Dok's guide to monitor placement in your home recording studio NOW W/Pt. 2: SUBWOOFERS

[Dok]

Inspired by marqueemoon's thread about upgrading his monitors - I didn't want to completely derail with everything I've learned and maybe this will help some people along the way. I think there's a ton of super unhelpful dogma and received wisdom out there without much merit that can take people years to recover from if they're lucky (or unlucky in my case) enough to end up with a bunch of factors adding up to a bad acoustical environment. I'm always referring people to this system but I've never actually gathered all the steps in one place and so now I'm going to do it one last time and just refer to it in the future when I start recommending what to do. The best part is that the initial, most important steps don't really cost anything, with the exception of full-height monitor stands if you don't already have those. And maybe a couple of tape measures. And lest it looks like I'm taking credit for this system, I'm not, I just want to help explain it and apply the principles as I have come to understand it.

RULE #1. NO AMOUNT OF ACOUSTIC TREATMENT IS GOING TO BEAT PHYSICS

In my old house I had a really great music room. It was 19'x21' and semi-detached, with all sorts of room for everything, including drums and microphones and a piano and tape machines and all that. I invested in a ton of acoustic treatment because of course I'd read about how important it is, which remains true - I had bass traps in every corner, I had triangle traps in all four ceiling corners, plus tube traps everywhere the wall met the ceiling. I had broadband traps at first reflection points as well as a good portion of the front wall. I had my monitors 1 foot from the front wall and my listening position was at the 2/3 point of the length of the room, all things that people on internet forums say you're supposed to do, and I had REW and a measurement mic and SonarWorks room correction software, but my mixes would NOT translate.

I mean, look at this shit:

My mixes were thin and weak everywhere else I took them despite sounding super full in the studio. REW was still telling me that my bass was out of control when I measured it from my listening position, but how could that be? I only had monitors with 5" woofers. So I bought MORE stuff, including a ceiling cloud, which didn't help. So then I thought, damn, I guess I need bigger monitors so I bought the 8" versions. That made things worse. Mixes were worse than ever and I was losing my mind. Must be the monitors again, so I bought a third pair, nope. Finally after months of going absolutely crazy I found an interview with this guy named Carl Tatz where he outlined everything that I had just gone through and why those kinds of problems aren't going to get solved without a systematic approach, which he calls his Phantom Focus System and it made complete sense to me. I'm not an acoustician but he described his methodology and it made sense to me. As it turned out, due to the room dimensions and speaker placement, I was sitting right in a peak of 200hz or so, which no amount of trapping would have ever fixed, and it was right at the location that his calculator predicted. That was all I needed and I was sold from that point on. So I moved the monitors toward me about 12 inches as prescribed, spaced them out a little wider as it called for and then adjusted my desk and listening position to spots where I was least likely to encounter a bad room mode, and holy SHIT. For the very first time my monitoring system wasn't at total odds with the physics of the room. I put on my usual reference material and honestly felt like I was inside the recording. Not going to lie, I nearly cried.

RULE #2. KNOW YOUR ROOM MODES

Room modes are caused by sound reflecting off of various room surfaces. A room mode can cause both peaks and nulls (dips) in frequency response. When two or more waves meet and are in phase with each other at a specific frequency, you will have a peak in response. When they meet and are out of phase with each other, they cancel and you end up with a dip or null in response.

In our example we are going to focus on the axial modes, which are functions of the length, width, and height of the room. Every room has different axial modes according to its dimensions, and in order to find the optimal placement for speakers and listening position, we are going to be dealing in terms of inches, so it's important to measure accurately.

We're going to use Carl Tatz's Phantom Focus protocol as our starting point here. Normally it's a methodology and very meticulous, scientifically-grounded approach that he personally deploys to his clients using sophisticated measuring and calibration tools, including multiple time and phase-aligned subwoofers, usually in already professionally-treated studios. But that's not most of us reading this and we don't need all that stuff to arrive at a pretty good starting point before we open up our wallets. Luckily Mr. Tatz is gracious enough to host all of this information on his website for us, which I highly recommend perusing and learning from.

https://carltatzdesign.com/acoustic-tools/

And we are going to use his example room's dimensions and plug them into the Axial Mode Calculator. You can do this with any room dimensions and the same principles will apply. Please keep in mind that the numbers I will be using here are only examples and your room will be different.

[Dok]

Let's start with our room dimensions of 15'9"x18'6"x9' and plug them in.



So what are we looking at? You see those valleys at the bottom of each section with the frequency labels? Those are our nulls, meaning those are locations within your room that those frequencies are going to be cancelled out. Taking our first dimension, which is height, we can see that the 1st and 3rd modes coincide to cause the deepest null at 54", at 63 and 189Hz, which means that if our ears and/or speakers are at 54" from the floor (or 1/2 the height dimension), we are just straight up not going to hear those frequencies. They're cancelled out there. So we know that we can't set our speakers up that high. Luckily for us, 48" give or take a few is a pretty average speaker height and it just happens to be nearly equidistant from the 4th order null at 41" and 251Hz. 48.5" if we're being exact, which we should be attempting - you can see there's a small dip in where three axial modes intersect but for our purposes we don't need to worry about that dip - we're selecting the best spot from a range of imperfect options, and ultimately it comes down to the distance between the floor or your ears - we can realistically only go a few inches either way depending on how adjustable your chair is.



So now that our speaker height is out of the way, what about the width? Again, our axial mode calculator will tell us where we definitely should not place our speakers, but we have to do a bit of thinking about logical places to avoid those nulls.



Looking at the space between modes 1,3 at 95" and mode 4 at 71", that puts us at 83" from each wall. But of course that means our speakers would only be about 24" from one another right in the center of our room, which isn't going to work! So we have to look at the next space over, between mode 4 at 71" and mode 2 at 47". Divide that distance in half and we have 59" from each wall. Now taking a look at mode 2, that's still a pretty big dip along there so we can nudge our width placement a little more toward the center a couple of inches, and you will have to make adjustments like this as well. Let's go with 61 inches from each wall for a total of 68" apart. Mr. Tatz went for even further refinements and in his example, which I'm still employing here, he went to 67.5" - he really likes that number but don't let it trip you up in your own calculations too much just yet. We are going for what our room tells us to do, not using specific numbers that don't necessarily apply.



Okay, now it's time to determine how far back from your front wall you're going to place your speakers! Let's look at that axial mode calculator one more time. If the very left side is our front wall, we can see that up to that 4th mode at 28" away and 122Hz, we've got some space to play with, but then the modes start really interfering until they get farther out.



Something to plan for is to try to leave some room for broadband absorption on that front wall behind our monitors at some point in the future, so we know we can't have them touching the wall (which can also cause unwanted resonances and other problems). We also know that we are going to sit and listen from a position that also isn't in one of those pesky room modes (that also takes our desk into account) so we have to find a good balance between these two criteria. What's our goldilocks zone here for where to sit? We know that between 37" and 56" is too close because there's no room for the desk, and between 83" and 111" is too far, so our sweet spot is right in between.



Mr. Tatz labels this result the Null Positioning Ensemble and even though our numbers are necessarily going to differ depending on our room dimensions we can still utilize the principles, which I'll touch on in the next post.

[Dok]

Okay, so now that we've determined height, length, and width of our monitors and our listening position, we have to make some fine adjustments. Again I'm not an acoustician so I am taking these recommendations on mostly faith and my own limited experience, and I don't necessarily need to know why something works to know that it does work if we've done our measuring accurately thus far.

RULE #3. OUR LISTENING POSITION SHOULD BE INSIDE AN EQUILATERAL TRIANGLE WHOSE APEX FORMS BEHIND OUR HEAD

Now that we've got the distance between our monitors sorted at 67.5" apart and we know that our listening position needs to be somewhere around 72" from the front wall, we know right where to put the chair. Our monitors should be angled at precisely 30 degrees (this is the optimal angle for stereophonic listening and gives us our inner equilateral triangle angles of 60 degrees each).

I bought one of these for dialing it in: https://www.amazon.com/Alumicolor-83012 ... r=8-3&th=1



Once the monitor stands are angled right you can even take a tape measure from each tweeter and measure out where they meet - it'll be at precisely the distance between the two tweeters (67.5" in this example) and you can put your chair right inside of the apex. Again if you're in a smaller sized bedroom like I am now, that number is going to be smaller, but the 30 degree angle and equilateral triangle both remain essential components of the system.

Check out these photos: https://carltatzdesign.com//the-null-po ... le-photos/

Once you've done all of this (it should really only have taken like 30 minutes to get to here), measure the distance between your tweeters and the front and side walls one more time to get them right where our mode calculator indicated (they usually need fine adjustments after you've gotten the angle right), and then you can start playing some music through them and judging for yourself!!

There's a handy guide from Tape Op with some of these steps restated: https://tapeop.com/tutorials/78/monitor-positioning/

Do toe in your near-field monitors to a 30 degree angle.
Do space your near-field monitors far enough apart so that the apex of your equilateral triangle is 18 inches behind your head. (I recommend 67.5 inches from tweeter to tweeter.)
Do use speaker stands and implement a decoupling element between the stands and the monitors.
Do adjust the height of the acoustic center of the speaker (usually midway between the tweeter and midrange) to match the height of the listener's ears.
Do experiment by moving the monitor/engineer position back and forth along the length of the room to avoid axial mode nulls. If you're lacking bass response, your best bet will be close to the front wall.*
Do attenuate first reflections once you have chosen your positioning by sitting in the listening position and having someone walk along the right side wall with a mirror until you see the left speaker. Repeat for the left wall and (importantly) the ceiling as well. Place sound-absorptive panels at the wall and ceiling positions that you have identified.
Do place absorption on the rear wall.

Don't assume that your speakers are going to be truly accurate in your room, no matter how much you paid for them or how well your room is acoustically designed.
Don't use any other angle other than 30 degrees for stereophonic monitoring. The laws of physics determined this for stereophonic listening 50 years ago.
Don't mount your monitors on the console. Unless your console has a lot of mass, the console resonance will greatly affect the frequency response.
Don't use consoles with high backs that prevent proper speaker height positioning.

[Dok]

And really, those are the basics. It seems like a ton of work but it's really just running around with a tape measure and doing some subtraction, and I absolutely swear by this method. In fact, I'm not aware of another protocol that really even exists that wouldn't take room dimensions into account and arrive at the same results.

There is some controversy in regards to what to do next, though, but to me it's easy to figure out after learning about Rule #4, which I will elaborate on tomorrow.

[seenoevil II]

Honestly, I feel like my mixes got worse after I got monitors. They also got thin and tiny despite using a billion reference recordings and visual aids.

With the inherent limitations of my space, I'm wondering if it's a lost cause and I should invest in some good headphones for mixing.... or maybe just hire somebody.

Audio engineering is the most unwelcome burden. Trying to learn enough to music well is like trying to run at the sun on the horizon.

Question: would mixing with only one monitor sidestep a lot of these problems? Phase and stereo imagining notwithstanding.

[Dok]

Honestly, I feel like my mixes got worse after I got monitors. They also got thin and tiny despite using a billion reference recordings and visual aids.

With the inherent limitations of my space, I'm wondering if it's a lost cause and I should invest in some good headphones for mixing.... or maybe just hire somebody.

Audio engineering is the most unwelcome burden. Trying to learn enough to music well is like trying to run at the sun on the horizon.

Question: would mixing with only one monitor sidestep a lot of these problems? Phase and stereo imagining notwithstanding.

My first question would what be are your room dimensions? Then I'd say read the thread and try the method described - the problems you mention are exactly the ones I mentioned that I experienced up top. It's pretty much free and it really works.

But a huge part of the reason it mixing is so tough is because you don't have accurate monitoring and are fighting your room. This can help get you closer to where that's not happening and when you make EQ and compression moves you can actually hear them.

[marqueemoon]

Audio engineering is the most unwelcome burden. Trying to learn enough to music well is like trying to run at the sun on the horizon.

I’d put this a little differently for myself.

The better I get at the engineering piece the more effectively I’m able to express myself musically. Doing both can be tough though, and technical challenges are extremely frustrating when I’m trying to wear the musician hat. I use a dumbed down setup to try to head that off a liitle, but yeah.

[marqueemoon]

This is great info. I definitely need to do some work to understand my room better.

Where I first really noticed room-related mix issues was at my bandmate’s place. The first thing we mixed there sounds pretty bad in ways mastering couldn’t meaningfully fix.

[mikeymike]

This is a great write-up; thank you so much for sharing!

[BTL]

OK, I need to come back to this later, but I'm very interested to make the best of what I've got.

[Dok]

Glad to see some people are finding this useful... and it reminds me that I never posted pt. 2 of this, which is why you need a subwoofer (or two, actually). Coming soon.

[Shadoweclipse13]

This is awesome!! When we move and I start to set up my music room, I am totally giving your method a chance!!

[marqueemoon]

Made huge progress getting the basement organized last weekend.

Should be ready to try these tips soon now that I have more space/actual options for where the monitors can go to work their best.

[Dok]

I still gotta do the subwoofer section! Making a mental note to try to get to it this weekend.

[marqueemoon]

I still gotta do the subwoofer section! Making a mental note to try to get to it this weekend.

I’m interested to see that.

Getting the low end right has always been really important to me. It’s been a struggle in some rooms.