JESCO LOHAN: DIY Room Treatment, Calibrated Monitoring, and Finding Your Listening Position

Speaker 1 (00:00:00):

Welcome to the Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast, brought to you by STA Audio. Sta Audio creates zero compromise recording gear that is light on the wallet only. The best components are used and each one goes through a rigorous testing process with one thing in mind, getting the best sound possible. Go to audio do com for more info. And now your host, Joey Sturgis, Joel Wanasek and

Speaker 2 (00:00:26):

Eyal Levi. Well welcome to the Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast. Our sync claps our setting my dog off. I've got my dog next to me. The voice you hear next to me is someone that I've been wanting to get on the podcast for ages now because I feel like we haven't properly talked about one of the most important aspects of being a good engineer, which has almost nothing to do with the engineer himself, which is room treatment and room acoustics. So we have Mr. Jesco Lohan on who I met you. Well internet met you through

Speaker 3 (00:01:10):

The stumbled across each other.

Speaker 2 (00:01:11):

Yeah, exactly. I think that through Brian Hood's group.

Speaker 3 (00:01:16):

Exactly.

Speaker 2 (00:01:17):

Yeah. Let me just say that Brian Hood is an endless resource of great things.

Speaker 3 (00:01:22):

It's true. Yeah, definitely.

Speaker 2 (00:01:24):

I also met Billy Decker through him who's doing this coming month on nail the mix. So hey, if you want good things in your life, be friends with Brian Hud.

Speaker 3 (00:01:34):

Definitely. He's a good guy.

Speaker 2 (00:01:37):

Yeah, I agree. And so basically you were in his group helping people treat their rooms?

Speaker 3 (00:01:46):

Pretty much. Yeah. I'm basically, I'm based in Berlin in Germany and a mixing engineer and studio acquisition. And I've been just trying to figure out, trying to dig deeper into where people's issues are with their rooms. So I just started talking to people online and I was talking to some people I guess on Brian Hood's group and that's when I saw you or when you saw what I posted. I can't quite remember and

Speaker 2 (00:02:19):

Well, I saw what you posted and I wanted you to help people in our group as well.

Speaker 3 (00:02:23):

Exactly. That's it. Yeah. And

Speaker 2 (00:02:24):

I wanted to bring you on the podcast and everything because I basically spied on it on you talking to people for a little while.

Speaker 3 (00:02:33):

Cool.

Speaker 2 (00:02:33):

Just to see if you were full of shit. And everyone kept saying, I talked to this guy and we figured out what was wrong with my room and I made some changes and holy shit,

Speaker 3 (00:02:47):

My

Speaker 2 (00:02:47):

Mixes translate so much better now. So I saw that over and over and over again. Cool.

Speaker 3 (00:02:53):

And

Speaker 2 (00:02:54):

Figured I may as well talk to you.

Speaker 3 (00:02:56):

Sure. Great.

Speaker 2 (00:02:57):

So welcome. Thank you. That was a long introduction. Thank you. What inspired you to want to help people with their rooms? It seems like it's tedious.

Speaker 3 (00:03:09):

Yeah, sure. It is a bit tedious, but then again, so basically where to start. So I have actually have a degree in aerospace engineering originally, so

Speaker 2 (00:03:19):

Oh, this is probably less tedious.

Speaker 3 (00:03:22):

Yeah. So there's that engineering nerd and me, but I've been doing music for ages and I kind of wanted to do it professionally after I kind of dabbled in the engineering industry. Then I started mixing for at some point. And in the process, obviously at some point I came across kind of acoustics and the things it can do for me. And I started experimenting in my own room. I started getting results, my mixes started improving based on the changes I made to my room and people, it got people's attention and they asked me if I could help them out. And that kind of started the ball rolling and and the nerd in me just really kind of got interested and it fascinates me, the physics of sound. I found it really, really fascinating. And actually the intersection between the creative work and the sort of technical side of sound, how the two interact and how they influence each other and how we can use the technical side to influence the creative side. So that's kind of where my specialty is because mixing, obviously doing the mixing work, which is all creative, which is all about just bringing out the emotions of the song. Kind of forgot what I was going to say there. But yeah, so that's kind of what really interests me is the intersection between the two and how they influence each other.

Speaker 2 (00:04:51):

Well, I guess the thing with the room acoustics and that whole side of it is that lots of people avoid doing it

Speaker 3 (00:04:59):

Because

Speaker 2 (00:05:00):

They just want to focus on the creative side of mixing and all that. And I think that the science part scares them.

Speaker 3 (00:05:06):

It does

Speaker 2 (00:05:07):

It scary. And then the money part scares them too.

Speaker 3 (00:05:09):

Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, both. I mean, it's complicated. Acoustics is complicated. It gets really complicated really quickly. And especially in small rooms, I mean, big rooms are actually easy. That's one of the disadvantages of the work that we do is that in the small rooms that we typically work in, the acoustic problems all kind of pile up on top of each other and it gets really, really difficult really, really quickly. And so reading online, why is that? Just because of the dimensions of the room basically. And then obviously in our scenarios, working from home studios, working from project studios that weren't built for that purpose, you have to deal with the issues of the room. And so you have materials in the room that affect the sound in a negative way. You have windows, you have doors and inconvenience places, all these kind of things. And yeah, like I said, it all kind of piles up because of the size.

(00:06:05):

It all piles up in the range that interests us. And it's some very multidisciplinary problems. So you've got several aspects of acoustics that all come into play on top of each other, and they all start sort of intersecting and you have to kind break it down into individual pieces if you want to solve it or if you want to solve the issues in your room. And so it becomes really complicated really quickly, and people are discouraged by reading lots of stuff online and getting confused about one person saying this, the other person saying that. And so yeah, I remember very well what it was like. I mean, just going through forums for hours and then coming out with your head hurting and not really having any answers at all. And I mean, I just started experimenting to be honest. I mean, I just started experimenting in my own studio and I still experiment a lot.

(00:07:02):

And so try, I always try, I want to get the best bang for my buck and I want to get it from a mixer perspective. So that's where I'm coming from. And over time I experimented with different designs, different materials. I did a lot of research into sound system design. Actually I recently did the sound system for a club here in Berlin. And going through that process, which is really interesting, that taught me a lot about what you can do with speakers alone. And that's quite incredible because as studio guys, we never talk about that. And those guys, the guys from the sound system design guys, they have all these systems and all these procedures just to work with speakers and rooms. They don't do any acoustics at all because it's way too expensive.

Speaker 2 (00:07:51):

Well, what you're saying to me is actually really interesting and should be inspiring because if you do think about acoustics in terms of several different disciplines that all kind of compound on each other in order to get one acoustic result, well, you can use that to your advantage by saying that, well, maybe I can't afford to fix all seven, meaning I can't fix the shape of the room I'm in or that, well, I'm in an apartment, so the room size is the room size, but I can fix six out of the seven or I That's exactly right. I can fix five out of the seven.

Speaker 3 (00:08:28):

That's

Speaker 2 (00:08:29):

Exactly right. And yeah, get 80% of a better sounding room. Maybe it's not going to be a hundred percent better, but 80% is better than 0%. That's

Speaker 3 (00:08:40):

Absolutely right. And there's sort of priorities coming, again, coming from the mixer perspective, there's priorities. So for example, for me, the most important thing is getting a balanced frequency response. It doesn't have to be flat, to be honest. Flat doesn't exist. People tend to say they want a flat frequency response. It doesn't exist. It's easy to type. It's easy to type, but even the most professional studios don't have a flat frequency response because things like a table that you're working on alone will completely destroy your flat frequency response.

Speaker 2 (00:09:12):

Or what about the fact that huge studios have windows in them?

Speaker 3 (00:09:16):

Yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:09:16):

Exactly. Even a window to the drum room.

Speaker 3 (00:09:18):

Yeah, totally. And then we talk about reflections a lot. There's always a reflection coming off the floor and there's nothing you can do about it. And it's always there. Even in the most expensive studios, there will always be a floor reflection, and that's the one last thing that remains and that we can't do anything about. But yeah, coming back to the sort of multiple problems that come on top of each other, that's true. Exactly. You can just start solving one at a time. You don't have to do all of them at the same time. And you can start with the ones that give you the biggest advantage. So for me, it's getting a balanced frequency response. And you can do that simply by positioning, literally just by finding the right spot to sit in your room because like you said, you can't change the dimensions of the room. So we might as well make the most out of what we got and just get the best result we can just by positioning. And that alone will give you 50% of the work that you need to do. That alone will give you a sound that you can work with and then you can build on that with panels, for example. So

Speaker 2 (00:10:24):

Let's talk about positioning for a second. I mean, I guess there's a point where if someone's not willing to move from their spot, they can't really take advantage of the power of positioning. So they need to, number one, be willing to move their spot in the room. But let's assume that there isn't a bed right behind them. Yeah, exactly. And that they are capable of moving to a different spot in the room. What's your method for that? What do you tell people to do?

Speaker 3 (00:10:58):

So, yeah, and that's really interesting, and I actually recommend everybody read the article that I wrote for you guys on the URM called Fixing the Low End without knowing anything about acoustics because

Speaker 2 (00:11:09):

There will be a link, by the way, it's a great article, it's on our website and there's a link in the show notes. So just go to the show notes for this podcast and follow the link to the blog he wrote for us. It's called Fixing the Low End in Your Studio Without Knowing Acoustics. It's a great article.

Speaker 3 (00:11:26):

Thanks. Great. So yeah, let me go through it in a few sentences. So the idea is that you find the optimal compromise between all the different room modes in your room. I'm not going to go into the detail of what room modes are, but it's basically when you're kind of moving, I'm sure everybody's noticed this when you're playing some music and you move through your room and the bass at some points in the room, the bass is just super loud. And another point is really quiet. And that's based on room modes. And these room modes are literally dependent on just the dimensions of your room. Now they kind of happen between all the different walls. So left, right front, back, ceiling floor, and depending on where you position yourself within that pattern of standing waves or room modes, that will determine what your base sounds like, how balanced the base is overall. You'll still get peaks and troughs in the response, but it means that you can find a spot where it's overall, it's kind of the best compromise. So the test for this is that you put one speaker, just one speaker just in the corner on the floor, and you play some music that you know really well, some music that has a varying baseline, so it's not like a OneNote base thing, which happens a lot in electronic dance music, what I work on. But so several, let's say three tracks that really well.

Speaker 2 (00:12:46):

So don't shoot a sine wave through the speaker?

Speaker 3 (00:12:48):

No, no, because you want to actually excite as many room modes as possible. You kind of want the full blast of problems coming and happening within the room. And so while you're playing music, you then just sit in your chair, the one that you'll be working at. So you're at the height that you're going to be working at, and you pick the central axis, one central axis of your room because eventually you'll want left right symmetry. So you'll pick a central axis, let's say front to back, and then you just play music. And as you're playing the music, you just roll in your chair from one end of the room all the way to the other end of the room, and you pay attention to how the base changes As this happens, basically what happens is that you're moving through this pattern of room modes.

(00:13:34):

As you are rolling across your room, there will be a point, you'll notice where at some points the base will drop out and some points it will be too loud. And basically what you want to listen out for is the balance between the subs, so the really low base and the kind of high base, the punch the chest. And just as an example, if you move up all, if you move up right up to the wall, that's where you'll hear a lot of sub-base. That's where you'll hear, really hear the really low frequency is really accentuated. So that gives you an idea of what the one extreme sounds like. And then as you move across, you kind of just listen out and pay attention to the balance between the low base and the kind of high base. That's just as a very, very rough starting point.

(00:14:17):

And you do this for several tracks and you just make a mental note of where it sounds best to you, where the base is the most balanced to you and you really want to spend time with this because it's the technique to figure out where you want to sit eventually and where the base sounds the most balanced. And then once of get an idea of where that is, you can kind of hone in, you can maybe just kind of focus on the few feet where you notice that it's the best with maybe some other tracks even. And what I do is I just kind of put some tape out on the floor to remember where that is, and then I test it with other tracks. And eventually you get a really good idea of how your room responds to base and you get a really good idea of what you can do. Now, it might be that it's not, it's going to end up completely perfect, but it's going to be the best that you can do in your room.

Speaker 2 (00:15:14):

And I guess in some ways you might consider doing this before you even buy a desk.

Speaker 3 (00:15:20):

Oh yeah, definitely. The easiest to do, the easiest or the best place to start is right at the beginning basically when the room is completely empty and you just got your speakers and you just have your chair and your speaker and that's it, that's kind of the best place to start because you want to then, because that spot will determine your base response and then you kind of want to build your setup around that. So I always start with the position of the sweet spot relative to the room, and then I place using this technique, then I place my speakers relative to my sweet spot. That's where I kind of turn things up on its head because people say, start with placing your speakers. And I say, no, no, no. Start by placing your sweet spot and then you place your speakers relative to your sweet spot.

Speaker 2 (00:16:01):

That makes a lot more sense, doesn't it?

Speaker 3 (00:16:04):

I think so. And it works. I've done it many, many times and I keep doing it. Obviously, the more I do it, the more I kind of get experience in it. But if you take your time, I'm sure you can get good results as well.

Speaker 2 (00:16:13):

Yeah, far more of a logical approach in my opinion, than positioning your speakers first.

Speaker 3 (00:16:19):

Yeah, and the great thing is that you don't need to know, don't have to have any test equipment. You can literally do this with just music that you love.

Speaker 2 (00:16:27):

That is a big deal. I always hated using test equipment. It always felt weird to me and that seems like a much better method. Alright, so you can control where you are in the room. You said that the next thing is you deal with panels.

Speaker 3 (00:16:42):

Yeah. So once you figure that spot out, you can then start building on that using panels like base traps for example, that would go in the corners. I would actually, to be honest, I would recommend for people really starting out is to not start with base traps, but start with the first reflection points.

Speaker 2 (00:17:02):

Why is that?

Speaker 3 (00:17:03):

Because it gives you a better bang for your buck basically because the base, it's tricky. You really need a lot of base traps to actually improve the base to an extent where it's really noticeable and you do have to take care of the first reflection points anyway, and they make a much bigger difference for the actual sound stage that you're getting from your speakers. So I'm a big fan of being able to just intuitively pan, for example. And if you've got a good sound stage and it's clean and it's full bodied, let's say it's a much more pleasurable listening experience and it's much more intuitive to work with that kind of sound stage. And so this is all about treating the left and right early reflection points, the back, the front and the ceiling.

Speaker 2 (00:17:53):

Well, and little rooms tend to have nasty flutters

Speaker 3 (00:17:59):

In

Speaker 2 (00:17:59):

Them.

Speaker 3 (00:17:59):

Yeah, actually my take on flutters is I think it's not that big of an issue. And the reason for that is we always kind of just clap our hands to test for fluter echo. That's kind of the standard test. And there's one major issue with that, and that's a flutter echo basically happens between two parallel walls. It's the sound, the energy bouncing left to or just bouncing back and forth between two parallel walls on a straight line. And if you're on that straight line, you'll hear it as pronounced as it can be. And obviously if you clap your hand on that line, you're going to hear massive flutter echo. The thing is your hand never produces any sound. It's the speaker that produces the sound and the speakers in front of you. So there's action, an angle involved in that reflection coming back to you. A much better test would actually be for flatter air would actually be to get a friend in and you sit in your sweet spot and you get your friend to stand next to the speaker and clap his hands next to the speaker. That way you get an actual, a much more realistic idea or much more realistic idea I guess, of what flatter echo sounds like.

Speaker 2 (00:19:08):

You don't clap the speakers together.

Speaker 3 (00:19:10):

You can try.

Speaker 2 (00:19:13):

Probably wouldn't end up very well.

Speaker 3 (00:19:15):

No, no. But what you'll notice at that point is that the flatter echoes not nearly as pronounced than when you clap your hands next to your head. And

Speaker 2 (00:19:25):

Interesting,

Speaker 3 (00:19:25):

If you've got panels on treating your early reflections, that's exactly what they're there for. They're there to suppress those reflections that you would hear in that case. So because that's, again, that's the kind of bang for your bucks approach. I don't really care about the rest of the room. I care about my mixing position, and as long as the flutter echo is suppressed where I'm sitting here, that's good enough for me to start off with at least.

Speaker 2 (00:19:50):

So another issue with base traps, and correct me if I'm wrong here, is that it's very hard to build them big enough to be effective in small rooms.

Speaker 3 (00:20:06):

And to be honest, it's not There you go there. I used to think that as well. And I did a lot of experimenting and I obviously built this sort of ubiquitous super chunk that gets talked about a lot and it does work, of course it works, but it's crazy difficult to build and it's in comparison at least relatively speaking, and it's heavy and it's cumbersome and it's expensive. And I did a lot of experimenting and actually I wrote an article about that on my new website, acoustics insider.com, and you can go check that out, called the Best and only installation material need for DIY absorbers. And basically I go through the experimentation with different materials and different depths, and I'll show you how I came up with this kind of ideal depth, which to me is around six inches or 16 centimeters of material depth for a mineral wall or a porous absorption material, a insulation material of about 40 kilograms per meter cubed, which is about 2.5 pounds per square foot I believe.

(00:21:18):

And that is, so you end up with an ab absorber that is about six inches deep depending on how you build the frame, it might be a little deeper. And that will actually give you base absorption down to around 60 hertz. So if you place it across the corners, that's kind of the way to go. So you have that air gap in behind and that increases base absorption a bit. Yeah, so you can easily get base absorption below 60 hertz or down to 60 hertz, sorry. But you really do want those panels to be at least that deep. To be honest. I don't recommend the building them that much deeper because the benefit you get is minute, it's, it's kind of negligible. But the problem is if you make them thinner, you do lose base absorption. And one major issue with thin panels is that they reduce reverb time unevenly.

(00:22:10):

Actually, it's one of those multidisciplinary things I was talking about before. You are kind of putting in one panel and it's doing three things at one time and you got to make sure that it's doing the right three things for your room. And so one thing that I always recommend is make your panels deep enough no matter where you use them, because if you reduce the reverb time unevenly, that makes for a really unpleasant room to work in. And actually, because you kind of get the highs and mids in check, but the lows are uncontrolled and that's really unpleasant. So forget about two inch panels, forget about four inch panels go for six inches.

Speaker 2 (00:22:43):

Interesting. That makes sense. Now what about below 60 hertz?

Speaker 3 (00:22:47):

So yeah, at that point you need to start thinking about different types of absorbers. At this point we're only talking about porous absorbers. So mineral wool or fiberglass or there are several other materials out there, but basically it's insulation material, right? It's a porous absorber and it absorbs sound by converting the movement of air particles into heat. So sound velocity actually and this, but we'll get into that later or another time. But so if you want to absorb energy below at the really low frequencies, you can either do that by having really, really deep porous absorbers. And that's what you said, that's what you mentioned. I mean if you really want to go down to the 30 hertz, then you need something deeper or you just need a lot of these panels that I talked about,

Speaker 2 (00:23:34):

How deep though.

Speaker 3 (00:23:35):

So there's this quarter wavelength rule and that definitely works. So basically that just says that you want to absorb or you want to position the absorption material at a quarter of the wavelength of the frequency that you're trying to absorb. So let's say you want to absorb a hundred hertz, that's always easy. So that's a wavelength of around 10 foot, 10 feet, I guess. So about three and a half meters, 3.4 meters. That's really easy to remember. And so if you want to absorb a hundred hertz and you need to position for the most effective absorption, you want to position that absorber at a quarter of the wavelength. So that would be around what 75 centimeters, which is around just over two feet I guess.

Speaker 2 (00:24:25):

So this is where it's starting to get into the unrealistic side of things for people who have a room that's already

Speaker 3 (00:24:33):

Exactly

Speaker 2 (00:24:34):

A sure in size.

Speaker 3 (00:24:35):

Exactly. So this is when you start losing a lot of space or just basically you just can't, yeah, you either lose a lot of space or you literally can't do it. And so then at that point you can start thinking about other types of absorbers. So this mineral stuff, insulation material is a velocity based absorber. It kind of breaks, it stops the velocity, the motion of the air particles. And the other type of absorber is a resonance absorber. So that's a pressure based absorber. So it's kind of just the reverse of a drum basically. So it's some sort of membrane, some sort of panel that vibrates on top of an air cushion, like a kick drum in reverse, and those can be tuned. So this is a resonance as well. Absorber is always attuned absorber while a porous absorber like mineral, a panel isn't tuned, it's just broadband.

(00:25:29):

And so those can be used to very effectively to absorb really low frequencies. And there's different types, different kind of construction ways, different ways of building these resonance absorbers, just kind of the standard panel one that I was talking about. And you can do that with wood or you can do that with a heavy foil. You can do that with the perforated panel is a resonance absorber. People use steel sheets. So they're all different kinds, but these are more complicated and in most cases they're actually overkill for a typical home studio or project studio scenario.

Speaker 2 (00:26:06):

So not overkill or overkill, but normal kill I guess would be to just start by getting your first reflection points

Speaker 3 (00:26:19):

Treated. Exactly.

Speaker 2 (00:26:21):

And then possibly some base traps after that. Exactly,

Speaker 3 (00:26:24):

Exactly. And the beauty of this kind of working with these deeper panels is that you can just kind of expand as you go along. So you start with your first reflection points and then you will notice an improvement and then you decide, okay, now I want to kind of tackle the base. And then you can start thinking about base traps or using the same kind of panel for base trapping, just kind of putting more of those in. And yeah, you can just build as you go. You just progress throughout a more elaborate plan of room treatment and you just start with first reflection, then you move through base trapping. Then at some point you'll end up thinking about diffusion, all this sort of stuff. But that's really much later down the line.

Speaker 2 (00:27:11):

So is there a point where there's too much say that you're just like, okay, I'm just going to build my entire room around me in six inch panels

Speaker 3 (00:27:24):

And not really, so you're kind of on a path to an coic chamber at that point, right? Too much would be no reflections at all and standing waves or room modes at all. And I'm sure you could work in such room, it probably wouldn't be particularly pleasant. So too much is fairly difficult to achieve. I think the only too much really, if you end up with a reverb time that is too low or is very low, and in my experience actually low reverb times aren't that bad.

Speaker 2 (00:28:02):

I was going to say, how is that a problem

Speaker 3 (00:28:04):

Exactly? As long as the reverb time is even across the entire spectrum, that's kind of the critical thing. Low reverb times in general aren't really much of an issue. It's kind of a taste thing more than anything. But at that point you can start thinking about bringing more reflection back in. So in the form of diffusion to keep the reverb time high or higher while still having a lot of absorption in the room. But for the typical sort of home project studio scenario, you don't really have to worry about too much, especially in base trapping. Literally you're aiming for, you're on a path for just, how do I say this? I guess the goal is to have to completely suppress room modes, at which point you'll have super tight, amazingly translating base and who doesn't want that, right?

Speaker 2 (00:29:02):

That sounds like the goal to me.

Speaker 3 (00:29:03):

Yeah, exactly. So I don't think you have to worry about too much. You do have to worry about uneven reverb times, which you will get if you don't work with deep enough panels. But like I said, it's not crazy deep. Just kind of stay away from the two, four or two inches, definitely four inches maybe. And foam definitely just forget about foam. And I'm sure there are people out there who've tried foam and you will know why I say you don't want to buy foam. It's pointless.

Speaker 2 (00:29:33):

So there's a million sites out there about how to build panels.

Speaker 3 (00:29:37):

Yes.

Speaker 2 (00:29:38):

So are there any that you recommend above the others?

Speaker 3 (00:29:42):

No, to be honest, I think that's even one of the things that most of the commercial panels get wrong, and that's really the depth. There is no guide as of yet that I found that it shows you sort of step-by-step how to build a six inch deep panel to be honest. I mean literally you can take any of the designs out there and just scale it up because the important part is that your absorption material is six inches deep. Whatever frame you put that in is kind of up to you. It doesn't really matter. The important bit is that you have the right material and that it's deep enough and whatever frame you want to put that in is really up to you.

(00:30:23):

Think of you can just come up with your own design if you want. I mean, I came up with a design I find fairly simple to build. It's literally just a wooden frame with some supports and it's very sturdy and it looks good and you can kind of build it from different types of wood, which is nice, but it's a very simple design. It's very effective. It took a bit of experimenting to get there, but as long as you focus on having the right material, which I mentioned 40 kilograms per meter cubed or 2.5 pounds per cubic foot and have it about six inches deep or 16 centimeters, then you're good to go. And you can literally, if you want to put that in a bin bag, then hang it on your wall. That's fine. That will work. I mean, that's also one thing. Do wrap them in plastic. That stuff is kind of nasty as far as I know there's no health risk involved, but

Speaker 2 (00:31:17):

It's itchy.

Speaker 3 (00:31:18):

It's itchy. It's like the fibers are kind of nasty to work with and if you don't cover them up and they kind of fly around and you don't want to inhale them, it's just not pleasant.

Speaker 2 (00:31:27):

I've actually seen people put that stuff in a burlap sack

Speaker 3 (00:31:32):

And

Speaker 2 (00:31:32):

Hang it on the wall.

Speaker 3 (00:31:33):

Yeah, it works. It's not pretty, but it works.

Speaker 2 (00:31:36):

So you really can get away with that if you want. I've seen it done in actually really good studios.

Speaker 3 (00:31:42):

Yeah, yeah, definitely. Definitely. Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 2 (00:31:45):

Okay, so let's say we found an ideal physician.

Speaker 3 (00:31:49):

We've

Speaker 2 (00:31:49):

Treated our primary reflection points and even done some base traps. We built perfect six inch panels. What's next?

Speaker 3 (00:32:00):

What's next? Well, at that point you should probably start thinking about how are you going to use the sound to work, first of all, I mean we can sort of start, can continue on the technical side of and then talk about diffusion and all this stuff. But for me what becomes interesting at that point is psychoacoustics actually, which is how our brain works with the sound. And there are certain things I think that are fairly important that get neglected. One of them being the volume that you work at. I think that's a really important aspect. I'm not sure if that's interesting to you.

Speaker 2 (00:32:34):

That's very interesting to me. But I've never read about that in basically an acoustics manual. But we always tell people that when we're doing the mix crits,

Speaker 3 (00:32:51):

That

Speaker 2 (00:32:52):

If they're working in a shitty room

Speaker 3 (00:32:54):

To

Speaker 2 (00:32:54):

Mix it quieter volumes to avoid exciting the room as much

Speaker 3 (00:32:59):

Right

Speaker 2 (00:33:00):

Now, I don't know if that's true or not. Now I'm questioning everything.

Speaker 3 (00:33:06):

Well, I mean, to be honest, if you're changing the volume in terms of room thinking about the room responding, you're just kind of scaling up or down, what happens anyway. So if you're working quietly, you'll still get the same effects because it's all about relative changes. So the direct sound, the relation between the room reflections and the direct sound will remain the same. I mean the room doesn't stop responding just because you're working quietly. But what does happen when you're working quietly is that your brain is actually more sensitive to volume changes. So this is, like I said, when you get into psychoacoustics, so this is about how your brain actually hears because 80% of what we hear is our brain. It's not our ear. Our ear is just the mechanics, but our brain actually does the hearing and the decoding. And that's why we have, there's all these mask effects, temporal masking frequency, masking precedence affect, all this kind of stuff.

(00:34:13):

That's our brain, that's not our ear. And so what happens is when you're working at quiet volumes is that our brain is actually more sensitive to volume changes. So in essence, that means we are more sensitive to transience, we are more sensitive to volume changes in the music. We are more sensitive to macro and micro changes in volume. And if you think about it, everything and mixing is about volume. I mean EQ is a frequency dependent volume change, a compressor is a temporal volume, change it. So that kind of works with time trends and designer obviously all this kind of stuff. And just coming back to just the simple balancing of your track of volume, automation, all this kind of stuff. And we're much more sensitive for all of that at quieter volumes. And it kind of gets less and less. This sensitivity to volume gets less and less as we turn up the volume.

(00:35:10):

And so at really high volumes, we can't distinguish volume changes very well anymore. And so we can't really make good decisions. So that's why it's important to work at quiet volumes or that's the advantage of working at quiet volumes. And mainly there are several other things that come into play. For example, the frequency balance, the frequency response of our brain also changes with volume. So this is kind of the other side of the coin. When you're changing the volume that you're working at, you're actually changing the frequency response of your brain. And that's why I recommend, that's why I want to talk about volume because if you're constantly changing the volume of your speakers as you're working, you're actually changing and affect the frequency response of your brain. It's about these Fletcher Munson curves or equal loudness contours. You can Google that if you want to. So I always make the analogy to a colorist for film. Let's say there's a guy coloring a film and he's supposed to really nail that one sort of style of coloration, but not only does he not have a calibrated monitor, a color calibrated monitor, but he's actually working on a different calibration every day. That's kind of what we're facing when we're changing the volume while we're working

Speaker 2 (00:36:41):

Because sounds inefficient.

Speaker 3 (00:36:44):

Well, we're introducing a variable into what we're hearing that we have no control over. And that's what makes it so difficult for most people to get an idea of what the balance in their mix, what the balance of their mix is like because they're changing the volume. Even just three DB is enough. And so you work with one frequency response one day, and then you're working with another frequency response another day. And coming back to this idea of the colorist, you can sort of imagine that this guy, maybe he uses a reference so he has a good reference. He knows, okay, this is the style that I'm going for, and he can kind of put that in on the screen and he can kind of use that as a guide. So he doesn't know exactly what's absolutely sort of an absolute terms what the colors should look like, but he can say, okay, my blue is supposed to look like the blue in this reference that I'm using.

(00:37:30):

So that's what we can do with references at that point. But it's really tricky. It's really difficult. And the thing is, if what we can do obviously is we can just fix the volume that we're working at, and this is what I do. I literally work at the same volume consistently for every mix. I make sure that my projects as I'm mixing are at the same volume. I have a setting on my monitor controller that is calibrated, so I know if I set it to that particular point on my monitor control, I get a certain volume. And

Speaker 2 (00:38:01):

So why do you think that is that mixers and good mixers too, to check their low end sometimes very loud for a few seconds and then turn it back down

Speaker 3 (00:38:13):

Because the frequency response changes in a way that we do want to know. I guess especially if the music is played at on big PA systems or something, you kind of want to check what that sounds like. And there's definitely some merit in that, to be honest. I think there's more merit in having a set volume to work at and working at a quiet level for the reason I mentioned before because of the sensitivity to volume changes, the working really loud. It's interesting and you can sort of double check that nothing crazy happens, but for me personally, I don't see much value in really turning it up that loud. I don't do that and my mixes translate perfectly. I actually, I cannot not brag about this. I literally just got one of my mixes just went gold in France and got gold status, which I'm really happy about and I wasn't expecting. Congrats.

Speaker 2 (00:39:13):

Yeah, thanks. That's great.

Speaker 3 (00:39:14):

And I don't check loud volumes. I have my set level and I check quiet levels and that's it. Because the loud volume really doesn't tell me anything. It literally just makes my ears, it just tires my ears and that's it.

Speaker 2 (00:39:28):

I think that mixing loud is just a horrible idea.

Speaker 3 (00:39:33):

I mean, it just breaks your ears and that's pretty much it. There's nothing else to get, but it's fun. It's fun. But then if you want to have fun, then do that for that purpose, I think. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:39:46):

Totally.

Speaker 3 (00:39:48):

It's not a working tool. It's not a tool in our toolbox, I guess, or it's not a tool in my toolbox at least.

Speaker 2 (00:39:53):

Yeah, okay. So once you have a good working volume you're comfortable with, then

Speaker 3 (00:40:00):

So then the thing is what happens is that your brain starts getting accustomed to what your room sounds like at that volume. So that's the critical part to all of this is that your brain, you get to know what your room sounds like at that volume, what exactly what your room sounds like at that volume. And then you can actually start making much more intuitive decisions about where you want your levels to be because you can then also just pull in reference tracks. You can pull in some track that sounds great, and you like the balance of, and you kind of think, okay, this might work for my track. And you can pull that in and you can reduce the volume of that track to your working volume. So I always check RMS levels, that's a really easy way to level match a reference to your project, and then you get to listen to your reference at the volume that you decided that really well. And then you can make apples to apple's comparison between your project and your reference. And if you do this long enough, if you just spend six months doing that in your room, you'll get a really, really detailed idea of what your room sounds like. And if you've then got your acoustics in check, you can start making very quick and very reliable decisions.

Speaker 2 (00:41:21):

So this is the first time that I've ever really heard someone break down what they actually mean by in your

Speaker 3 (00:41:28):

Words. Yeah, people say this all the time and they never say what it actually means. And yeah, I got really interested in this kind of stuff and obviously just through working I started experimenting and I started noticing these effects. I mean, it all started with louder is better. We all say louder is better, but how much louder is better? How sensitive are we to louder is better. And in my case, I found out I'm so sensitive to it that 0.1 DB makes a difference. And so I level match all my references on average. That's really important. RMS or you can use one of those new loudness measuring tools based on the R 128 guideline or whatever they're called. But yeah, I'm super sensitive to this stuff. That's what I noticed and that I need to level match and only at that point can I really make comparisons because louder is better. We, it's so programmed into our brains that we have to eliminate that variable. We have to get rid of it before we can make any comparisons that are actually legitimate, sort of like proper comparisons.

Speaker 2 (00:42:35):

Am I right in thinking that it's so programmed into our brains that it's something we react to without even maybe consciously receiving problem that there's a volume the problem? Yeah, because point 0.1 db, okay, because 0.1 DB is very hard to perceive even

Speaker 3 (00:42:54):

Possible. Yeah, I mean one DB is set to be the just noticeable level difference. That's what one DB is, that's how it's defined. It's the just notable noticeable level difference. So 0.1 DB to most people doesn't really make a difference. Well, at least it's way beyond the difference they can hear. And I can't hear 0.1 DB level difference, but I can perceive I can feel the difference and it makes comparisons really difficult. And so that's why I don't make any compromises. I just say, I'm not going to compromise on this. I'm going to make it exactly the same loudness, those the two kind of pieces of audio that I'm comparing. This is really great for mastering, by the way, if you're checking a master, because you obviously the master in mastering the track gets really loud. Mainly that's what they do. They make it really loud. They might do subtle compression changes or they might do subtle EQ changes, maybe not so subtle even depending on what they want to do.

Speaker 2 (00:43:54):

I guess it depends on who it is and how good the original mix is. But

Speaker 3 (00:43:58):

You kind of want to get rid of that variable loudness so you can get down into the actual changes to the song, to the music that they made. When I check a master, what I do is I pull the master into my session and I compare it to the high definition mix that I exported for them, and I'm level matched the two. And that way I don't have that loudness difference to confuse me into thinking something is happening that isn't actually happening. And so I can tell, okay, the music changed in this way, and then I can look at the metering and I can look and say, okay, I had to reduce my master by 12 db. So he boosted the mastering engineer boosted the track by 12 db. So that's kind of the two things that I can then say from that check.

Speaker 2 (00:44:45):

I see. Okay. That's very, very interesting to me, by the way. My mind is a little bit blown, but it makes perfect sense just because you can't consciously notice something doesn't mean it's not happening. And you're basically saying to take this out of the realm of what we think we understand and into the realm of what's actually

Speaker 3 (00:45:11):

Happening. Exactly. So this loudness, this volume thing just dominates everything. It's such a strong psychoacoustic effect that we need to have it in check, we need to control it in order to work with it. And what happens is when you start controlling it, when you start making it a conscious part of your workflow is that you get such a lot more detailed ideas of what's actually happening in the music. You get to actually tell what the balance of your track is. You actually get to tell what the dynamics of your track is. If you have too much dynamics, then it sounds kind of eighties or if it's too little dynamics and then it sounds like it's from two thousands, it's this kind of stuff, 2009, 2009, first of all, you get to develop your taste without loudness breaking the assessment. I guess when you start hearing music on a level matched basis, you actually get to tell or get to say, oh wow, this is how much dynamics I like. This is how much bass I like in my mixes. And then because you're working at this calibrated volume level and at the same loudness, you get to then put that back into your mixes.

Speaker 2 (00:46:25):

Well, I always tell people when they're a being

Speaker 3 (00:46:28):

To

Speaker 2 (00:46:28):

Other mixes to level match, but you're just telling people to do it to a much crazier degree, which makes sense.

Speaker 3 (00:46:38):

I think especially when you get more experienced, you at that point, you don't need to do it that meticulously anymore. I think there are a lot of people out there I think probably, I don't know, but probably many great mixes if you ask them, they probably do this intuitively, they don't even think about it. But this kind of level matching thing as once what your room sounds like at a certain volume and what you like at that volume, like I said, you can make these decisions much more intuitively. And at that point it's probably not that necessary to be that meticulous about level matching anymore. But especially for people starting out, it's the most powerful learning tool I think. And it's brutal. You're going to hate it, but it's absolutely brutal. But it'll help you learn quicker than anything else.

Speaker 2 (00:47:28):

So when do clouds and diffusion even come into play?

Speaker 3 (00:47:32):

Okay, going back to that. So clouds to me are part of the early reflections control. So cloud will actually be part of the first things that you want to do. And because it's an earlier reflection, it's going to go somewhere above your setup.

Speaker 2 (00:47:50):

Got it.

Speaker 3 (00:47:51):

And just to mention this, there's a test out there, and I'm going to write about that myself when I get to it. It's called the mirror test, and it's just basically it means hold up a mirror to the wall or the surface that you want to put an absorber on that if you're wondering if there's a first reflection happening, you hold up a mirror to that wall and while you sit in your sweet spot, a friend holds a mirror up to a wall, moves that mirror along the wall at ear height. And then as you the point where you see the speaker in the mirror from your sweet spot, that's where the reflection happens because the sound's going to take the same path as light. So it's kind of like playing pool or billiards. It's inbound angle equals outbound angle. And so that point where the reflection happens in the mirror, that's where the first reflection happens and that's where your absorber needs to go. And this happens on your left wall, your right wall, your back wall, your front wall, and on the ceiling on the floor as well. But we can't do anything about it. But so on the ceiling, that's where the cloud would go.

(00:48:55):

Does that make sense?

Speaker 2 (00:48:56):

Yeah, yeah, totally. Perfect sense. So you already covered clouds at the beginning of this.

Speaker 3 (00:49:03):

Yeah, it's kind of the two kind of realms or the two categories of control that you want to work with that you want to do to your room are first reflections, which happen in the plane of your monitors and your ear. So at ear height or in the vertical plane, sort of the axis between your monitor and your ear. So that's kind of one area of control that you want to get in check. And then the second is kind of base, and that's irrespective of earlier reflections. And so at that point we're talking about corners and how room modes work in your room and there's a whole nother bag of tricks to do that. Maybe just to say to start off with is that the more the better and start close to where your setup is. I think that's a very, very broad general rule that you can't go wrong with to start off with without going into too much detail.

Speaker 2 (00:50:01):

Alright. Okay. So let's go back to psychoacoustics. So we've decided that we're going to level match. We've done all the level matching. Then what?

Speaker 3 (00:50:13):

So maybe just as a quick idea of how you can set calibrate in quotation your monitoring system. So the idea is to have a level in your DAW that you work at and then to have that level represented on your speakers kind of match to a certain volume. And that's where your monitor controller comes in. So you want to set your level in your DAW, and you want to set the level of your speakers through your monitor controller, and you can definitely follow some rules from the movie industry, blah, blah, blah, on what level that needs to be. But I think the important part is that you don't set it too loud or too quiet. So what I always recommend is if you want to set your level for your monitor controller, just do it at the beginning of a session. Do it as the first thing you do when you get in your studio one day and you decide, okay, I want to calibrate my monitors.

(00:51:12):

Just kind of play around with volumes of your monitor controller and see what volume you like that isn't too loud and isn't going to break your ear. And you'll have a pretty good idea of what that is, but basically what you think is comfortable. And then you just mark down that position on your monitor controller with a pen or some tape, or if you're just changing the volume in your DAW on master fader, I don't recommend it, but in your sound cards, in your interfaces, volume thingy, volume knob, then just remember what that setting is that you decided that you want to work at. And then just stick to it. That's it. Just stick to it. Literally keep coming back to it, change it If you decide, okay, I want to listen louder, listen louder. If you say, okay, I want to do this whole checking transient, being more sensitive to volume changes thing, work quietly and then come back to that volume setting. And that should be kind of your go-to volume. I kind of want to develop a monitor controller at some point, and it doesn't even have a volume knob. All it has is three buttons for three volumes, like quiet, normal and loud, all I need.

Speaker 2 (00:52:22):

That's actually a great idea. And once you calibrate it, would it be relative to your central point,

Speaker 3 (00:52:30):

You mean? Yeah. You mean the buttons on that idea? Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. So the normal setting would be your go-to work setting that you could maybe calibrate with some little switches on the back with some little knobs on the back or something. And then you could say, okay, the quiet version is like 15 DB down and the loud version is like 10 D db up or something. I dunno. Something like that. That'd be fun.

Speaker 2 (00:52:54):

That would be really cool actually. It

Speaker 3 (00:52:55):

Would be cool. Right?

Speaker 2 (00:52:56):

Okay. Yeah, because I think that I see where you're coming from with all this, and one of the things that I think every mixer does is as they're getting tired, they slowly turn up the volume and they do all kinds of dumb things like that that they know they shouldn't, but I mean we all know we shouldn't, but it's just

Speaker 3 (00:53:21):

So, so easy. It's a natural response to your brain getting tired, right? It's exhaustion that drives the volume up. And I mean, to be honest, when it comes to that point, it's really time to take a break.

Speaker 2 (00:53:36):

It is. It's almost like an IV drip where you have control. It's just like I feel just a little more pain. Just turn the volume up just a little more. Just tick on the pain please. Just a little bit. Yeah, just a little more volume and make the pain go away. Alright, so after that, what are we man? Just, well actually before you answer that, just if you think about it, I'm talking to the audience guys, if you think about it, everything that we've talked about till this point doesn't require that much money.

Speaker 3 (00:54:13):

No. And the thing is this, especially positioning and doing this calibrated monitor thing that doesn't cost you anything. You can do that right now. Just effort, just time and actually less time than you think and it pays off so much.

Speaker 2 (00:54:25):

Yeah. So I mean, this kind of kills the idea that you can only do this if you have a ton of money.

Speaker 3 (00:54:34):

You just need to know what you're doing. And that's what my new website, acoustics insiders acoustics insider.com is all about. That's exactly what I want to dive into is showing people how to work in their rooms, especially like music professionals, show them how to be confident in their sound, how to get reliable, reliable results consistently through acoustics and psychoacoustic workflow tricks, I guess.

Speaker 2 (00:55:04):

Well, I hope that you are collecting emails

Speaker 3 (00:55:08):

From your website. I am definitely. And guys, if you want to jump on board on that, definitely visit my site there and sign up.

Speaker 2 (00:55:16):

Oh, so by the way, I found your email sign up. If you go to jco lohan.com/signup, you spell, if you're listening to this episode, you already know how to spell his name, but just in case it J-E-S-C-O-L-O-H-A n.com/signup. And you'll like it says on that page, sign up here to stay up to date about my progress. I'm assuming that that's your progress with, that's

Speaker 3 (00:55:47):

Exactly right. And so I got the new website ready just a few days ago, and so I'm kind of shifting my presence from my personal or, well, not my personal, but my mixing overall personal website, sound engineering website over to acoustics insider.com if that's what you're interested in and you want to learn more about acoustics, learn more about where you should go. But I mean, both signup forms on all the websites, they all lead to the same thing. So you're good on escal low hand.com as well.

Speaker 2 (00:56:24):

Awesome. Well, let's keep talking. So what's after level matching?

Speaker 3 (00:56:29):

So after level matching, I think you've got a pretty I, you've probably got your work cut out for you if you started doing that, and you'll probably see improvements to your mixing very, very quickly. But at that point, obviously we can start talking more about more acoustics, diffusion you mentioned. I mean, we can definitely talk about that. Diffusion really is all about just getting rid of those last specular reflections, so sort of direct reflections. And this is really about improving the overall or the character of your room. Let's say if you really want an even sound across your room, then you can start thinking about using diffusion. If you record, obviously this is really important. Sorry, if you record, then that's more when you want to start thinking about the fusion because you going to get a much more even and usable sound from your room. But I mean obviously up to this point we've been kind of talking about a mixing production.

Speaker 2 (00:57:42):

So you mean in

Speaker 3 (00:57:43):

A drum room? Like in a drum room? Yeah. And just in any kind of recording space, or let's say you want the back part of your project studio to be a recording space and then sort at this point, we've dealt with the first reflections for our mixing position, our sweet spot. But let's say you've got a guitarist and a singer doing some recording in the back of your room, so the walls there are still going to be bare. And at that point you will get flu echo because obviously the singer, the microphone, let's say for a singers kind of right in front of their face. And as they sing that flutter echo will be pronounced. And so, I mean, you can start working with angles and all this stuff, but this is kind of when you want to start thinking about diffusion. Although you could all still do it with absorption if you want to, you can just get rid of those reflections With absorption, it's probably cheaper. But yeah, that's kind of when you want to start thinking about diffusion. Diffusion is kind of the bank for your buck isn't particularly great with diffusion, let's just say like that, because they're kind of cumbersome to build. They're expensive material wise, lots of material involved. If you actually want proper diffusion, you have to calculate them. So your bookshelf will help a little, but not really. And

Speaker 2 (00:58:56):

That's what I was just about to ask.

Speaker 3 (00:58:58):

Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, you can do that and it probably helps a little. You just want to make sure if you put a bookshelf there, you just fill it randomly with stuff. You want it to be as kind of broken up as possible, the surface of that bookshelf. But proper diffusion is based on mathematics and there are calculators online if you want to do this. It's not difficult to do with these calculators, it's just cumbersome and expensive. In the end, if you want to build them, they're heavy, they're difficult to put on the wall, and they're really restricted in frequency. That's another thing if you really have to design a diffuser for a particular frequency range, and you'll notice that if you want to get into the really high highs with diffusion, that you need to make those little pieces of wood really tiny and that it makes the exponentially raises the time involved in building one of those. And if you want to diffuse low frequencies, the thing has to be huge. So diffuses are very limited in bandwidth and you kind of want to focus them on the frequency ranges that are important to you when you record. For example, in this scenario,

Speaker 2 (01:00:10):

Diffusion in terms of a mixing room, this is where we're starting to talk about the final last few percentage of getting the room tuned. So it's not even that important if you've taken care of everything else.

Speaker 3 (01:00:25):

No, I don't think it's important at all.

Speaker 2 (01:00:27):

And that explains why it's so

Speaker 3 (01:00:29):

Damn

Speaker 2 (01:00:29):

Expensive, how much goes into it, because man, if you look up some professionally made diffusers, they are by far the most expensive part.

Speaker 3 (01:00:38):

Yes, definitely. They're super expensive. And yeah, it's the last, like you said, it's the last few percent. I think there's, for example, for a recording space, you could do it a bit more ghetto I guess by just putting some kind of slanted panels on the wall instead of building a diffuser that really breaks up a reflection based on the mathematical formulas. And it's great, it works, but you could also just kind of put some angled panels on your walls that direct those reflections either into the ceiling or into the floor and soak in that way, kind of get rid of the reflection, but without killing the energy. I mean, that's the whole point of diffusion. You break up a certain reflection or you get rid of a reflection, but you don't get rid of that energy. And if you do some of that, that would probably help.

Speaker 2 (01:01:32):

Okay. So basically don't worry about diffusion. Yeah, don't worry about diffusion. So I mean, I like to live by the 80 20 rule as much as possible though, even though the thing about 80 20 as applied to life is that it's kind of bullshit, but it's kind of not. And the reason I say it's kind of bullshit is because there's no formula for life. So to just be like 80 20, I mean maybe it's actually 86, 14 or something, but the idea of bang for the buck and put your focus on the things that

Speaker 3 (01:02:13):

Matter.

Speaker 2 (01:02:14):

Yeah. That get you the most return on investment. I think that that's the best and smartest way to live, especially when it comes to audio. And especially if you're not making a million dollars a year at mixing or you have a very, very limited environment that you're in, meaning it's already built, you can't do anything about it, you'll get divorced over it or whatever. Please. Yeah, please. Exactly. Please don't. A bunch of things you can do before you even get to.

Speaker 3 (01:02:49):

There's a whole bunch of things you can do and you might find that you won't ever have to get there. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:02:55):

Okay. Well, we have a few questions from our listeners. Please, if you don't mind answering them. I'm going to bring them up right now, and what's funny to me is that you've probably already talked to some of these guys

Speaker 3 (01:03:07):

That's possible

Speaker 2 (01:03:09):

In your personal consultation

Speaker 3 (01:03:10):

Possible. Yeah. Okay.

Speaker 2 (01:03:11):

So I'm going to find some of these that we haven't already talked about because for instance, Tyler Rodriguez is asking, what's the simplest thing someone can do to make their listening environment better than often that's overlooked. And it's like I feel like we already discussed

Speaker 3 (01:03:27):

It and it's positioning. It's just a matter of doing how to do it. And one thing I need to mention here at this point is because the 38% rule gets quoted a lot, and this technique is basically the updated 38% rule because the 38% rule is based on ideal room geometry and basically purely a hundred percent reflecting surfaces. And that's never the case in a real room. So this technique basically tries to find the spot that people identify using the 38% rule, but under the conditions of your actual room. So that would be my answer to him.

Speaker 2 (01:04:08):

Okay, great. Here's another one that we kind of already talked about from Alex Nala when he's asking how necessary is it to have loud harps accord in a good metal mix? I'm just kidding.

Speaker 3 (01:04:23):

And I'm the perfect guy to answer that because I don't mix any metal at all.

Speaker 2 (01:04:28):

No. So how necessary is diffusion for achieving the best possible listing environment? We just talked about that for

Speaker 3 (01:04:35):

A while. Yeah, exactly. Not that important.

Speaker 2 (01:04:36):

And he also asked, do you have a good DIY method for it? And we just talked about that too. No, not

Speaker 3 (01:04:42):

Yet. Well,

Speaker 2 (01:04:43):

It

Speaker 3 (01:04:43):

Would come.

Speaker 2 (01:04:44):

Okay. Anthony Potents is asking, how much does monitor size affect your listening? I'm in a big room and using eight inches right now, but was looking at a few higher end monitors that are 6.5. So I would love to understand this part of monitoring better. And I can tell you he's in a very big room. He's in one of those old school big fucking control rooms. That's

Speaker 3 (01:05:08):

Awesome. That's awesome. Acoustics just gets better with a room size, and that's the general advice out to everybody out there. If you're looking for a new room, the bigger the better. It's as simple as that. And in terms of monitor size, I think it doesn't really matter too much as long as you can physically do what you need to do with your monitors, literally, if you've identified your listening position, if you can still put up the stereo triangle, literally, practically put it up in the way that you need it to be without a wall getting in your way, then that's fine. Then by all means, use a huge monitor. There's something to be said about how the sound melds between the tweet and the wooer, let's say in a two-way monitor. So there's an ideal distance from a monitor at which the sound is kind of, its most coherent, I guess you could kind of say. Or it needs a certain distance for it to match up, if that makes sense. So especially with, I mean midfield or farfield monitors, they're not made to be listened to at a meter's distance, so you kind of want to pay attention to that. So if the manufacturer said, this is a farfield monitor, you probably don't want to use it as a nearfield monitor, but otherwise, in terms of physicality, you just, if you can make it work, then that's fine.

Speaker 2 (01:06:36):

Makes sense. Okay. So Bruno Leo Rivero was asking, where do you find inspiration outside music and what makes you keep feeling passionate about your work?

Speaker 3 (01:06:48):

Oh, wow. I'm definitely inspired a lot through all forms of art. So I have discovered as kind of easy, as simple as that sounds. I rediscovered movies and I don't even look at, I don't watch big classics collect the classics of movie. I really literally like Seth Rogan sort of style comedies. But there's an art in that kind of movie as well, in that art, in that kind of film. There's definitely something to cinematography and all this stuff that really inspires me. And there's a lot of parallels between all the arts dance. My girlfriend is a pole dancer and just a fantastic dancer, and she incorporates dance into her performances and the emotion of just expression into her performances that I find really inspiring. And we talk about this a lot and we look at other people's performances and we discuss what we see and how it makes us feel.

(01:07:42):

And I get inspired by all forms of art to be honest. And I think there's no hard rules there. It's just like when you like something, then it speaks to you, and if you don't like something, then it doesn't. And so yeah, I get inspired by all sorts of stuff. Business as well. I find there's something really interesting in communication and I guess helping people or the value of helping people under what circumstances you do that. I find that really inspiring as well. I think about that a lot. I've tried a few things and failed at a few things, and that definitely inspires me as well. So yeah, I read a lot. I meditate. I find a lot of inspiration from meditation, from looking inside, just kind of noticing yourself, just learning to look at yourself and realizing what's there and accepting what's there. And it's challenging at times, but it's really inspiring as well. It feels really good. Okay,

Speaker 2 (01:08:50):

Here's one from Andrea, which is what's your number one philosophy when it comes to mixing?

Speaker 3 (01:08:58):

Follow the emotion of the music. That's it. The mix is mixing, is portraying the emotions of the music as effectively to the listener as possible. And that's it. If you can do that,

Speaker 2 (01:09:12):

I completely agree.

Speaker 3 (01:09:14):

And nothing else matters. Literally nothing else matters. Or rather, that's by far the most important thing because nobody will care about music that doesn't talk to them, and that doesn't matter how good the mix technically is. So it's all about conveying emotion and use whatever tricks you've got in your tool bag to do that.

Speaker 2 (01:09:34):

Okay. Here's another one from Alex Nala, which is if you add a sub to your monitor system, how does that change what's needed in terms of treating the listening environment?

Speaker 3 (01:09:45):

Nothing. Because a sub literally, Hey Alex, by the way, we talked and we had a good time talking to each other. Nothing changes.

Speaker 2 (01:09:53):

Did he ask you about harps? Of

Speaker 3 (01:09:54):

Course, I don't think so. But yeah, no, nothing changes because a sub is literally an extension of your monitoring system and nothing changes in terms of your room that you still want to find the listing position using the same technique because that's going to be the place where the support for base is going to be the most balanced or the composition of your base frequencies of through these room modes is going to be the most balanced. And a sub literally just plays into that concept, or it just kind of excites more energy in that area. But nothing really changes. A sub is literally just an extension of your monitoring system and there's definitely sort of a process to positioning a sub and tying it in with your main speakers. And I definitely want to get into that at some point. It's not quite as trivial. I'm kind of working on a procedure to do that by ear. Give me some time with that. It's not easy. Alright, we'll give you some time, but it's going to come eventually.

Speaker 2 (01:11:02):

Alright, here's one from David Fuller. Is there a difference in treatment between two-way monitors with a sub and three-way monitors?

Speaker 3 (01:11:09):

No. No. The ideas are the same. I mean, you kind of treat the speaker as a source of sound. If it's a two-way monitor or a three may monitor, that makes no difference. It's more, I guess, because the three may monitor tends to be larger, so it's more the practicality of putting it where it needs to go. That's going to be a bit different I guess. But no, there's no difference.

Speaker 2 (01:11:34):

Okay. Here's one from nar. Magnusson. Hey Jesco, as you know from earlier, I have big base traps that are pretty effective. And my first reflection panels and cloud are four inches. I'm guessing you guys have spoken.

Speaker 3 (01:11:46):

We did speak Una's a great guy.

Speaker 2 (01:11:48):

Yeah. Okay. Yeah, we love him. Will there be a benefit of thickening those panels to six inches? I've seen you recommend?

Speaker 3 (01:11:56):

I guess so, because at this point, so he said he's got the base traps already and then he's got four inch panels. At his first reflection points, he

Speaker 2 (01:12:05):

Said he has big base traps that are pretty effective and his first reflection panels and clouds are four

Speaker 3 (01:12:10):

Inches. No, well, probably not at that point, to be honest. If he did a good job at building those base traps really deep and they do what they're supposed to do, then he's controlling the reverb time and the lows through those. Because I mean that, that's my main concern, sort of shallow traps is this reverb time issue. But if you are taking care of the base frequencies, if you're taking care of the reverb time in the base, there's definitely a point to argue about what that actually is. But if you're taking care of that through base, those deep base traps, then you've probably got that in check and you probably don't need to make your first reflection points any deeper, any your absorption there.

Speaker 2 (01:12:52):

Okay. Another one from nar, and he says, and another question. Yes, please. I've killed early reflections on the sides and ceilings as well, dealing with console or reflections by following your suggestions to lower my monitors. But I still have a bit of comb filtering throughout the spectrum. When I measure with room EQ wizard, I also have some high mid whistling. What's the next step in further treatment?

Speaker 3 (01:13:18):

So

Speaker 2 (01:13:19):

Give us a little background as to what he's even talking about.

Speaker 3 (01:13:22):

So basically he's got his console, he's got a nice console set up, and he had his speakers, his KRK monitors up on stands fairly high above his console. And I think they were quite far apart as well, if I remember correctly. And he said that he could really hear the reflection of the console and it's possible. And so I suggested that he lower his speakers so that the reflection coming off the console doesn't reflect back to his head because a comb filter basically is basically the direct sound combining with a reflection. And I mean, comb filters are nasty, right? I mean, it's kind of what you hear when you're mixing and you decide you want to make this mono track stereo, so you kind of double it and then you put one to the left and one to the right and then you delay one by five milliseconds or 12 or whatever.

(01:14:16):

And then if you combine them, if you collapse through that back to mono, those start interfering. And that's what you hear the comb filters of those two tracks interfering. And it's the same that what happens with the direct sound and a reflection. So that's what he was hearing. And so I suggested that he could lower his monitors behind his console so that the reflection off the desk actually kind of bounces past his head because it's kind of too shallow, if that makes sense. It's kind of difficult to explain without a proper image. And he did that and he said that that was really successful. But then, I mean, there are always, if you measure your room, that's what I said to, there is no such thing as a flat frequency response. You always get reflections coming back and you will always get C filters unless you are in an anaco chamber or you see those pictures of the Blackboard studios, which is literally diffusion everywhere.

(01:15:13):

So that will probably take care of that as well. But you will get comb filters and it's not that big of a problem because your brain gets used to it. Our auditory memory is super short. It's under a second I think. And we just get used to what we're hearing and our brains will compensate. Like filters are an issue if they're very, very strong. But even at that point, your brain probably gets used to them and you get used to it and you can make the perfectly fine decisions under those circumstances if you're working at a calibrated volume and you level match your references because then you get to know what that sounds like even with your reference material. So I wouldn't worry too much about seeing comb filters in your measurement about the, what did he say? The high zing, what did he call that?

Speaker 2 (01:16:01):

He said high mid whistling.

Speaker 3 (01:16:04):

Whistling high, mid whistling. Kind of difficult to say. Maybe stop whistling. Just stop whistling while you're mixing. Just

Speaker 2 (01:16:14):

Stop whistling. Yeah, you won't get high mid whistling.

Speaker 3 (01:16:17):

To be honest, I don't really know what he knew what he means at this point, so I'd have to check back with him and maybe we can narrow it down to figure out what that issue actually is.

Speaker 2 (01:16:26):

Whistles. Normally when I hear whistling, usually I'm hearing that in symbols that are broken or in guitars, that needy cue.

Speaker 3 (01:16:37):

And so at that point, it's in the material, it's not in your room, right?

Speaker 2 (01:16:42):

Yeah. It's not usually renar sitting next to me while I'm trying to mix. So here's another one from Andrea Gianelli, which is if you had to destroy one piece of gear from your rig, what would it be?

Speaker 3 (01:16:57):

I have some old lexicon reverbs that are just sitting there looking pretty, not doing anything. And to be honest, I should tie them in and see if they do anything for me, but I'd probably start with those. To be honest, I work purely in the box. I got rid of all my out outdoor gear. I mixed through a mixing contour for ages, and I did tons and tons of comparisons, and I noticed that it didn't help me one bit.

Speaker 1 (01:17:23):

Boom,

Speaker 3 (01:17:24):

Literally, because I'm a workflow nut, I want to work fast, I want to work reliably. And mixing console just made things difficult and it didn't do much for the sound, not enough to merit the inconvenience of working. So I got rid of it. And so I'm completely in the box now and I'm super happy with that. And so I don't have much gear to destroy, unfortunately. I usually tend to sell everything that I don't use.

Speaker 2 (01:17:52):

Is that an Argosy Halo desk

Speaker 3 (01:17:54):

It

Speaker 2 (01:17:54):

That I see? Yes, I have one of those.

Speaker 3 (01:17:56):

Yeah, it's lovely. I love it. It's great.

Speaker 2 (01:17:58):

That's a good piece here. It's

Speaker 3 (01:18:00):

Awesome. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:18:00):

Here's another one from Renar. Magnusson, I've heard advice regarding monitor height, like how you shouldn't have them so low that they had to be tilted more than 10 inches to get the tweeters aimed at your ears. What's your take on that?

Speaker 3 (01:18:16):

So I guess that's what he did at the moment, right? Based on my recommendations. So

Speaker 2 (01:18:20):

I mean,

Speaker 3 (01:18:21):

Why don't let me first say he should be the judge of it himself if he tried it, what results are you getting? Does it sound okay to you? What happens is there's a reflection. It gets really nerdy basically at that point because you have to start thinking about the reflection patterns coming off of your desk where they are going. You have to think about the dispersion characteristics of your loudspeaker. Different loudspeakers have different dispersion characteristics and all these sort of things come into play. But I don't see, there's also something to be said about where you place your monitor in terms of height relative to the height room mode. But I did a bit of experimenting with that and came to the conclusion that it's not as important as where you sit, hence my test of determining the sweet spot. So I don't really see a problem putting the monitor, lowering it, and pointing the tweeter upwards. If it sounds good, if it sounds all right, I guess it works.

Speaker 2 (01:19:32):

Now I have a question for you. Okay. Take a look at this picture. By the way, this picture that we're talking about is in your show description so that you guys can see what I'm talking about. I'm over Skype. Here's a link to the Facebook group. Someone just posted this and said that they were working in this room today, and it's fucking gorgeous.

Speaker 3 (01:20:01):

I have a bit of an issue that I can't open it because I'm on my workstation computer and I don't sign up to Facebook here.

Speaker 2 (01:20:09):

Okay, so let me give you a screenshot. Yes, please. In your Skype. Yes, please. We have multiple ways to solve this problem. Okay. There's a reason I want you to take a look at this control room. Okay. Let me know that you got this.

Speaker 3 (01:20:24):

Alright, let's have a look. Oh, yeah. This was on the URM Facebook group recently, wasn't it?

Speaker 2 (01:20:31):

Yes, yes. That's where I'm grabbing it from. Okay. Obviously a lot of money went into this room and that view is tremendous. Yes. And it's great, but God, there's glass everywhere and that scares me. And I'm wondering, in your opinion, obviously you're not there right now. When you look at this, do you look at it and say, oh shit, there's glass everywhere, or do you say, thank God it's so big because the bigger you get, the less of a problem you have?

Speaker 3 (01:21:06):

Exactly. So the first thing when I see this is the first thing I think is, wow, that's a huge room. They probably don't have any issues at all sort of thing. And then glass isn't necessarily a problem. You can angle glass, and I assume that's what they did here. I remember reading about the studio a while ago, and I don't know exactly what they did, but I imagine that's what they did. So that you can angle glass that's probably quite far behind the speakers. There's quite some distance between the window and the speakers. And so the thing, oh, that's

Speaker 2 (01:21:39):

Peter Gabriel's

Speaker 3 (01:21:40):

Studio, Peter Gabriel Studio Studio. That's it. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (01:21:41):

That's what it, that's what

Speaker 3 (01:21:42):

Is, yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:21:43):

Real world studios.

Speaker 3 (01:21:44):

Exactly. Yeah. So there's distance, there's a lot of distance between the windows and the speakers. And this is something you can do if you have a large room, and then you can really distance yourself from the reflective surfaces. And the thing is, the energy in the reflections drops with distance, like sound level drops with distance. It has to travel. And so any kind of effects that you get from interference between direct sound or reflections is going to be far less of a problem if the reflective sound has to travel a lot farther, and so is a lot lower in volume in relation to the direct sound. And that actually means the filter, the induced comb filter is much smaller. So that's kind of the benefit you get when you have these huge rooms. You can position yourselves, yourself far away from any surfaces. And another advantage of these huge rooms is that the room modes that we have to deal with in our smallish home studios and project studios is those room modes are in frequencies so low that they don't actually become an issue. I mean, they're lower than the 20 hertz hearing threshold, if you can hear that. And so the problematic ones, I mean, I'd have to emphasize that room modes exist, still exist higher up in frequency, but the problematic ones are so low that they don't cause much issue.

Speaker 2 (01:23:10):

Great. Well, ESCO, thank you so much for coming on. Thanks

Speaker 3 (01:23:15):

For having me.

Speaker 2 (01:23:16):

It's been enlightening for me to say the least. And I encourage everyone listening to acoustics insider.com and take in every single thing that he has to say, because the reviews from all our subscribers are that every single thing that they try that you recommend is like audio gold, basically acoustics and gold.

Speaker 3 (01:23:43):

That's awesome to hear. Thank you very much. Yeah, I mean, I also, I just want to dig deeper. I'm not satisfied when somebody tells me do this 38% rule thing. I'm just like, yeah, but why? And then the whole thing starts to unravel. And so I'm constantly developing new ideas. I'm constantly researching stuff. I'm reading up on current research, and I take all the influences from the mixing side, which I have a lot of experience with, and I take the influences from the sound system design side, which is really fascinating. They do a lot of stuff that we in the studio never do, and it's totally applicable, and I kind of bring it all in. And so I want to be able to help people really get out of this confusion zone and out of this, what do I do with my room kind of place, and know exactly what they need to do and know exactly what they're listening to and really make great records.

Speaker 2 (01:24:39):

Yeah. Well, it sounds like you're doing a great job. Thanks. Well, thank you, sir. Absolutely. And I hope that you can come on again. Absolutely. Absolutely. I'd love to.

Speaker 1 (01:24:47):

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