3 principles to create a perfect sweet spot
01-02-2022Many studio owners and audio technicians experienced this problem: the room is fighting you. Studios often weren’t built to have a controlled listening environment. But you can compensate the sound defects by creating a listening sweet spot. Pay attention to these principles to improve the sound in the room.
1. Carefully pick the place of your desk. It’s best to move it to one of the short walls and center it away from the wall (38% of the room length), avoiding those first axial modes.
When the possibility arises to build a studio from scratch, building the room with angled walls guides away reflections from the sweet spot and helps create a reflection free zone.
2. Make sure your head is in a equilateral triangle with the speakers. Turn the speakers 30° toward you and make sure they’re placed on ear height.
3. Install absorbers, bass traps and diffusers. Absorbent panels and bass traps reduce reverberation and contain sound reflection. Carefully placed diffusers influence the reflection to enlarge the sweet spot.
In an ideal world a perfect sweet spot can be created with these 3 guidelines. However most of the time owners and technicians get confronted with irregularities in rooms which causes reflection problems. Even though they can be very small, they can still cause havoc. Good acoustics are the foundation for good listening conditions, but some minor sound adjustments can be made through a sound optimizer connected to the system.
More on that later.
https://www.amptec.be/acstx