It's been many years since I was exposed to the Crown Tecron (later Techron) TEF system. Hopefully progress in room measurement since then has resulted in public-domain software (and hardware if necessary) to allow me to collect better data than my simple RTA presents. The RTA is OK for adjusting an EQ, but I need much more data to do a good job of "adjusting" a room where mistakes are expensive and difficult to correct.
What extremely affordable tools should I be investigating? I live alone and I'm buying a house with an acoustically lovely odd-shaped "family room" and I want my acoustic treatments to be scientifically-based, measured and re-measured with each incremental change. I'm not just talking about near-field reflections and bass traps...if I start hanging clouds and making massive tuned traps and diffusers, I need to rely on something much more than just intuition, standard treatments, simple math, clapping my hands or listening to reverberations... I want real measurements of decay times at various frequencies, etc. I want numbers. I could search better if I had a clue what I should be looking into.
What extremely affordable tools should I be investigating? I live alone and I'm buying a house with an acoustically lovely odd-shaped "family room" and I want my acoustic treatments to be scientifically-based, measured and re-measured with each incremental change. I'm not just talking about near-field reflections and bass traps...if I start hanging clouds and making massive tuned traps and diffusers, I need to rely on something much more than just intuition, standard treatments, simple math, clapping my hands or listening to reverberations... I want real measurements of decay times at various frequencies, etc. I want numbers. I could search better if I had a clue what I should be looking into.
Sorry to be so lazy...but I'm sure that pro PA people, especially those doing permanent installations, do this kind of study frequently and some small operators must be able to offer me good advice. When surface are not parallel, I'm less able to predict the room modes, and I really need to measure, especially as I start applying treatment. I would hope good AV firms do this kind of measurement, with perhaps slightly different goals.
Last edited:
How about the free REW software? Worth pursuing for room measurement? In general, will built-in soundcard hardware work (or whatever is in my laptop) or will I need better D/A for test signal generation or mic preamp and A/D sample collection? I have half-decent measurement mics and decent preamps, but no DAW or anything like that (yet).
- Status
- Not open for further replies.