The only thing more amazing than loud low bass is bone dry loud low bass

Bone dry sounds awesome.

My frustration with rock venues is that there's usually lots of bass, but it's super sloppy. Everything below ~80hz sounds like a giant audio sludgeball.

I feel like even a little bit of tuning and room correction (the sort one can do at home with freeware and a $89 calibrated microphone) would help tremendously, but there's no appetite for that on the part of concertgoers or sound techs.

I'm glad there are dance venues getting this right.

That sounds like something I could do for my own loungeroom. I mean, I have no fancy gear but it seems like a process to make the best of what I have. For the cost of a decent microphone it could be worth it.

The gist of it is:

- get a calibrated mic

- use REW (Room EQ Wizard, free) to take several measurements in your room, in the listening area(s)

- REW will average them and generate an inverse EQ curve to compensate

- you can export the parametric EQ settings and use them anywhere that supports parameteric EQ such as EqualizerAPO (windows, free) or CoreAudio parametric EQ units (Mac, free) or in a standalone hardware device like the MiniDSP (~$100 IIRC)

you can always tweak the parametric EQ curve to suit your personal taste, like some extra bass or extra treble to compensate for aging ears (like mine)

have fun and good luck!

Wow, thanks for the quick writeup. I think I'll give this a shot at work where we have audio/video equipment for presentations and the like.

Good luck! Corporate meeting rooms tend to be a bit of a worst case scenario for sound.

The absolute worst case scenario for sound is an empty rectangular (or cube) shaped room with bare walls and most corporate meeting rooms come pretty close to this.

However, you can still make some improvements.

Yeah, foam deadening has gone a long way for us to reduce echo and other issues over Zoom, along with many directional mics condensed into a mixer. I am a bit of a stickler with sound quality over conference calls, so anything to improve it is very interesting to me.

REW is an excellent piece of software. You may be able to make some improvements for a single listing positioning, but just a heads up that you can't EQ away room level issues.

From their own (again excellent) help guide: https://www.roomeqwizard.com/help/help_en-GB/html/iseqtheans...

Right, REW is not a cure-all. Speaker selection and placement are orders of magnitude more important than anything else.

After that comes room issues. Surprisingly I think most residential rooms are decent, acoustically, because they tend to be filled with padded furniture and such and aren't overly reflective in obnoxious ways. Also most people aren't running massive subwoofers and if they are, they generally know what they're getting into. With all that said, I think REW is great for cleaning up the rest.

If all people did was pay attention to speaker selection and placement, I think most people would wind up with a very good listening situation.

And if all people did was pay attention to speaker selection and placement and clean up the remaining issues with REW, I think most people would wind up with a great listening experience.

Good starting tip, but readers should be aware that you can only help with frequency domain issues here.

The thing that might break your acoustics might more often be time-domain issues. No EQ on earth will get rid of the reverb in an empty warehouse. The same is true on a smaller scale in your place. And because it is smaller you will have specific frequencies (room modes) ringing out longer or shorter at your listening position. These are issues you can only fix with actual physical alteration of the space by putting in more stuff and adding absorbers, diffusors and such.

So EQs can help, but you should also think about the actual surfaces of the room itself.

In principle you can also use a phased array to remove the reverb. I'm not aware of any non-academic implementations though.

https://holoplot.com/ give a two dimensional array. The hangs of speakers that you see at most concerts are a line array, and within each of them will be an array of transducers that control the pattern of the individual cabinet (eg cardioid subs. You'll also quite see digitally steered columns in a lot of spaces these days too. None of these remove the reverb, but they do provide control over where energy is directed to minimise it occurring in the first place.

Neat! "All" you need on top of that for reverb cancellation is for the 2D array to be a surface enclosing the region of interest and for the way it itself mechanically interferes with the sound to be predictable. If you're a bit careful with where you send the sound then perhaps the top/bottom exits wouldn't matter too much.

Forgive me! It's a broad topic, and one must always choose what to cover in a short internet post.

In short I think speaker selection and placement are about an order of magnitude or two more important than everything else. If those are the only two things you pay attention to and don't drastically screw the rest up, you'll have a nice sounding system.

Room correction (which is also speaker correction) is probably the next most important thing, although well into optional territory IMO.

There's lots more that I fuss over, but I don't want people believing that they need a lot of elaborate rituals and room alterations to achieve good sound. It's not true, it's counterproductive, and scares people away from this really fun hobby. =)

    No EQ on earth will get rid of the reverb in an 
    empty warehouse. [...]

    So EQs can help, but you should also think 
    about the actual surfaces of the room itself.

You're completely correct, but I don't emphasize room issues too much for beginners. Why? In my experience, most residential rooms are actually pretty acoustically decent for a few reasons.

1. They tend to be filled with comfy padded furniture, bookshelves, etc. which do a nice job of breaking up high and mid frequency reflections.

2. The brain already performs a lot of "room correction" and it's particularly good at performing it in familiar spaces like our own homes.

3. Most people's home systems (especially those of beginners) aren't putting out the kind of massive low frequency output that's really troublesome to tame.

Of course there is always going to be a room mode or three, usually with a prominent one somewhere in the midbass range.

I have already played with EqualizerAPO in the past and it surprised me with how capable it was.

As you seem to have intuited, I am in beginner territory and that "gist of it" overview is all I needed.

My HTPC/Steam machine will get a calibration in the near future!

Thank you very much for helping me to help myself to improve listening experience.

Room correction rarely can get as good a result as actually sorting out the room, particularly at concert/club levels.

It sounds like you frequent some questionable venues. You'd be hard pressed to find many live sound engineers operating today that won't be working with a dual channel RTA (Smaart, or similar) and keeping an eye on the venue's transfer function during a gig as the acoustics change (different crowds, temperature etc).

Hey stemming from this is a lot of talk of eq and rooms. I hope no one minds but may I also add something for budding sound techs: mics and speakers and why it’s easier for a dance venue compared to a live rock venue. These are what I’d call newbie-ish problems so forgive me if you’re talking about pro level rock venues. Low end builds up on stage and unless managed gets into mics you don’t want it to leading to lots of sloppy bass. One might low cut mics that aren’t meant to be receiving low end content for example or mute ones not in use. Another thing is that producing bass frequencies requires the speaker diaphragm to move more air and so there’s a slower transient response or time to complete a cycle. If you send too many different things at once to the low end the poor thing gets ‘confused’ and things get sloppy. Double hangs seem to be getting quite popular for this reason, less instruments fighting over the same cycle. Otherwise don’t send everything you can to the sub just because you can. Personally, unless there’s some reason to, I rarely let anything go below 80 anyway and defs not 60. I hate giving advice, tell me how I’m wrong.

I'm curious, if these waves aren't heard, is there much need to dampen them? Are we talking about to reduce the physical effects on those around, or is there a mechanism that makes these audible at some point?

Without damping them you get a few problems around standing waves and room modes.

Those modes will make it so that you have some areas in the room where that frequency will be uncomfortably loud, and other areas where it goes away entirely.

The article is talking between 8 and 37hz, iirc. General given hearing range is 20hz to 20khz. So the vlf is flirting with that range. Throwing in an aside here, inaudible might be a better word than undetectable. I was always told just because you can’t hear it doesn’t mean you can’t feel it, for both high and low end. As for why you might want to dampen inaudible low end aside from a fastidious want for control, or not wanting a build up of that feeling only for some lucky punters, you might just not want to shake a ceiling tile loose or a vibrating air duct might be annoying: there is more energy in the low end.

Works at somewhere like Burning Man where there's little to have standing waves against.

This is one of the factors that make decently large, remote outdoor electronic events (bush doofs etc) such an experience. There's no better way to enjoy a tranquil natural environment that slapping a giant Funktion One system into it.