How to Treat Your Home Studio for High Fidelity Listening & Mixing

Even if you’ve bought the best audio gear, your room acoustics can ruin everything you hear. In this post We will tell you the easiest way to tame your room acoustics, using a short, sweet room treatment mantra (most relevant for Indian domestic sized rooms).

Without treatment, all small rooms have lousy acoustics (especially in the low frequencies).

When you’re listening through speakers in such a room, the room imprints its acoustics onto the sound you’re trying to hear. Forget about listening to music with high fidelity… you’re listening to your room and all of its problems.

The solution: Make your room disappear.

You can effectively do this by making your room sound as neutral as possible, so that it does not colour the true sound coming from your speakers. Don’t worry… by “neutral”, I don’t mean dead. I mean acoustically balanced for enjoyable, transparent listening.

Here are the Three Golden Rules for treating small (e.g.,Indian apartment sized) rooms:

1. Add broadband bass traps to as many corners as feasible, including the wall-ceiling corners.
2. Add mid/high frequency absorption at the first reflection points on the sidewalls and ceiling.
3. To prevent flutter/slap echo, add some mid/high frequency absorption and/or diffusion to any large areas of bare parallel surfaces. E.g., parallel walls, parallel ceiling and floor.

That’s all folks! Done. Of course, you could tune it further to truly optimise it for the sound you want (maybe you want an insanely accurate room, or a lively sounding room with diffusers on some walls)… but these three steps will get you 80% of the way there, toward a “neutral” sounding mixing / listening room.

For small rooms, we’ve got some award winning Nankarrow room kits that just work!