or quality, but they usually understand the concept of making money from anywhere for very little investment.
On the flip-side, clients who (to their detriment) don’t always care about quality are not going to offer higher rates if they think the job can be done anywhere and/or with nothing more than a USB microphone plugged into a laptop. Clients who know better are usually willing to pay for the quality and service that come with a professional talent, who records in a professional environment, on professional gear. They understand that, just like in their own businesses, to be among the best requires an investment in time and money. Clients can justify higher talent payments more easily when they know that the audio will be professionally recorded and will be consistent from one session to the next.
Having higher-quality equipment and a proper recording space helps you to justify demanding a higher price for your work. Good clients understand that your investment in training and gear has value and the results will speak for themselves.
If you are a voiceover talent, who loves and respects this industry, you will hopefully continue to work towards providing the highest quality audio possible and consistency from one session to the next. This doesn’t mean that you should not provide for your clients in emergency situations… you should. It also does not mean that you must have the most expensive pieces of gear. It simply means that you will continue to seek out the best equipment for you and your situation until you reach the point that any change would not provide a significant improvement. Do not stop at “good enough”.
