building a diy ISO box?

[aviel]

anyone ever tried something like this in the video?



i am recording at home, and i thought, welll why not.. anyone tried this?

 

[egan.]

I've built a lot of iso boxes and rooms over the years and the problem is you have to make it pretty big and/or partially open or else it sounds like it's in a box. If it's worth a shit it's also going to be obscenely heavy and too big to fit through household doors. Not everyone has the space but I just set up amps in another room in the house and build a tent around them to kill highs and reflections.

 

[hsnyder]

Hmm intriguing idea, can you describe this tent? Just a ton of acoustic foam?

I had an idea once of building one that had a queen mattress on top of it so it doubled as a bed and didn't take up as much space in the room (talk about bedroom volume, lol)... But I never actually did it, cause I was (am) afraid that it will sound like a box.

 

[egan.]

Well I keep building variations on this:

Essentially I just use heavy curtain and blankets on stands and have cabs fire into acoustic panels. It's still loud in the room but the tracks come out dry. It's several rooms away so it doesn't bother me. I'm in a house but the neighbors are close and haven't complained during any of the albums I've done here.

 

[hsnyder]

oh my fuck. okay no joke... its a tent. Any need to add room reverb to try to get some early reflections back?

 

[AD Chaos]

Too bad that vid isn't high gain stuff.. Looks like a really well-built box.

 

[egan.]

oh my fuck. okay no joke... its a tent. Any need to add room reverb to try to get some early reflections back?

Nope. I don't want them.
I've definitely built smaller stuff and stuff that controlled sound (escaping) better before but it was always at the cost of the recorded sound. Weird phase stuff and speakers that sounded choked are par for the course with small boxes. With this it sounds good and I can take it down or put it up in an hour. The trick is of course that I have extra rooms and I'm in a freestanding house so neighbors are a non-issue.

 

[hsnyder]

Gonna try this. Thanks

 

[aviel]

so all those grossman iso box, randall iso and stuff like that have that boxy sound to them? because i heard pretty good sound clips on this forum. my main concern is noise neighbours-wise.

 

[egan.]

I think they have a boxy sound yes, but if your main concern is sound leakage it may be a compromise worth making.

 

[Simon Dorn]

so all those grossman iso box, randall iso and stuff like that have that boxy sound to them? because i heard pretty good sound clips on this forum. my main concern is noise neighbours-wise.

No boxy sound with the Grossman, or very little at least. It's not a 4x12 in a treated Studio room, but it's a great Cab to work with, at home.

 

[hsnyder]

As a student of physics I'm sorely tempted to get REALLY into the boxy sound issue... I wonder how many people have really tried a mathematical approach to it..

 

[egan.]

By all means do it. It's interesting that there seems to be this universal square with one inch of insulation approach which just screams comb filtering. Add to that that few of them allow the speaker to breath in either direction and you have a recipe for something that may sound good but won't sound like a cab in free air.

 

[StayTrue]

I built a collapsable iso cab a few months back for my mesa 4x12. Works really well, but the low end can get out of control if you crank it. Here's a post I made about it a few months back.

 

[hsnyder]

By all means do it. It's interesting that there seems to be this universal square with one inch of insulation approach which just screams comb filtering. Add to that that few of them allow the speaker to breath in either direction and you have a recipe for something that may sound good but won't sound like a cab in free air.

Yeah. I may give this a try. Ill make a progress thread if I do...

 

[AD Chaos]

I was checking the Rivera iso box and their 'solution' to the boxiness (while maintaining a compact size) seems to be an 'air labyrinth':



I'm getting interested in building a big box myself. Will make a thread also, if I do.

 

[HCL]

I'd never thought of using an ISO cab for live. That makes so much sense, and if it opens up you're also good for really small venues with no PA or a PA breaking.

Theoretically, couldn't you use something like an ENGL e530 without a poweramp with an ISO cab live? They have a very small built in poweramp for practicing through so there would be signal.

 

[egan.]

It's been years but I was a stage hand for a Nickelback show and all of their on stage cabs were dummies. They had 4 road cases per guitarist with 4x12"s permanently mic'd inside (presumably for different tones or cabs since they were all used). The cases were huge of course, but it did sound good.

 

[MarcusGHedwig]

It's been years but I was a stage hand for a Nickelback show and all of their on stage cabs were dummies. They had 4 road cases per guitarist with 4x12"s permanently mic'd inside (presumably for different tones or cabs since they were all used). The cases were huge of course, but it did sound good.

That's absurd, how big were these things? And any idea on the construction, or how they kept the mics fixed in the sweet spots within the boxes? Just seems like such a crazy concept, a mobile 4x12 iso chamber of sorts (not to mention fucking 8 of them, jesus christ)

 

[egan.]

It's been a long time but they were like 4x4x7. That's a rough estimate. They looked like regular cable trunks with lids that opened for access. It seems like a lot of gear/space but the dummy cabs took up as much case space as the isoboxes did.
basically this only I'm pretty sure the boxes were longer/wider with more insulation: