Encouragement for better sound at one of our establishments

[Executioner213]

One of the venues we have in my town used to be a train station (it's called The Depot). The hall where they have bands has 2 things going wrong for them: The stage is off center, and the walls have tile about five feet up from the ground all around the room with pretty much nothing up for dampening. I've tried to mention to them before that maybe they could look into some acoustic foam around the top of the room, but they don't want to do anything to compromise the historic properties of the venue, which is a stupid standpoint to me if they are having bands and booze there IMO.

So...in a room thats got all flat walls, tile on the floor, tile on the walls 5 feet up, and a stage thats off center (think of if you took a wall, divided it in half, and then put the stage on the right half of it - they have a projection screen on the other side), is there any sort of EQing that can be done to avoid it from just being a slap-back mush, or at least cut down on it some?

 

[egan.]

is there any sort of EQing that can be done to avoid it from just being a slap-back mush, or at least cut down on it some?

No. You can pull the most offensive resonances but there is nothing you can do about the reflections w/o addressing the acoustics.

 

[JBroll]

It might happen sometime that we can analyze the 'room sound' as a function and apply the function's inverse to the signal before playing it, but that's Jetsons shit right now. EQ can only really help take care of resonances and feedback and try to recover clarity when shit starts hitting the fan.

Jeff

 

[Nebulous]

It might happen sometime that we can analyze the 'room sound' as a function and apply the function's inverse to the signal before playing it, but that's Jetsons shit right now. EQ can only really help take care of resonances and feedback and try to recover clarity when shit starts hitting the fan.

Jeff

In terms of resonance and peaks/ cancellations, I can see where you're coming from with that, but what about the actuall time based characteristics of the room? How would you electricaly/ mathematicaly and hence practicaly "invert" a reverberation/ delay/ reflection to cancel it out if the cause of that reflection still exists.

Not trying to be a smart arse. I might learn something now haha.

 

[JBroll]

You would use phase cancellation to your advantage, I'd expect. It would be hard for me to go between guessing what such a thing would involve mathematically and how to explain it, especially when actually doing this shit is a long way ahead in terms of theory and computation, but... at the risk of shooting my foot while it's in my mouth later, maybe something like finding a transformation of a selection of audio that is - at least to some good approximation - the inverse of an impulse captured from a room?

I'd imagine that computers would be necessary somewhere in there, and while maybe an analog circuit could model the 'eslupmi' a computer would probably handle that better too. I don't know the mathematics behind impulses as well as I should (and, yes, I am going to work on that mathematics of audio processing thread some more, I just need questions and a little more spare time than a tutoring job, a last semester of an undergrad degree, a girlfriend who is actually worth the time she takes, working on getting into graduate school and getting published, and music writing tend to give...) but if we can express the 'output' of a system in terms of a series of (hopefully invertible) operations on the 'input' we can go backwards from there just like we can go backwards with 'undoing' EQ. Compression... not quite so easy.

This may suck a good amount of time away from my cryptography nerdiness in the future, so we'll see what that goes.

EDIT: Erm... FUCK! Paragraphs! This is nonsense! Where did my nose go? END EDIT

Jeff

 

[gibbed]

It might happen sometime that we can analyze the 'room sound' as a function and apply the function's inverse to the signal before playing it, but that's Jetsons shit right now. EQ can only really help take care of resonances and feedback and try to recover clarity when shit starts hitting the fan.

Jeff

the problem is the room response is different at different locations within the room

some high end monitors do what you're talking about, but they are only intended for use by one listener who is always sitting in the same spot

 

[JBroll]

Yes, and while although this would make everything much more complicated I wouldn't be surprised if it were still possible. Keep in mind that the compensation would hit the listeners in different positions differently too; again, as I said earlier this is really far off but I'm of the school of thought that everything involving physical interactions as 'simple' (ha-ha!) as audio can be described mathematically, and with enough work just about anything can be approximated well enough. Now, if I keep thinking about this I might actually have to start doing this stuff seriously, so... I'm going to go hide now.

Jeff

 

[Sloan]

Not to derail the thread, but this reminds me of a time I played a show in the food court of a fucking SHOPPING MALL. It was so much fucking echo oh my gawd, it still haunts me to this day. You could hear a note for about 30 minutes just bouncing through the cavernous structure that is the mall. I can't even describe it right. It was so bad that I couldn't stop laughing. Possibly one of my worst gigs ever. I also blew up my amp and had to use this dudes little 10w peavey practice amp WTF JESUS?!

 

[Metaltastic]

Not to derail the thread, but this reminds me of a time I played a show in the food court of a fucking SHOPPING MALL. It was so much fucking echo oh my gawd, it still haunts me to this day. You could hear a note for about 30 minutes just bouncing through the cavernous structure that is the mall. I can't even describe it right. It was so bad that I couldn't stop laughing. Possibly one of my worst gigs ever. I also blew up my amp and had to use this dudes little 10w peavey practice amp WTF JESUS?!

Ahahahahahahahahaa next you'll be playing at an amusement park

 

[jesterroot4]

lol had one of these gigs last week, was a competition too lol
head of events at XFM was one fo the judges, was interesting, in a hall type place, was awfull!!!

jeff be careful, u may end up like hawkins... lol

 

[Kazrog]

Not to derail the thread, but this reminds me of a time I played a show in the food court of a fucking SHOPPING MALL. It was so much fucking echo oh my gawd, it still haunts me to this day. You could hear a note for about 30 minutes just bouncing through the cavernous structure that is the mall. I can't even describe it right. It was so bad that I couldn't stop laughing. Possibly one of my worst gigs ever. I also blew up my amp and had to use this dudes little 10w peavey practice amp WTF JESUS?!

In 2001 my band played in a large, flat cafeteria with a linoleum floor that had almost entirely GLASS WALLS, for some kid's 16th birthday party.

The best part was that we all checked our amp levels with earplugs in, since we were such n00bs we thought we'd need to really crank it just like we did in our large, luxurious, soundproofed practice studio (we got kicked out of there a few months later but that's another story!) Of course I had a 300 watt Line 6 half stack (BBE Sonic Maximizer rack in the loop at that point too for extra brittle high end!), and my former bassist had a Trace Elliot with a 4x10. THUNDER.

Most of the kids decided they should go outside and watch us through the glass walls. So did my mom.

But a few brave souls who could withstand the piercing high end reflections and thunderous bass, including the birthday dude - stuck around decided to turn the cafeteria into a mosh pit!

We borrowed some disco lights from the DJ who went on before us, and we put a rope light around the kick drum. Somewhere I have video of all this....

 

[PhilR]

One of the most popular local venues for metal shows near me went for over 10 years before finally adressing the fact that the stage area is a massive bass trap. I played there this weekend and I had to conclude that the stage is some kind of metaphysical black hole that somehow sucks audio from instruments. I was stood directly in front of the drummer and I could barely hear him.

Playing there again tomorrow night as well. Although we might get a soundcheck this time, normally the only check the first and last band and then just linecheck everyone else. I mean, as long as the crowd gets the goods who cares if the band can't hear shit right?