Acoustics FAIL
Originally published at The Null Device Blog. You can comment here or there.
My attempt to build something like Realtrap’s Portable Vocal Booth was a failure.
Well, kinda. I suppose I could say it was too successful.
I’d used my remaining lumber and my last slab of OC703 to build two 2-foot by 2-foot panels, which I wrapped in musiln, then bolted together at right angles, forming a kind of acoustic corner. I’d hinged it so I could fold it up when not in use.
The hinging provided some problems. It left me without a good “hard point” from which to mount it to a mic stand, as all my hard points would move. So instead I removed the hinges and bunged it together with some angle brackets.
This still left me with some problems. I needed something that I could clamp onto a stand that wouldn’t collapse under the weight of the thing. After several false starts with mic stand clamps, hinged clamps, and 5/8-27 thread mounts, I finally screwed on a crossbar and some drum mounting hardware. This worked rather brilliantly. Except it required me to mount it to a drums stand instead of a mic stand. Fine, I guess, because a drums stand was the only thing sturdy enough to hold it all.
It wasn’t too heavy, honestly, but being 2×2 and v-shaped, it was really unbalanced. While I could probably guesstimate the center of gravity fairly well (college physics comes streaming back) I’d never get it exactly right, since it’s not a spherical object of uniform density.
I brought it downstairs, into the studio.
This is where things went wrong.
It worked brilliantly. It was also huge. It dominated one side of the room. Having a large acoustic absorber on one side of the room basically meant there was an enormous dead spot on one side of me that wasn’t on the other. The whole room began to sound kind of weird. I had only a limited number of places to put it too (I may have to move some furniture) without blocking my egress from the room or, more importantly, the cats’ access to their respective litterboxes (and I am not about to change the studio name to “Mouldering Cat Crap Studios).
So that was kind of sucky.
Back to the drawing board. I disassembled the V and used the hardware to mount the panels on the ceiling. So I’ve got acoustic panels on the ceiling now.
Oh well.